Halls Creek Rd is a part of the Heysen Trail. It runs not south and and it is where I often walk in the evening with the standard poodles. It  offers protection from the strong,  southern coastal winds and it has lovely afternoon light.   

This picture was made in the  late winter. There are fields where sheep and cattle graze  on the western and eastern sides of the road. This, in effect, is a strip of roadside vegetation between farmland.  A lot of the spaces on the Fleurieu Peninsula are like this. Most of the land has acquired capital value and has become a commodity. There is no Arcadian  natural simplicity that stands in opposition to, and a compensation for,  urban life in the postmodern city here. It is the landscape of white settlement. 

It all looks quite different in late spring as the green grass has dried  and it has become a golden brown. It would be a different photo in summer. Late spring, however,  is not a good time to walk along  back country roads,  such as this one  with the standard  poodles.  The dried grass seeds along the side of the road become caught up in the poodle's woolly coats and they are very difficult to get out. Miss one and they spiral their way  into the body within 24 hours. 

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This picture of  porous limestone rocks was made at Venus Bay on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia in 2013. It is just south of Streaky Bay.  We were on a weeks holiday there with Heather Petty. Whilst there I  avoided  photographjng the panoramic  landscape views of the  cliffs and the Great Australian Bight and focused on the details which fascinated me.   

It had been many years since we had last been there,  and I'd never forgotten this part of the Eyre Peninsula.   Yanerbie, with its massive white  sand dunes that extend up to 4.5 km inland from the coast, was firmly planted in my memory, and  it is a favourite  photographic location of mine for photographing  landscapes in South Australia.  Landscape, currently has an inferior status in the  contemporary visual arts. It's not a fashionable subject in the art  institution. 

The picture was made on the headland of Venus Bay in the late afternoon along the western part of the South Head Walking Trail which offers views of the eastern end of the  Great  Australian Bight. The small settlement of  mostly fisherman  style shacks that hug the coastline of the bay,  borders the headline,  and  the trail  around it offered an interesting early morning walk for the poodles.  

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This picture was made one afternoon along Halls Creek Rd in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. Halls Creek Rd is part of the Heysen Trail,  and  I often walk along there on a  late afternoon poodlewalk in the winter time. It's fenced on both sides of the road, it is protected from the southwesterly winds , and the western sunshine gently lights up the vegetation.

It's a pleasant walk in the late afternoon and  I've made a number of photos/studies  of the roadside  vegetation along this section of the Heysen Trail.  This was one of the first: 

On this occasion I exposed  some old Portra NC 160 ASA film that had been sitting in  the 6x7  film back of the Linhof Tehnika 70 for 5 years or more.  I thought that I'd better finish the roll  of film and  have it developed as I had nothing to lose.  Though the negatives were a bit flat and the colours  were washed out  the  digital  files were okay when  I scanned the film. Some  of the pictures looked a  bit odd,  but I didn't mind. 

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This photo is from an  early morning photo shoot at Hayborough, Victor Harbor in  South Australia. It is looking west to Granite Island. Rosetta Head, or The Bluff,  is in the background. 

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I have been keeping an eye  Mark Kimber's  intriguing  Instagram stream with increasing interest. It includes his own work as well as that other photographers --current and past---from diverse sources. Kimber  must spend hours scouring the internet for material as it  ranges from  daguerreotypes from the 1840s to contemporary art photographers.   

Many of these references are to the work of photographers that I've never heard of:--two examples  from the recent  posts are  David Battel who photographs the streets of New York  ---- and Andrea Monica ----a Professor of Photography at Drexel University who   makes photographs  with an 8x10 inch view camera and  prints using the platinum process.

Seeing this work made me realise  that connections with the work of others are important  for me living in Victor Harbor  in South Australia.   They take me out of the provincalness of  a coastal town in  the Fleurieu Peninsula,  and a  photographic culture  that is overdetermined by most of the photographers  in Adelaide being commercial in orientation.  The result is  isolation and that means that I tend to work alone. 

Connections is not just seeing the work of other photographers online.  Connections also means  goingon photo trips,  connecting up with other photographers and photographing with them.  Traditionally,  this has meant  going to Melbourne to photograph in the CBD,  or the streets in Richmond as I did on my last trip:   

It also meant connecting up with Stuart Murdoch, and doing a topographical photography together around Melbourne's suburbs such as Merri Creek.  I've started to diversify or broaden these  kind of road trips to other places and connecting with other photographers  who work as art photographers. 

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Whilst I have been on our early morning  poodle walks during the 8 months or that  we have  been living at this seaside town I have been tentatively exploring the coastal erosion around the Victor Harbor's  beaches east of Rosetta Head.   This is tentative to the extent that I am not actually  scoping for large format photography,  nor even  picking up from where I left off  when we used to come down to Victor Harbor on the  weekends.  

I can see that  coastal erosion  is a problem as the sand dunes are  eroding along the Victory Harbor beach and Hayborough. Coastal recession is the process by which “soft” (e.g. sandy or muddy) shorelines tend to be eroded landwards under a rising sea level.

The current solution adopted by the Council is beach replenishment--that is, taking sand from Kent Reserve to the eroded beach along The Esplanade. This  is a short term fix as the  sea  eventually washes the  buffer of new sand away. 

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Yesterday was World Sight Day and Sight For All, the  charity organisation restoring sight for people in third world countries around the word,  held it's first one day  photogpraphy challenge in association with Atkins Photo Lab in Adelaide.   

The creative brief was  a photo around the theme of  yellow with the picture  having  to be taken edited and uploaded  on October 11. I entered the competition and Suzanne and I drove up to  the Adelaide Central Market car park  for a shoot inside the car park.   

After the shoot Suzanne did some shopping whilst I took the opportunity to briefly do some work of mine with the Linhof Technika 5x4 field camera. It was a picture for the  Alt-Adelaide series that I've been  slowly working on.   

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I've been going through the archives  looking for material for the website's various galleries  and I came across some studio based work:

I had ignored this body of work because I couldn't develop it. I didn't know how to.   Technically it  wasn't very good and that discouraged me, especially when I saw the quality studio work on the internet done with  high end DSLR  cameras.

 But I  do like the way film can flip things--makes them odder or wilder. 

I started  on the  large format silo project yesterday evening with a  black and white   shoot of the silos at Talem Bend using the 8x10 Cambo in late afternoon.  However,  the conditions were not ideal  for this kind of photoshoot.  

The sun is now quite intense even before it disappears below the horizon, and the clouds that I wanted  for cloud cover did not eventuate.   There were  clouds  in the sky when we were in Adelaide,  and it looked promising as we drove along the south-eastern freeway to Talem Bend.   But the clouds  hugged the coastline of the Fleurieu Peninsula coast,  rather than moving inland across the Murraylands.   So, to my dismay,  it was clear blue sky at the silo location.  

The next stage of the silo project was  organized today whilst  I was in Adelaide having  a coffee with Peter Barnes and Gilbert Roe at Cafe Troppo in Whitmore Square.   This stage  consists of   a photo trip with Gilbert  in mid-October 2015  along the Malle Highway ---probably the section between Pinaroo in South Australia and Toolebuc in Victoria. We have agreed to  camp at Ouyen and  to make trips  out from that base.  Gilbert will be using his pinhole camera.  

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I haven't been doing much large format photography lately. The weather hasn't really  been suitable  for the large format photography  photoshoots that I had planned. 

However, I did scope  this trunk study on the Heysen Trail  though:

The tree  was where I'd parked the car to walk along  the Heysen Trail of the evening poodle walk.  I noticed it in the subdued light as I was driving away at the end of  the poodle walk and took a couple of snaps.