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Origami can be everything. All you need is a piece of paper and some patience. Just like origami, you can be anything.
Momentum is a magazine for the creative minds out there, made to inspire. Forget the colours, and let your mood guide you. Focus on what matters. With Momentum, everything is possible. This week’s spotlight is Melbourne, where we take a look at their creative ways. Supposedly being the ”Stencil capital of the world” and ”Australias most European city”, we are bound to find something interesting. Without further ado, let the origamifolding commence...
Nicolay Dahlgren Journalist, Photographer and Editor Momentum
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stencil capital of the world
By Nico Dahlgren
Melbourne is known as one of the world’s great street art capitals for its unique expressions of art displayed on approved outdoor locations throughout the city. Melbourne, the capital of Victoria and the second largest city in Australia, has gained international notoriety for its diverse range of street art and associated subcultures. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, much of the city’s disaffected youth were influenced by the graffiti of New York, which subsequently became popular in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, and along suburban railway and tram lines.
Melbourne was a major city in which stencil art was embraced at an early stage, leading to the naming of Melbourne as ”stencil capital of the world”; the adoption of stencil art also increased public awareness of the concept of street art. The first stencil festival in the world was held in Melbourne in 2004 and featured the work of many major international artists.
Melbourne’s street art; a trip down memory lane Around the turn of the 21st century, other forms of street art began to appear in Melbourne, including woodblocking, sticker art, poster art, wheatpasting, graphs, various forms of street installations and reverse graffiti. A strong sense of community ownership and DIY ethic exists amongst street artists in Melbourne, many of whom are activists for the progression of society through awareness, created in part by their work. Many galleries in the City Centre and inner suburbs have started to exhibit street art. Prominent Melbourne street artists were featured in Space Invaders, a 2010 exhibition of street art held at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Hosier Lane (photo) is Melbourne’s most famous laneway for street art, however there are many other laneways in the inner city that have a plethora of street art. Prominent international street artists such as Banksy (UK), ABOVE (USA), Fafi (France), D*FACE (UK), Logan Hicks, Revok (USA), Blek le Rat (France), Shepard Fairey (USA) and Invader (France) have contributed work to Melbourne’s streets.
The Melbourne Stencil Festival was Australia’s premier celebration of international street and stencil art. Since its inauguration in 2004 the festival has become an annual event, touring regional Victoria and other locations within Australia. The festival was held for 10 days each year, involving exhibitions, live demonstrations, artist talks, panel discussions, workshops, master classes and street art related films to the general public. It featured works by emerging and established artists from both Australia and around the world.
Since its inception, the Stencil Festival featured some 800 works by over 150 artists, many of whom were experiencing their first major art exhibition, finding it difficult to be exhibited in major commercial galleries reluctant to display emerging art forms. The first Melbourne Stencil Festival was held in a former sewing factory in North Melbourne in 2004. The three-day exhibition attracted spectator numbers far beyond expectations.
To see some of the city’s best street art, head to the following locations • • • • •
AC/DC Lane and Duckboard Place Hosier and Rutledge lanes Centre Place Flinders Court Russell Place
• • • • •
Croft Alley Stevenson and Tattersalls lanes Drewery and Sniders lanes Caledonian Lane Corner 361 Little
By Nico Dahlgren
through the eyes of macro
What is Macro Photography?
Macro photography is one of the most popular forms of photography, and with good reason. It is easily accessible, and it is a very broad genre of photography. Studio pros can enjoy taking macro shots of leaves, flowers, and sluggish insects, maintaining total control over lighting. Nature lovers can spend hours outside, searching for hidden treasures among flowers and leaves. Plus, in nonphotogenic locations, like many people’s backyards, macro photography makes it possible to take great images of nature without traveling at all.
Macro photography has to do with the size that your subject is projected onto your camera’s sensor. If you have a oneinch subject, its projection at “life-size” would be one inch on the camera’s sensor. An object which fills one inch of the sensor will fill most of the resulting photo, since the sensors in typical DSLRs are no more than 1.5 inches long. When an object is projected at life-size onto the sensor, it is at “1:1 magnification”. If an object is projected at half of lifesize (say, that one-inch object takes up just 1/2 inch of the sensor), it is at 1:2 magnification.
Working distance is easy: it’s the distance between your sensor and your subject at the closest possible focus distance of your lens. The longer the working distance, the easier it is to stay away from your subject (and if that subject is skittish or dangerous, a large working distance is fairly useful). A working distance of ten inches means that, with a camera/ lens combo of eight inches long, the front of your lens will be two inches from the subject at its closest focusing distance. The best macro lenses, as you might expect, have large working distances — a foot or more. The working distance increases as the focal length of the lens increases. The Nikon 200mm f/4 and the Canon 180mm f/3.5 are two examples of macro lenses with large working distances.
For macro photography, either DSLRs or mirrorless cameras would work great. If you are looking at native mount options, DSLRs are going to be ideal due to the large choice of available macro lenses (particularly longer focal length macro lenses) and accessories. If you are open to using adapters, mirrorless cameras can be used with pretty much any DSLR lens as well, although Nikon’s “G” type lenses without aperture rings are often quite painful to use with adapters, as you cannot set accurate aperture values. Having live view on the LCD is very helpful, since truly instantaneous feedback lets you know exactly how you have the image framed — tiny hand movements in macro photography can lead to massive shifts in composition. If your goal is to create photos with the highest magnification possible, full-frame cameras are usually overkill for macro photography. Even the Nikon D810 with 36 megapixels cannot match the magnification of the 24 megapixel Nikon D7200, simply because the pixels on the D7200 are smaller. With macro photography, the highest pixel density (most pixels per square millimeter of the sensor) is what determines the maximum magnification of the subject. The large-sensor D810 has fewer pixels per millimeter than the smaller-sensor D7200, despite having more total pixels. In many genres of photography, larger pixels are preferable. With macro photography, though, the smaller pixels lead to more magnification, even at the expense of sensor size.
That being said, large-sensor cameras certainly have other advantages. Their larger viewfinders help with focusing, and they generally have more controls, particularly on higher-end models. More importantly, if you take photos which aren’t at maximum magnification, full-frame cameras have a distinct image quality advantage. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to take a photo of a crab as close as you can focus, because the final photo would not have the entire crab in it! In this situation, the larger sensor and higher pixel count of, say, the D810 would give you a real advantage over the smaller-sensor D7200, even though the D7200 has more pixels per millimeter. So, a full-frame DSLR is still generally better for macro photos than a cropped-sensor camera, but the advantage isn’t as large as in other genres of photography. For most types of photography, your typical plane of focus will be somewhere between five feet and infinity. At this distance, an aperture of f/8 or f/11 typically will render the entire scene within
the depth of field — some items may be a bit out of focus, but they still should be recognizable (discounting extreme telephoto shots, of course). The closer towards the lens that you focus, though, the smaller the depth of field becomes, even at the same aperture settings. The depth of field gradually becomes so tiny that it can be difficult to get your entire subject to appear in focus. In macro photography, especially, this can be a huge issue. There are, of course, a great deal of technical terms related to macro photography, but the most crucial is the concept of magnification. Once you understand the differences between, say, life-sized images and 1:4 images, you already know the most crucial macro-specific terminology that you’ll come across. And, although Nikon DSLRs with high pixel densities are technically the “best” for macro photography, you certainly can take great macro photos with any camera, even compacts. Macro photography is extremely accessible, which is what makes it so popular among both beginners and professionals.
inside victorian roots
By Nico Dahlgren
Australia’s most European city The architecture of Melbourne is characterised by an extensive juxtaposition of old and new architecture. The city is noted for preserving a significant amount of Victorian architecture and has some of the largest in the country. Additionally, it features a vast array of modern architecture, with around 60 skyscrapers over 100 m in the city centre which have deliberately been set back from thoroughfares and streets to preserve historic architecture—leading to the title of ”Australia’s most European city”.
The juxtaposition of old and new has given Melbourne a reputation as a city of no characterising architectural style, but rather an accumulation of buildings dating from the present back until the European settlement of Australia. The city is also home to Eureka Tower (photo of it’s vantage point), which was the tallest residential tower when measured to its highest floor for some time.
Discover Melbourne’s rich past in the many historic buildings and monuments around the city Stand beneath the clocks of Melbourne’s iconic railway station, as tourists and Melburnians have done for generations. Take a train for outer-Melbourne explorations, join a tour to learn more about the history of the grand building, or go underneath the station to see the changing exhibitions that line Campbell Arcade. Leave the bustling Flinders Street Station intersection behind and enter the peaceful place of worship that’s been at the heart of city life since the mid 1800s. Join a tour and admire the magnificent organ, the Persian Tile and the Five Pointed Star of the historic St Paul’s Cathedral (featured image).
Skyscraper boom of the 1960s Despite the city’s historic preservation, Melbourne features a large collection of high-rise buildings. To counter the trend towards low-density suburban residential growth, the government began a series of controversial public housing projects in the inner city by the Housing Commission of Victoria, which resulted in demolition of many neighbourhoods and a proliferation of high-rise towers. Furthermore, Australia’s financial and mining booms between 1969 and 1970 resulted in establishment of the headquarters of many major companies in the city and saw a continual rise in large, modern office buildings being constructed, putting Melbourne on par with Sydney which underwent a skyscraper boom in the late 1960s and 70s. Melbourne has some fairly tall buildings especially when compared to some of Australia’s other capital cities. The late 80s and early 90s saw five of some Melbourne’s tallest buildings constructed; Rialto Towers (1986)—the tallest office building in the Southern Hemisphere when measured to its roof, 120 Collins Street, 101 Collins Street, Bourke Place and Melbourne Central (all 1991) all of which stood over 245 meters high. Other Australian buildings when measured to their spire reach taller heights, however. The 2000s saw a continuation of skyscrapers and tall buildings with the urban renewal opening of the Melbourne Docklands in 2000 and the construction of Eureka Tower, an apartment building which is currently Melbourne’s tallest and the 77th tallest in the world at 92 floors and 297 metres. Firms like BKK Architects are breaking ground designing the thinnest tower in Melbourne.