140110_125300_2089 Summer As I Remember It (Fri 10 Jan 14)

            Pirrama Park, Pyrmont, NSW

I think we all develop a set of generic memories about a place if we spend enough time there. They may not always be accurate, these memories, but they become a shorthand for the place at each time of the year. They're a method that we use to relate ourselves to place and time, a way that we use to explain it to ourselves.

This is summer as I know it in Sydney. The light is strong, indeed harsh. The air is often damp; perhaps not a tropical dampness, but an oppressive, muggy dampness that tends to sap the energy out of you over the course of the day, if you have any left from the difficulty of trying to sleep the night before. Work still gets done, but it drips with sweat and the desire for air conditioning and/or a cool shower. 

The man in the distance still talks on his mobile phone but doubtless wishes to be somewhere else. One woman surrenders to the heat and absorbs the sun; still common, but far less so than in the summers that I remember from a couple of decades back. The threat of skin cancer is better understood now. Another woman in the distance eats her lunch, but probably not energetically. Look closely at the hunch of the shoulders of the people on the stairway on the far side of the road, walking up the stairs but without a great deal of enthusiasm for their task.

The other thing that I recall from long past summers though is the occasional cool change at the end of the day. It would be invariably accompanied by the ionised, metallic smell suggesting the impending presence of thunderstorms with their fat, heavy raindrops, and the cool wind that would blessedly sweep along the coast from the Antarctic regions. That hasn't really happened this summer. 

But of course, summer's not over yet.
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Update Apr 25: Back at the time I loaded the original shot on PBase, 800 pixels wide was the laughingly described "large" (standard) size. I was loading at the (for the time) significant size of 1000 pixels wide... and you would be hard pressed to see the details that I described above.
(Nor could you see any EXIF, which PBase had screwed up yet again.)
When I updated the image to replace the PBase account watermark I upped the image to 1600 pixels, so hopefully you can better see what I'm talking about.
   

Taken on: January 10, 2014

Tags:

Concrete Path

Grass

Midday Light

Mobile Phone Call

Pirrama Park

Pyrmont

Sunbaking

Woman

Summer Vibes

Summer Heat

New South Wales (NSW)

Australia « less

Sets appears in: • Hanging Out In My PAD; 2014 Visual Diary

Camera: Olympus E-P1, f/5.6, 1/1250 sec, 42mm (=84mm), ISO 200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Olympus E-P1
Lens:	OLYMPUS M.14-42mm F3.5-5.6 L
Aperture:	f/5.6
Exposure Time:	0.001 sec (1/1250)
Focal Length:	42mm (35mm equivalent: 84mm)
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Auto, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	Low gain up
Contrast:	High
Sharpness:	Hard
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Adobe Photoshop 25.9 (Windows)
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