Whilst we have been down at Victor Harbor  for a couple of days I've been exploring  a new location for large format photography--the estuary of the Hindmarsh River.  The specific spot I've been scoping  is  the area of the Swamp Paperbark Trees (Melaleuca halmaturorum) with its  minimal  understorey of herbs.

The site is  easy to access with  the 8x10 Cambo monorail,  and the Swamp Paperbark would be a suitable  subject for black and white. I have photographed  these before  but never in terms of black and white.  

I am currently on a phototrip  around the Venus Bay area on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. The core of the  phototrip is the sand dunes at Yanerbie:

I've finally found an 8x10 colour shot:

This is from my archives. It was taken with a Rolleiflex  SL66 with a 50mm lens. I'm not sure when it was made. Sometime last year. 

Here  is another possibility for an 8x10 black and white shoot: 

An overcast day with little wind is what is  needed. 

All this effort does raise the question of what place does large format black-and-white photography  still hold today in a digital world full of colour images? It does seem to belong to yesterday's world. 

It has more to do with  craft and DIY ethos in reaction to the intense colour world of digital; a reaction that turns back to old 19th century processes and  places an emphasis on the process rather than the end result. The results often seem flat. 

I've been going through the 2012 film archive looking for the scoping work that I'd done for 8x10 black and white shoots in that year.    This was one possibility.

The location  is easily accessible from a car park and it is  protected from the coastal winds. 

The above interpretation was made with Rolleiflex SL66. I also experimented with a different portrait  format. 

This was made with  a Leica MP-4 and slow film Ilford Pan F Plus 50 ASA:

I prefer the longer interpretation to the square one.  

This snap of Bosch pears at the Adelaide Central Market just before we left for a break at Victor Harbor gave me an idea of a still life picture in the studio:

I could do this  in the studio withe Rolleiflex 6006. The lighting would be different, as it would be window light.  It would make a change from the macro studies  that I had  been doing.  

I no longer have a darkroom and I don't want to build one at Victor Harbour. I can't stand the chemicals,  they play havoc with my skin, and I'm happy with digital files rather than  the fine print made in the darkroom.  I'm not a good printer. 

That creates a problem with my 8x10 black and white  photography. How do I develop the negatives? Up to now I have sent the 8x10 negatives to a pro-lab inSydney--Blanco Negro--- to be  developed. It proved  expensive to develop  24 negatives--- I only have 12 double film holders.  

I've always thought it  would be  much more convenient to develop the 8x10 negatives in Adelaide at a community darkroom, even if that does mean  DIY.  Thankfully,  one now exists--- The Analogue Laboratory,  which is now situated at The Mill in Adelaide's CBD. What a great initiative!  

 It is  much cheaper if I do it myself and  Ii represents a return to the craft skills of photography that I was trained in. I used to tray develop sheet film in the Bowden studio,  but it appears that DIY at the Analogue Lab involves  sheet film  clasped in hangers that are then gently dipped  up and down in  a tank. 

You can develop more film  in one go, so it is more efficient than the  tray development that I used to do.   I guess the next step is using a Jobo   3000 series Expert Drum  at home. Jobo, however, went  insolvent in 2010.  

I'm looking forward to my first darkroom session this Sunday. 

I finally managed to use the  old Cambo SC monorail to make some 8x10 colour pictures of  the bark of the redgum in the reserve.   

I mucked up one exposure---the first one--- as I'd forgotten to take off the yellow filter on the Schneider Symmar 210 mm lens that I'd been using for my black and white exposures. 

The next step  is  take the  sheet film to Atkins Technicolour to have them  to process the  negatives. That service will not be cheap-- probably around $16.50 for one sheet of film. The next step is to  scan the negatives  myself with  the Epson V700 scanner. 

I did  two abstractions of the  peeling bark in  the open shade:

I'm not sure that 8x10 colour is an economic  proposition or that it is worth the expense.  I had the sheet film in the fridge and I needed to use it before it expired.  

I've started back working on my sea abstracts and pink gum and Xanthorrhoea  projects  which  have been constructed in terms of DIY books in progress.  It has been several months since I worked on them. I've  been waiting  for Posthaven to get their publishing platform up and running after migrating the work from Posterous.  

I've  also been scoping for subjects for an 8x10 colour shoot. The  new Toyo double  sided film holders are loaded with film--Kodak Ecktar 100ASA.  I've returned to a number of locations that I had in mind, but winter has changed things dramatically.  The winter grasses have returned and its a green world now as opposed to the dry landscape of a few months ago. 

 It's been frustrating as possible location after location has been rejected. I'm going to have to start with a couple of abstracts of the redgum trunks in the reserve across the road from the studio.  

Due to the recent changes to Flickr by Yahoo I am in the process of  moving away from Flickr and  setting up  a photostream at Ipernity. I'm moving even though  Flickr is still  the most commonly used photo sharing site and it  is  more dynamic now.     

Flickr  has been re-designed for  iPhoneography. Yahoo's  culture of design is one of people developing brands and imposing it on people, rather than building a culture of design that is rational, emotional and meaningful. The thing I hate most at the moment is when you click out of your stream of contacts' photos you are set back down at the beginning. This completely defeats any social aspect and flings everyone into the everychanging present...no time to comment or reflect just stay at the latest photo.

 The new design  is for the iphone crowd, but it is  monetization  that is  killing the photo-sharing platform. It's time to move on. 

It appears that there has been a mass migration of the old school Flickr  film photographers to Ipernity.   I have followed them because of my desire to belong to this kind of photographic community.  Ipernity has a design that respects the photos much more than Flickr,  but it is a very quiet place. Maybe that will change with the  recent influx. Film is not dead, but  it will only get more expensive in the future. 

I hope the recent influx of photographers to Ipernity  revitalizes the site,   as the  work by  those community of photographers who take their photography seriously   is very important to me. Studying other people's work is how I learn to take better photographs.  I no longer read photography books to do this,  as I once did.