Thort I had better try my experiment on the Eiffel Tower, it is the king of all iconic places.

Rotorua Geyser

Heres another 50 google images, this time I searched 'Rotorua Geyser' didn't work as well as my first two but you still get a similar result. The strongest relationships at the moment are the sky- land sepatations, 90 percent of the images have blue sky which is another thing to note.

Working with this idea of gathering images of popular tourist icons off google there are many possible results.
I'm using the word 'icon' in two ways. Icon as an 'iconic' place or feature i.e Mitre Peak, The Statue of Liberty, Maya Bay. And in my process I'm using 'icons' from the internet. In this case tiny thumbnail images from google which are icons you click on to enlarge.

More Possible Icons:

Maya Bay is a bay off the Island of Phi Phi in Thailand. It was made famous by the movie 'The Beach' featuring Leonardo Di Caprio in which a group of travellers discover a secret beautiful island and create a village community on it iscolated from civilisation. It is now a very popular tourist icon in Thailand and 100s of boats take tourists to visit the lagoon every day in the peaq season.
I have done the same thing here with gathering 50 google thumbnails of 'Maya Bay' and layered them matching up the corosponding features of the photographs. Heres a few examples of what the thumbnails look like

More Mitre Peak

Here I have Google searched 'Mitre Peak' again and saved the thumbnail versions of the first 50 results. I opened them in photoshop and wacked the opacity down to 20% and then matched up the peak in all 50 images. The result is quite interesting and shows how similar alot of the photos are.

More Old and New

D.A. De Maus 'Port Chalmers' Albumen print 1880's

My Image from same point of View. Digital SLR. 2009.

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Both Images layered in Photoshop.

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Had a bit of trouble finding the spot, there's so much bush there now. I like the contrast of colour and black and white. It says a lot about time and technology. It was a fun exercise and I might continue doing more like this.

Old and New

My Image, Taken with 6x6 Bronica. 2009 J. Perry. Port Chalmers Albumen print. 1865-75

I have been going through more old Dunedin photos and found some of Port Chalmers. I have taken photos from the same points and then layered them to see the difference 100 or so years has done. Surprisingly little has changed in Port Chalmers apart from there being a massive Port there now which fits with my study on the Travel and Tourism boom.

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Both of the Images layered and I have cut bits off my image to reveal J. Perry's.

More Plastic photography

A few more roadtripping photos taken with my Holga. The fish eye lens is fun but its real bad quality and bits of the photos are always cut off.

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Quite like the colours on these bottom two images, real grainy and theres a bitt of vignetting happening.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

The end of the world. Dunedin.

White and Pink Terraces

The White and Pink Terraces near Rotorua became a popular tourist attraction in the mid 1800's and were destroyed in 1886 by a volcanic eruption. Some said they were the 8th wonder of the World. How would they look if they still existed?

Photo By John Kinder, 1865.

Google screenshot 'Pink and White Terraces' 414,000 results!!!

Milford

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Heres my carefully composed and technically magnificant photo of Mitre peak, Fiordlands.



Screenshot of a google search 'Mitre Peak' thousands of results 46,500 to be almost precise.

And a montage of the first 50 results from the google search

The first 50 thumbnails layered.

Messin' about

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Recieving Transmission, 2009 Jesse Simons.

So I decided to purchase a new Camera, the plastic-fantastic Holga K200n 35mm Camera with fish eye detatchable lens and coloured flash filters!!! Took a film just messing about and came up with some interesting results. With this crappy plastic thing you don't really know what you are looking at when taking photos, and results often suggest this!

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Self Portrait, 2009 Taken with Holga K200N with fish eye lens.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 New Zealand License.

Driving Home From a Surf, 2009. Jesse Simons

The thing with plastic toy cameras is that they are less intrusive than large more serious cameras. Most people who would see me with this thing wouldn't take me seriously and this could make it easier to take photos where cameras or photographers are not so welcome.

Another thing about these cameras is that they suggest works as 'mirrors' rather than 'windows'. What I mean by 'mirrors' is that the images can be seen as a representation of the artist. The idea of the 'window' suggests the image defines the information within the photograph. This would be relevant to more professional technical photography.

Good fun to play with anyway and I found relevant quote by Aristotle:

".....play and introspection are the only two human persuits that are engaged in just for the hell of it"