fossils

Fossils

 



For a long time I’ve been curious about fossils
and as often seems to happen to me, my camera follows
my interests. It’s as if my photography
is about my life, not my life about my photography.

Considering the number of times that I have
attempted photographing
fossils the pickings have been very slim.

Here I am today, working again on the subject.
Again, just not enough grunt to the photo.

It’s good to keep picking up the camera though,
it’s like practising scales.


The top fossil,
between 3.1 and 3.2 million
years old, was found last Saturday

in a cliff on the Taranaki coast, about an hour
south of here. I was on a geological society
field trip to the area. We studied the cliffs
over a 2 or 3 kilometre stretch. They are notable
because they illustrate much of the geological
history of this area.
This is not a fossil at all, but a scallop
that I cast in lead some years ago.


Following on from the posting below, today I’ve been photographing this fossil crab.

It’s found locally and in other parts of New Zealand too, such as North Canterbury.

I started on this project in the late 90’s when I was artist-in-residence at Canterbury University. Their museum has a good collection of these in storage to which I was given ready access. I went on a couple of personal fossil hunts in the field too, no results unfortunately.

I’ve been keeping my eyes open during all the 6 years I’ve been in Taranaki. Again no results. These crabs appear inside oval rocks that look exactly like thousands of other oval rocks!

Recently a kind New Plymouth resident gave me one as a present. I’ve had a couple of tries at finding a photograph in it. I’ll just keep playing with it, I may be being led to other pastures. Sometimes I have to photograph something in order to see what it looks like photographed.

I also wanted to see what the difference was between a colour version and a black and white one.

Meanwhile, below is a photo from about 4 years ago.