Devastation

Creekside Open finished on 29th May. I was allowed to keep the plates in so that I could finish my documentation. However it rained solidly for several days afterwards. On 7th June it stopped and I went to view the damage. A number of dishes that had been in the water had been swept away down the Creek as far as the Ha'Penny Hatch, whilst the plates in the mud bank had fallen over. Some of the waterbound plates had become detached from the bricks that had been weighting them down, so had to be repaired.

For the medium format film photography and the time lapse movie I had planned, the whole lot had to be washed and re-installed. The whole thing was also to be removed by Saturday 11th before the private view of the second exhibition in Creekside Open. So I had three days to conquer the technicalities of time lapse photography and get Charles Shearer down with his film camera.

It turned out that the advice I had been given by Mo Hague was completely wrong for my project and the equipment I had available to me. I now had lots of batteries for my Panasonic and an intervalometer, a remote control device to set the camera to take shots at specific intervals, that fitted my FZ30.

On Thursday and Friday I finally succeeded in getting some footage, even though the weather was completely unreliable. It was so bad that I was unable to leave the camera to do its thing and had to stand in the wind and rain making sure the umbrella I'd attached to a pole next to the tripod to keep rain off the camera didn't fly off. I also managed to drop my pocket Lumix into the water and had to rescue it before the tide took it away (miraculously it dried out in front of the Rhino heater in the studio over the next five days and came back to life).

On Saturday 11th June Emma came to help clear the plates out. We also filmed that. See next post for the Creekery movie which I put together in iMovie the following week in order to show at the RSVP exhibition on 17th June.