The image below is a continuation of the little experiment that I'd started  a couple of years ago to try and photograph light itself. Light is the subject. 

This  is late afternoon light in the Redwoods near Beech Forest in the Otways in Victoria in March 2024.   I was concerned with the  intensity of the light. 

I  experimented whilst walking amongst the Californian Redwoods that afternoon, but  I wasn't really happy with  the results of light falling on the trunks of the Redwoods.   I needed to de-literalized’ the images much more. 

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I've started experimenting  with digital black and white whilst making some seascapse with the 5x4 Linof Technika IV  and colour sheet film. The weather condition chosen   was the mist and fog hanging around Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula over the Xmas/New Year period (2023-24).  

I've never had much success with digital black and white conversions from a colour digital file using the Sony A7 R111--- the results have always been disappointing, as  the images have  looked bland and muddy.   The recent seascapes and fog offered me an opportunity  to experiment to see if I could create something better.   The above 'behind the camera' image is an example  of  this experiment.  

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Now that Suzanne's broken fibula is healing and she is able to walk one of standard poodles I am able to start to plan a photo trip to the Murray Mallee in South Australia. I will take Maleko with me. 

I plan to pick up where I left off prior to  the Covid pandemic, which was  in 2019. This was the Claypans  and the nearby  Copeville and Galga area  that were on the old  Waikerie railway line, which was a branch line from Karoonda. The railway  was constructed around 1914  and was closed in the 1990s.  

I will start by returning to this  site and this photo:

It will be a large format photo trip and my initial camp will be in the quarry near Copeville,  as it was on the previous trip.  Things have changed in the meantime.  The Copeville silo was painted  by Jarrod Loxton in 2022 as part of the South Australia silo art trail. 

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The picture below  (from early January 2023) comes from  my decision to explore and  experiment with  a  different approach to the seascape project that I have been engaged in over the last year. I am finding it an intriguing project. 

The exploration involved searching for   different locations from the Rosetta Head one  that I had previously been using. What I was looking for was  a site   that  would enable me to get closer to the sea , as well as  provide protection from  any surging rogue waves. I was wary as I'd been previously caught with expensive consequences for the photography gear. 

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Last Sunday (26th March) was  overcast and raining.  These are  good conditions  for  returning to the  Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern part of the Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia to make some large format photographs of the bushland.  I did return,  and my objective  was to  photograph the bushland in  black and white. I have learned that monochrome works better representing  this old growth stringy bark  bushland  than colour film.   

The photo making  needed to be after  the rain  had eased and before the cloud cover cleared and the sun came out.  The location chosen was along Strangeways Rd,  which I had identified  the day before whilst I was on an afternoon poodlewalk with Maleko.  There was no low cloud or mist between the trees that morning  but it was gloomy -- suitably so  - and, luckily,  there was little wind.   

I had about  45 minutes to an  hour in the  mid-morning  to use the 5x4 Sinar F1 view camera.   I was able to make 2 exposures before the sun came out and changed the atmosphere. 

Like the Gitzo tripod I was using,  the entry level, Sinar is around 50 years old,  as it was probably made sometime in the 1970s. It is  a lightweight, modular, view camera and very  easy to use in the field;    or  either  the right angle viewer  or the   binocular reflex magnifier on the back  of the camera.  I don't have either of the latter.  I just use a simple dark cloth, which is a hassle to use when the wind is blowing. I didn't have time to put  the Sinar pan tilt/head on the tripod. 

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Continuing the light series/project.  This  is  Light #3 for contrast. 

The photo was made on a  spring morning in October 2022 looking across Encounter Bay from Rosetta Head at Victor Harbor.  

There was heavy seafog that morning. These are infrequent as they only happen a couple of times during the year. 

A couple of days before, and between Xmas and New Year 2022,  have been conducive for seascapes and  photographing light. 

An example of a seascape from Rosetta Head at Victor Habor in the early morning:

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The fourth in the  series of photographing light per se which broadens the terrain beyond photojournalism, documentary and landscape. 

This is looking east over Encounter Bay from the shoreline of a small beach in front of Whalers resort complex. 

Another image  in the  series of photographing light per se which broadens the terrain beyond photojournalism and documentary:

This is looking east over Encounter Bay from Rosetta Head.

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The studio  hardware  upgrade is  nearly finished.   Thank goodness. 

The old Mac Pro (2009) and  its cinema monitor are  now sitting in the garage looking for a new home. The  Mac Studio and  Eizo monitor  replacement  have  arrived,  been unpacked, and are  sitting on my desk in the studio.   I've  just started  working with them. I've also upgraded to the  Adobe Photography plan. I didn't want to lease the  photo software  but  I really didn't have that much of a choice.

A picture from 2021 of a building in Pirie St made with my old Rolleiflex TLR through an open  window in the Epworth building:

At this stage of the upgrade I cannot get my  old Epson V700  flatbed scanner to work, even though I  upgraded to the VuScan software. So all the film photos from  2022  plus many of the b+w ones from 2021 have yet to be scanned.  I have been forced  to order a new Epson V850 Pro scanner. 

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This is my second attempt in my little project of photographing light per se:

On this occasion I endeavoured to  simplifiy things down to the bare minimum.  I'm  at the western edge of Encounter Bay on Jetty Rd that runs alongside  Rosetta Head in the early morning. I'm precariously balanced on  some rocks at the very edge of the sea. It is early in the morning just after sunrise. The advantage of digital is its flexibility as working with a tripod and film would be much more difficult. 

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This is my first attempt at photographing light per se that I mention in an earlier post.   I took advantage of the layer of cloud softening the early morning  light.

This  is  looking east across Encounter Bay  from Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor.     I did  try this approach with an old film camera -- eg., a   Rolleiflex TLR (colour negative) to see what happens but the film is still unprocessed.   

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I live on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia  and, as a result of my early morning poodlewalks along the coast,  I  I have become very aware of light,  and  especially the power and violence of light  in relation to photography.   My usual mode of photography is one of  being anxious to minimise or avoid the blinding or excessive light that results in blown highlights.  So I would normally photograph in soft or  low light situations (using both analog and digital cameras) to manage the  excessive and destructive  light.   

However, as a result of my experiences of the fluidity of  light along the coast during  this year  I have tentatively started to explore  light as the subject of photography. It is very tentative though: 

The traditional interpretation of light in our western culture contrasts  light with darkness, with light  standing for vision, reason, knowledge, truth and the real --eg.,as exemplified in  the Enlightenment movement.  On this interpretation light serves as a transparent medium in which truth and the objective world are revealed. Light unveils, clarifies, illuminates and makes the world around us perceptible and knowable. 

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I have started to  explore the possibilities of seascapes  this last month or so using  large format cameras -- namely, 4x5 and 5x7-- and photographng in colour.   

The location from which I work  is Rosetta Head (the Bluff) and the subject is Encounter Bay in the early morning around sunrise.   I park  the Forester  in the top car park over looking Petrel Cove then walk around the northern side of the Bluff and then up the eastern face carrying the camera gear. The 5x4 and carbon tripod are no problem as they fit into a pack, but I struggle with the 5x7 Cambo and the Gitzo tripod. 

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I have finally begun the necessary upgrades  to my digital "darkroom" that is centred around independent content creator and  work-from-home.  The  current set-up has served me well for the last 7 years,  but it is finally  reaching its use-by date.  The software of the Epson V700 scanner has a flaw as it won't scan b+w negatives but  I cannot upgrade  it as the O/S of the Mac Pro is too old.

The upgrade  is going to involve  buying new computers around June 2022 when Apple release the  more professionally oriented MX Macs;  plus new processing software  for both still photography and video. The hardware plan is that a Mac mini plus  an  Eizo screen will replace the old Mac Pro (2009) that I have been using for my film photography. Then I will be able to  upgrade the Epson software.     

The first step  in the longish upgrade journey was to upgrade the operating system of the 27 inch  iMac (2015 Intel) that I use for my  digital  still photography and to download new post- processing software.  To my surprise I was still able to upgrade the macOS for the iMac  from  the macOS High Sierra that I had been using to the recently released  macOS Monterey. (I thought that the 2015 iMac would be too old to upgrade to the  latest macO/S). 

My fingers are crossed as I'm hoping that   the iMac has the capacity (processing power)  to be able to use process  the 4K videos from the recently acquired Panasonic SH1.  

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During the last couple of months as the La Niña event  with its cooler, wetter conditions has been weakening I have been regularly exploring  the local Waitpinga bushland in the early morning. This is  after walking with Kayla  along a dusty back country road for 30 minutes or so.  The explorations are all 30 minutes in duration are they are designed to get to know the bushland and to find some suitable material ---possibilities-- for a large format photo session. 

This picture  of some roadside vegetation, just after sunrise,  was made on New Years day. After looking art  it for a couple of weeks I've decided that it is a possibility worth photographing  in the right light.  Light is crucial here.   Thankfully, it  is easy to find, even though it is  just as easy to walk past without noticing it --- which  I have done  on many an occasion, even when I have been looking out for it.       

The bushland  explorations have  taken  quite some time  to uncover the photographic possibilities. The scoping sessions using a digital camera are of  fragments of the bush -- a tree trunk here,  a branch there,  an  old log on the  ground there abouts. I then have to remember where these possibilities are  so that  I am able to  find them on the next exploration.  Sometimes it takes me a week or more to re-locate some of these  possibilities;  some because there are times when I can  never find them again.   

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In the 1970s and 1980s  a Leica M4 rangefinder   with a 1970s 35mm Summicron lens  was my carry around  film  camera. It worked extremely well and I was very comfortable wandering the streets using the camera without a light meter.  Some say that  this was a classic M -- the apex of the minimal  analog, hand-crafted design. But it  was on the cusp of fading into oblivion in the face of a newer technology of the 35mm SLR from Japan (Nikon F) from the  early sixties. The latter was  a steady trend which increased even more during  the 1970s  and 1980s.    

I used  the M4 extensively for the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity project, especially  for the black and white photos in the Snapshots and Bowden sections. 

 I dropped the Leica M4 onto a concrete floor in the Queensland  Art Gallery in Brisbane's South Bank in the 1990s.  The rangefinder mechanism broke and  it could not be repaired in Australia. The camera body  was misplaced and then lost  for approximately  25 years.  The 35mm Summicron lens, which had sat in a cupboard  was eventually  used on a  digital Sony NEX-7  in  2014.  I bought  the Sony E mount so that  I could use the lens. 

Then the Leica M4 body was found around 2018. Unfortunately,   the rangefinder mechanism still could not be repaired in Australia  as there were no  second hand  rangefinder mechanisms.  Over the next couple of years I saved up some  money and I  sent the body  back to Leica Camera in Wetzlar, Germany in 202 to be repaired.  They put in a new rangefinder mechanism  and refurbished  the body. They did an excellent job --- the 1970s camera is like new.  

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Art photography is often about  journeys along winding tracks and trails, some of which lead to no where.     

Sometimes these  journeys are  in the form of working on projects over a long period of time. Eventually an archive of photos builds up and we start to wonder what can we  do with these  photos over and above showing them in the the odd physical exhibition that is quickly forgotten and only exists on a CV.    Often  these projects are then put to one side, we forget about them, and we move onto new projects.

I recently went on a field trip to Lorne and the Great Otway National Park in Victoria with the Melbourne based  large format photographers. Like the previous visit, it was a short trip - we ( Suzanne, myself and the standard poodles)  only spent  a few days staying at an Airbnb at Aireys Inlet.  Accommodation along the coast of the Great Ocean Road was extremely hard to find.  It appears that everybody is travelling around Australia with the national  borders closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Lorne itself was packed. There were people everywhere including  at Erskine Falls.   

I hit my physical  limits carrying my Gitzo aluminium tripod and Linhof 5x4 Technika IV up a series of steps  to  Swallow Cave at the top of the Sheoak waterfall. It was the tripod that did it: -- the Gitzo  is heavy and unwieldy and it hurt my neck and back when strung across my shoulders.  I really struggled.   It is the lightest tripod that I own, but I  had to take rests to ease the strain on my neck and back.    

Consequently, the next day when I walked along a  forest path from the Blanket Leaf Picnic Area to the Cora Lynn Cascades and back I knew I could not carry the  Gitzo aluminium tripod and Linhof 5x4 Technika IV; even though it  was just a couple of kilometres on a moderate grade walk to the Cascades.   

 I'm just going for a walk in the forest I told myself. I'm going to enjoy myself in the Otways.  To hell with lugging heavy gear.  I saw  this part of the creek on the way down to the Cascades. It  was  in a very dark corner, it was raining,  and so it was  a very low light situation. 

I just carried a Sony A7 R111 digital camera with me. It  works well handheld in low light. The Cascades themselves were nothing much so I photographed this section of the  creek on the way back to the picnic ground.  It was no longer raining.   

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 Hamish McKenzie, in  addressing the attention economy  on the Substack blog, refers back to the old (pre-social media) internet and blogging. This is internet history. That was then. We now live and work in the attention economy  with  its environment of perpetual digital distraction  where  companies  (eg., Facebook and Google) are targeting our attention to make money. Their business model is  the monetisation of attention to  passively consume through governing modes of participation  within the system. Facebook's  software has the capacity to  produce and instantiate modes of attention as well as to track and process  user data across the web. This is an infrastructure that  works invisibly in the background to shape forms of sociality.   

What has emerged is a techno-culture of perpetual distraction--all those pings, pop-ups, notifications  that cause us to be perpetually distracted.  Rather than democratising the public sphere, social media replaces it with a global Freudian id, in which everyone’s darkest impulses collide, and rational  debate becomes difficult.

So we need to critically think about the  role of Facebook's network of friends in our lives,  how it affects our mental capacities and predicts our future interests.   

So how might we critically engage? 

McKenzie  say that  Substack,  which  is an independent publishing platform  based on a subscription model,  is a place where writers are rewarded not for doing the things that capture attention but instead for doing the things that respect readers’ trust. Substack emerged as a digital publishing platform from a  frustration with:

"how the quality of discussion has been degraded on social media. We are dumber on social media than we are in real life. We are less forgiving, less willing to listen and understand, and more prone to dismiss and then torch our ideological opponents. That, after all, is how we earn internet points....the incentives that underpin today’s dominant internet media businesses have led to tribalism and groupthink ... With an ad-based business model you have to play for scale, which isn’t always conducive to good discourse. To make any meaningful money in such a model, media producers have to generate millions of ad impressions." 

He says that the old internet internet felt like a less hostile place then, and there were fewer heat-seeking algorithms that sought to transmute attention into gold. Substack, as a counter force to social media  he adds,   frequently references that blogging era,  and  it seeks to recapture some of what made it special.

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I have just realized that by using Latitude and Longitude through  Google Earth I am able to give  a far more  accurate way of identifying  the location of my photos,  than just saying 'the rocky coastline just west of Petrel Cove' in South Australia.  

An example of a recent photo:--Lat:-35.5932 Lon:138.5978

GPS coordinates have also helped me to find a section of granite rocks along the coast of Deep Creek Conservation Park that I've  wanted to walk and explore. I knew about them in a casual way,   but I could not  find their location  until I came   across a latitude reference to their location near Deep Creek Beach.  I was interested because I wanted to continue to explore the relationship between  photographic abstractions and  nature whilst avoiding  the genre of  the landscape. 

It will be a workout walking to and from the coast  carrying 5x4 equipment. As the walk is around  6 hours so it will become  part of  the training for the forthcoming camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome  in South Australia in May. 

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This picture of  leaves, bark, and light is from the archives --late December 2018. The leaves and bark were  in the  local  reserve  just across the road  from my studio in Encounter Bay.  

This macro image was made with my  old mirrorless  Sony NEX-7 digital camera which had been outfitted with  a Voigtlander close up adapter and an old  35mm Leica M lens. The combination had only been put together a  few weeks earlier.  My fingers were crossed: would it work smoothly? Would it allow me to forget the tech and concentrate on making photos, just as I could with a Leica M  film camera?  

Though the Sony NEX-7  is very basic and old tech -- it is not full frame and it is not good in low light --- it still functions well within these limitations. This is one way to keep an old digital camera (circa 2011) going--as a second walk around camera to the camera that replaced it --a mirrorless Sony A7 R111, a  Novoflex adaptor and a 35mm  Leica M lens.   

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I have been using the few occasions when  I go up Rosetta Head on an early morning Sunday poodlewalk with Kayla to photograph seascapes. That is what you see: the southern ocean. 

I am discovering that my  emphasis is on the clouds rather than the sea: 

I have tried a different compositional approach  ---eg., one that is more evenly balanced between cloud and sea and neither dominate the other. 

However,  I find the latter  composition more bland and  boring. Boring, tired, done is my  immediate response. And they don't look like abstractions. But they promise possibilities. 

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There is not much in the way  of an edgeland  in the landscape  around the coastal township of Victor Harbor.  The suburban edge of the town backs onto farming properties. It is a similar situation with the other townships in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.  So it  is difficult to continue working on this long term project. 

However, the  old Victor Harbor Council's dump, which  has been closed down for some time,   has become an edgeland on the Waitpinga outskirts of the township. It is a home for rabbits and occasionally cattle wander through.  I have previously photographed here.  

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The fuzzy experiments continue. This time it is Petrel Cove on a stormy afternoon: 

I was sitting in the car in the Petrel Cove car park waiting for the squall  to pass  before I went for an afternoon  poodlewalk with Maleko.  I was wondering if I could achieve layers and textures in the photo with everything out of focus.  

As mentioned in this blog  post  in the Eye on the Mallee website  I spent several days in mid-August at Kapunda with Suzanne's Lavender Trail friends. Whilst they walked the trail  around the Kapunda region  in the mid-north each day  I photographed. I actually spend more time photographing in,  and around,  Kapunda than  I did in the South Australian mallee. Well,  I split my time between the two different regions. 

This picture is of the Anglican church in Kapunda. It was designed by Edmund Wright,  and built around 1857-8: 

I ventured up Rosetta Head one cloudy morning recently  --the 3rd of August. I decided  not to carry my film cameras  from the Petrel Cove carpark as I did not know what an out of focus pre-sunrise grey seascape would look like photographically.  

This is the first experiment. I was  looking east over Encounter Bay towards Goolwa and the Coorong whilst I was making  my way to the top of  Rosetta Head:   

Kayla had gone ahead to join Maleko and Suzanne, who was doing her exercises. 

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I have been tentatively experimenting with an abstract approach to photography in low light situations. as a break from working on the newsletter and the Walking/photography exhibition at Encounters Gallery.   

The low light scenario happens at   the end of the poodlewalks with Maleko when we are   returning   to the car along the coastal path at  dusk. When start to return when it  is too dark to photograph amongst the coastal rocks. However, there is  still light and colour  in the sky over the southern ocean so I can hand hold the digital camera (a  Sony A7 R111) to make a photo.  

A recent  example of the experiment:

It's an experiment because this kind of subject just doesn't work as an abstract when everything is in focus--I've  made several attempts and it looks ugly.   I've also tried  it with the lens wide open and the foreground of the subject  in focus--but it  is a nothing  kind of image.  Nor does it work when there are small pockets of clouds in the sky over the sea. 

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The 3  pictures in this post  were made whilst  I was on my way to make some supplementary photos for the upcoming Walking /Photography exhibition  at Encounters Gallery for the SALA Festival in South Australia. The Festival starts  in August, 2020.  

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