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.
I had become frustrated with uploading iPhone videos to YouTube and I switched to going through the macro archive of images at the time looking for background material for the Light Paths website. I realised that hadn't seen some of these images for quite some time. This image of seaweed and granite at Kings Head in Waitpinga was made a month latter on a poodlewalk.
I was pleased with the results then, I still am. The basic mirrorless camera combination gave me what I was looking for, as the interest in the landscape is more often than not in the detail. The digital combination has enabled me to play around and to experiment, and I am more that happy that I will soon be able to get ten years of use out of a digital camera.
2011 now seems such a long time ago. That was when digital camera technology was on a rapid upward curve of improvement, the
iPhone 4 had just come out,
Flickr was going strong as a photo sharing site, the broadcast media was able to forge a shared reality for a nation, Facebook had become the most popular social platform in the world; photo blogging was all the rage; and blogging still
promised much in the way of creative collaborations.
Pre-Facebook, pre-platform.
Today Facebook--with its satellite products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – is the
centre of our digital lives. Facebook is where people post their photos, read news, arrange protests, engage in debate, play games and watch bands. in 2020 with the Covid19 pandemic being online meant being on Facebook with its torrents of viral misinformation--eg.,
QAnon.
2011 was a more innocent era when conspiracy theories were regarded as a harmless eccentricity. Facebook and other social media platforms have since changed the way we get information. Whatever public sphere we once had is now distorted and polluted by both being forced through four narrow apertures called Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and the rapidly
expanding ecosystem of the surveillance economy.
