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?

The iMac at Encounter Studio is  now up and running, though it is still disconnected from the network. That connection requires tech support.

I scanned some recent black and negatives (6x6 and 35m)  last night  with the  flatbed Epson V700 scanner. The pictures  were made just before, and on the holiday at America River on Kangaroo Island.

The photo above was made with my  Leica M-4P, a Summicron 50mm lens, Ilford 50 ASA  black and white film. It only has minimal post processing Lightroom 4.

I had bought the 35m film by mistake --I was after 120 for the Rolleiflex---so I was trying it out to use up.  It is 20 years since I've made pictures with 35m black and white film. I'm pretty pleased with the  result--there is a nice tonal range.

I've upgraded the operating system of the 27" iMac to Mountain Lion, now that it has a new hard disc courtesy of Apple. I can now connect with my computer in Adelaide.  I've also upgraded  some of the photographic software--Lightroom and Silver Efex Pro--that I regularly use in my digital darkroom.   

This picture  of, what I take to be  a salt lake,  was snapped near D' Estrees Bay on Kangaroo Island. It was next door to   the Cape Gantheaume Conservation Park.  I  had been looking for some salt lakes  with easy acces without much success.  We just stumbled upon this one  on our way back to American River.  

It was the last  afternoon of our holidays on the island. We left for Adelaide the next day. 

Apple has recalled the iMac  to replace the potentially  defective Seagate hard disc. It is prone to crashing.

The last 24 hours have been spent backing up all the files on the hard disc of the 27 inch iMac to the NetGear Nas Raid storage device,  and then, to make doubly sure,  backing the digital and film files to the portable Lacie hard discs.

It has been a nonstop backup. As soon as one finishes I start another.

The south westerly wind has gone. Temperatures are on the rise. The summer heat has arrived for Adelaide and the city will swelter with the heat. I'd given up going to the coast to take large format photos and decided to concentrate on doing abstracts in the reserve near the studio.

It was easier as the cloud cover early in the morning  provided me with cover from the early morning sunlight.

I'll  take the negatives back to Adelaide today  to have Atkins Technicolour  develop them. I'll scan them when I return to Victor Harbor on the weekend. I'll  then upload  them to see how the  the film versions  are different from the digital ones.

I decided to do an 8x10 abstract  of the bark of the river gum  from Arkaoola  in the reserve opposite the studio at Victor Harbor.

I made a couple of black and white photos--one on each side of the trunk. It was still too windy to go to Kings Head  with the large format gear. The south west wind will slowly die out over the next couple of days then the temperatures will rise to around 40s C. 

This is an abstract of the trunk of a river gum in the reserve across the road from the studio  in Encounter Bay,  Victor Harbor

The tree  that had been bought down from Arkaroola by Suzanne's mother as a seedling back  in 1982 . It was planted in the reserve and it is now a solid tree.  

I am fascinated by the river gum's bark.  It is quite different from the local river gums in terms of  both texture and colour. 

I've taken a number of photos over  the Xmas break with a digital camera--a  Sony NEX-7--- mostly as a study  for a large format shoot. I am thinking about  using the 5x4 Linhof  in an early morning shoot.

I  don't do portraits very often because I am not very good at them.

I also struggle with the lighting. I've been  using natural lighting from a window,  but I find that it  is too harsh and contrasty. I don't really have the studio equipment to do diffuse the lighting; or increase the lighting from above. 

It is over 40 degrees in Victor Harbor,  a hot north wind has been blowing since around 10am, and   the  forecasted cool change is slow in coming. I managed to do some photography early this morning for an hour or so, before the weather changed to the intemperate conditions.  

The pictures  were largely scoping studies for latter film shoots.  Normally I only see this part of the coast in the late afternoon when it is shadow, and I had several ideas that I wanted to explore in the early morning light.

I've started constructing a website or a gallery of my  photographic projects whilst I scanned and post-processed  some  8x10 b+w negatives.  It is very basic and minimalist  gallery at the moment.  I'm  slowly edit the images for the projects,  starting from the Bowden project in  1989. 

I eventually got sick of sitting in front of a computer so Ari and I went off on a photoshoot in the afternoon:

I was  reworking this picture. The tide was low so the location was accessible.  The gas cylinder had collapsed since my last visit a  couple of weeks ago.