I've been laid low with a torn ligament in my lower back and that ends the planned 8x10 photography for this weekend. So  I've been going through some of the roadside pictures on the computer that I took  last year during the summer.

One area   that I started in the roadside series was the summer grasses:

I'd just seen some of James Cant's  sunny and dry South Australian landscapes, and more specificially, his close-up images of local grasses and brush. These were highly textured, almost calligraphic, paintings. 

I had a quick look at my summer grasses  photography before, just after I'd scanned them,  but I didn't like the series  at all. I thought the idea was misguided. So I forgot about  them.

It's winter  now and everything looks different. So I can see the pictures I took then  at more of a distance.

This part of Port Elliot is a much desired location. Big expensive architecturally designed housing is being built right on tops of the sandstone cliffs.  The houses have a commanding view of Encounter Bay. That's the way people like it. 

The sea around the rocks  is a  favourite spot for surfers and photographers. 

I'm more interested in the housing meets the coastline theme. I've had several goes at this, none of them satisfactory. It can only be done when the tide is very low. The sand is slowly going from the beach, exposing the rocks. 

I've started reading Jane Hylton's The Painted Coast: Views of the Fleurieu Peninsula in order to gain a sense of the visual history of this part of South Australia from the 1840s to the present.  The original native vegetation, which can be seen in the early water colours of G.F. Angas and H.P. Gill,  has long gone.

The region is now mostly farmland. The remnants  of the  native vegetation outside of the conservation parks can be found along the road side. This is now pretty thin.

I find the lack  of native vegetation and biodiversity rather depressing.

The heat wave continues in Adelaide. 

 I'm doing more work in the studio--at the moment it is black and white shots of a clove of Russsian garlic. I'm decided to use up the expired Ilford FP4 125 ASA  film, which  came with the Rolleiflex 6006  system that  I acquired a year ago.

This is a rose from the garden at Solway Cresent. It was taken in 2011 with  Fujichrome Provia 100F using a Cambo studio stand.

I spent yesteday scanning 5x7 colour negatives on the flatbed Epson V700 scanner without much success.  The negatives were scanned without a film holder, as no film 5x7 film holders came with the scanner.   I used the film area guide  and they have a strong blue cast. I couldn't  restore the colour with the Epson software. It did not work at all.

Unfortunately for me there are  no 5x7 film holders  made for  the scanner. They only go  up to 5x4. I am converting some of the scanned negatives to black and white but I will have to invest in a flexible  5x7 film holder from betterscanning.

I can see why people make the shift to digital.

During the high summer in South Australia it is difficult to take photographs.It is very hot and without the the cloud cover there is a very limited time at dawn and dusk to take photographs.

I don't fancy walking across rocks in the dark carrying large format equipment to have it all set up before dawn. Usually I have a location in mind and I  wait for some cloud cover to soften the very bright sunlight.

In the meantime  I make use of the studio. It's a simple set up: tabletop,  window light, closeup rings on a Rolleiflex 6006 , exposures of around 2-4 seconds, a 120 roll of  Fujichrome  Provia 100F and some fruit and  vegetables, such as this avocado.

It has been a couple of  months since I posted on the Encounter Studio's blog. Even though I'd been working on the Victor  Harbor book over the Xmas break I'd more or less forgotten about this blog. I only remembered it when I was  setting up the book's  gallery this morning.  

This is an picture  taken last year and it depicts erosion along the side of the Ring Road. I made a number of studies of this subject as I was attracted by both the shapes and the  colours.  

This is pretty much how I see the rockface in the coastal landscape just west of  Victor Harbor and around Kings Head.

It is  the constantly changing play of light on the rock forms along the coastline that caught my eye and intrigued me. I tend to see the rockface in terms of abstractions---organic abstractions, as it were. Abstract modernism in this  form makes sense to me as a photogrpaher. 

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