By accident I  discovered  the limits of the dynamic range on my Sony A7 R111 digital camera  whilst I was on a recent  landscape photo session in Waitpinga in South Australia  late this summer (mid-February).   

Even though I was photographing in the early morning light,  the camera could not cope with the dynamic range between the deep  shadows at the base of the cliffs and the highlights of the sun in the clouds. Using Lightroom 6  I was able to recover the detail at the base of the cliffs in post processing, but not in the highlights. 

An example: 

The pictures  that I made when I was at the foot of the cliffs that morning were similar, only the highlights were even more burnt out. I did not realize this had happened  until I uploaded the digital files onto the computer's hard disc  and looked at the images on the computer screen. I eventually deleted these. I  had to admit  to being  somewhat surprised. Taken back actually. 

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The weather conditions were good this morning  for a 5x4 large format photo session along the coast early this morning.  There was some solid cloud cover, low tide and  little wind.  The weather forecast was for strong westerly winds and rain along the coast  today,  so I took a chance. 

I had  about  an hour on site with approximately 30 minutes carrying the gear to and from the site. I was able to make  2 photos  of different subjects out of the 3 with the Linhof Technika that I had planned, before  the conditions became  unsuitable around 8am.  This is a behind the camera photo of the second session:  

This is the only 5x4 photoshoot that I have done along the coast  since this  one  early in January:-- 3 months ago,  before I  had acquired the Sony A7r111. Basically I have struggled to find suitable subject matter for the large format photography, and  when I have find something, the weather conditions have not been suitable.   

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I have been playing around with  photographing seascapes with a digital camera whilst I am on the poodle walks  without much success. Most of the images I have scoped have been bland and boring. 

I have been scoping them in order to photograph the seascapes with a large format camera on a tripod from the top of the cliffs. 

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Now that Ari no longer with us we are  now able to  go on longer walks that allowed us to explore our locality.  

Yesterday afternoon  we all went exploring along Tugwell Rd in Waitpinga. The country was farmland and we just walked along Tugwell Road. 

I was scoping  for possible photographs with the film cameras. This is one  possibility. 

The local coastal landscape:

Made on a recent poodlewalk with Kayla and Maleko. 

In February, just before going to Tasmania,   I dashed over to Christchurch, New Zealand, to attend my mothers' funeral. She was 97. 

I stayed in a motel in Papanui Rd, Merivale with my sister.   In the early morning I would walk down to the local shops to have breakfast and  I would take  a few snaps along  the way. 

Merivale is one of Christchurch's  more upmarket suburbs. In contrast,  to say Sydenham,  it is where the old money is. It didn't seem to have been that badly damaged by the 2011 earthquake. Or if it had, then the  insurance money flowed in quickly to repair the damage to the buildings.  

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I have just returned  to Victor Harbor after spending  2 weeks in Tasmania.

The first week  was spent photographing on the south west coast of Tasmania whilst Suzanne walked in The Walls of Jerusalem National Park and the second week was spent being tourists primarily in the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart. 

Our base was in Tunbridge in the Midlands which I briefly explored between weeks 1 and 2. 

This building  was in Campbelltown which is about 20 kilometres north of Tunbridge on the Midlands Highway.  

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Prior to going to meet Gilbert and Eric at Hopetoun in the Wimmera-Mallee  to make some more  images for the Mallee Routes project  I camped at Murrayville to photo some of the  nearby  silos.  There were a couple of days of overcast conditions in the Mallee and I wanted to take advantage of these conditions  to make some 8x10 black and white photos.

This is the silo at Carina, which is just south of Murrayville:

This is going to be a slow project.  As it is turning out it requires several hours travelling time,  overcast conditions, camping  and a few pictures in the morning and the evening at the most.  Then the weather changes back to the usual  blue sky and bright sunshine and I pack up  the photoshoot  until the next time. 

At the opening of the Abstraction x 5 exhibition, which includes abstractions by   Graeme Hastwell, Beverley Southcott, Stuart Murdoch,  Adam Dutkiewicz and myself,  we launched the Abstract Photography  book. The exhibition and launch was yesterday  at the Light Gallery in Adelaide to a full house.  

The  book was written  by Dutkiewicz and myself, and it recovers the lost modernist abstractions made in the 1960s by Adelaide photographers, has a couple of essays by Adam and myself and a number of  abstract photographic  images by Adam  and myself. 

The full title of the book is Abstract Photography: Re-Evaluating Visual Poetics in Australian Modernism and Contemporary Practice, and it was published by  Moon Arrow Press. It was the  lo-fi version--the artist proof of concept--- was launched. The general reaction was that the history, text and contemporary  images in the book hung together well to form a cohesive whole. We'd got there. 

This behind the camera image of   me photographjng a silo at Peake  for the 15 Silos on the Mallee Highway project was made on a day trip along the Mallee Highway with Maleko.  I needed some  black and white mages  of the silos on the Highway for the Weltraum  exhibition at Magpie Springs  in the 2016 Shimmer Photographic Biennale as the  ones  from an  earlier photoshoot hadn't work out that well.  

The Biennale opens on Friday,  September 2nd. The  8 x 10 image black and white  image of the silo at Peake was not included. It is an outtake due to the the lens vignetting because raising the front standard  to its limit was too extreme for the lens to cover.  I need to stand further back from the silo when I return. 

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