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.   

The bushland  is quite dense in parts and is I walk through it on the kangaroo trails.   Slowly, ever so slowly, I have been able to map the bushland in terms of the photographic possibilities by laying down piles of sticks on the pathways made by the kangaroos that point to possibility  and then to see the subtle changes over time. The changes include rain, the bark peeling off, the twigs and leaves on the ground, the colours in the different light  

An example of a photographic possibility: 

It took me a week or more to find that log after I'd stumbled upon it.  I then  signposted it,  checked out the changes over a couple of weeks, and then photographed it with the baby Linhof. This  is an  old Technika 70  and I used its  6x7 and 6x9 film backs. (I was never i na position able to afford the Linhof  Technika 6x12.)  Anyway the latter  is too panoramic for most of these fragmentary bushland situations.   

I use the baby Linhof to see if the view camera and Gitzo tripod would work in this selected situation. They worked for this one, thankfully.  Other times I am not so lucky. What works using a digital camera handheld does not work with a medium format camera on a tripod.     The plan is that  I will return and  photographed it with the 5x4 Linhof in the early morning  before the sun light falls across the log.    

It is a very slow process --- a journey --- and it  will result in 5 or 6 5x4 images at the most. There  bushland  images  of  humble subject matter have little to do with the pastoral landscape tradition nor are they are  resolutely modernist.  Nor are they concerned with the idea of Australia