A  loose group of Adelaide art photographers are having a group exhibition at  the  2013 Ballarat International Photo Biennale.   It will be in the  Mechanics Institute Building in Sturt St,  which  is in the central part of the city. 

The exhibition is designed to be  a platform  that showcases SA art photography, and,  as such, it will  also include  an A4 horizontal softcover book that extends the exhibition and a website that extends the exhibition and book.  I'm part of the group and I've started  to select the  images from the Tasmanian trips:

These trips were made over the last couple of years and the exhibition will centre around Queenstown and the Mt Lyell open cut mine. It will concentrate on the mine as a manufactured landscape,  the industrial ruins, and  tailings from the mine at  the mouth of the King River. This body of work is in opposition to the wilderness photography that is popular in Tasmania.

I have decided to shoot some 8x10 colour  film that I bought from B+H about nine months ago. It has been sitting in the fridge at Encounter Studio until I acquired a couple of  new Toyo double darkslides . They arrived last week. 

I used a poodlewalk yesterday to go  scouting for likely locations for large format photography.  Here is one possibility: 

The  location has to be roadside or pretty close to it,  as the   Cambo SC monorail and  the Linhof tripod are too heavy  to  carry  very far from the car. This location looks to be a goer--it needs good cloud formation through. 

I've been having problems scanning my black and white negatives. The highlights of  the scanned negatives have blown out and the files have been too contrasty. I initially thought that  these problem were caused   by over exposure  then the  overdevelopment of the negatives. This is an example:

No matter what I do with these kind of files,  the whites go muddy. It's hopeless. 

Yesterday, when I was scanning with the  Epson V700  flatbed using the  Epson software upgrade for the Mac's latest  operating system (Mountain Lion)  I decreased the contrast  on a similar negative  making it  flat and grey  to see what difference  this would make.  

The result above  is a file that I am able  to  work on with respect the highlights.  

So my problems were caused by  the  scanning. Before the software upgrade I did not have a reduce contrast option. What was being scanned  was way too contrasty when using the old basic  Epson Scan software  that came with the scanner. 

I walked along the back country roads at Victor Harbor  this morning scoping for a large format shoot. This scene, which I saw on the way back to the car,  looked to have some  possibilities:

I was thinking in terms of making some 4x5 colour and 8x10 black and white   images over the next couple of days. The weather is looking okay. 

Early morning light--just after the first rays of   the sunlight. 

 I normally make pictures of  rock detail in the  open shade as I find the forms and tones easier to handle. 

I was on my way to a photoshoot west of Kings Head at the foot of the Newland Cliffs, when I saw the light illuminating the cliff face near where I'd parked the car.  So I thought that I'd  take a snap just to see what it would like.  

I am now  more willing to  introduce sunlight into my photographs. 

I have successfully migrated  the book blogs that were on Posterous over to Posthaven. Twitter had purchased Posterous for the strength of the talented development team, not for the product itself. Twitter is busy creating billions of dollars in value, and any deviance from that goal --eg., spinning off Posterous---would have been a distraction. Twitter stated that it  closing  Posterous down on April 30th

Once I discovered that Twitter was closing  Posterous closed down a couple of months ago by   I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with  the material that I'd worked up.   I didn't want to lose it. But how to keep it in a form that I could work on easily. So everything has been in limbo. I have been making photos for them books, but I haven't worked on the drafts  for several months.

Now I can begin to start working again on the DIY books. That's a relief.

I've started photographing seaweed on the beach at Encounter Bay when we are down at Victor Harbor. I have been exploring it's abstract qualities  in  both colour and  in black and white.

I started taking them  on the  poodlewalks  in the mornings with Raffi along  the beach when we were down here for the week. I don't have much time to take them after the sun rises and before it becomes too bright. 10-15 minutes at most  if there is no cloud cover.

Here is the colour version for contrast:

I converted the digital colour  file into black and white using the Silver Efex Pro 2 post-processing software.

Posterous will close on April 30th 2013. So ended my experiment with  that form of  micro-publishing. Tumblr had become vastly more popular than Posterous in the field of short-form publishing or “microblogging.”

It's a pity. . Posterous offered the content and platform that pointed a direction to a more perfectly multi-media future for Twitter, where it could become possible to build a  network around both Posterous and Twitter users, and then allow for the melding of tweets, blogs, photos, and video. However, Twitter were interested in the talent not the product.

Posthaven  emerges? A  working version  by the  former founders of Posterous Garry Tan and Brett Gibson, which  can import Posterous blogs,  will be rolled out in late February. It will cost $5 per month.

This blog will be incorporated into  my poodlewalks weblog on the Wordpress platform.

The digital suite  of Encounter Studio is now up and running and I'm starting to pick up the photography from where I left off before spending the  week at American River in Kangaroo Island.

Although I had this area in mind I've started simple:--abstracts of the river gums in the reserve cross from the studio. We have an 8 week old  silver standard poodle pup that requires constant attention when he is not asleep.

 

Another example of using the Leica with  slow black and white film:

I'm afraid that the post-Twitter Posterous micro-publishing platform  is going to close down sometime in 2013. It is a pity because Posterous was the ideal no-frills, no time-demands system that displayed photos quite well.

Is Twitter   playing the Microsoft card ---buy out a competing start up and stifle it thereafter until it died a natural but untimely death? Scepticemia puts it this way:

The developers might not close shop outright and instead close new registrations, while keeping the servers running for the existing users. However. they just let the system rot and not address the bugs that inevitably keep arising time and time again. Then, one day, something big goes wrong that requires a lot of resources in terms of money and manpower to fix and instead of fixing that, they go around closing shop, blaming it on the bug.

Twitter has a history of this --eg. Tweetdeck.

I will close this blog. It has done its job. Its the material on the books that I'm working on that represent the problem. Where to shift that material?