I've just returned to Encounter Studio in Victor Harbor, South Australia today after a month's phototrip in Tasmania. Suzanne is in Paris,  I'm looking after Ari, and the digitial suite has a new modem. The old one died during an electrical storm whilst we were in Tasmania.

I've linked up with an Adelaide-based  Art Photographers Facebook group that is quite lively and free wheeling and I've ordered a new digital camera to replace the old Sony  that was stolen in Melbourne last November. 

I've been  trying to reconnect with the  work that I was doing in Victor Harbor before the Tasmanian phototrip. To my dismay I've lost any sense of what I was working on or trying to do.  So I looked at the negatives that I had scanned just before I left for Tasmania:

I have to face it. I'm not sure that I had a particular project with the Victor Harbor book.  What was I trying to do with it I asked myself? I didn't have an answer. So what was I doing then? There has been a workflow but I've just been been taking snaps around several themes.

So where do I go from here?

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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The South Australian  modernist painter thst I have the greatest affinity to is Dorrit Black. She used the unique forms of the  Fleurieu Peninsula landscape  as the basis for  her modernist works, such as Coast Road (1942) and Cliffs at Second Valley (1949). The latter is not online.

The pallette in Black's   work of the 1940s is sombre, the approach is cubist, the forms sculptural, and there is a gesture towards the sublime.

This the photographer on location  in the early morning. The rock being photographed is this one.

I'd come across the rock form  when I started exploring the cliffs east of Kings Beach on an evening walk with the  poodles. I took some snaps and  they looked okay on the computer screen.   So I returned with my film cameras.

It was a struggle to get the gear down the cliff face early in the morning.   The  Linhof Tripod is heavy and bulky and difficult to carry. But  it  comes into its own in situations like this, as it is very  flexible and sturdy.

My interest in the rocks was form and light. Modernist abstraction in photography made sense-----it is abstracting from the  forms in nature. This abstraction of the forms of the landscape  has nothing to do with romantic subjectivity or transcendentalism.  

I don't see many Australian photographers  or painters doing this sort of work.

This is a picture that was taken between Petrel Cove and Kings Head in the early morning using a Rolleiflex SL66  and Ilford PanF Plus 50 --a slow black and white film.

The location  is difficult to access as  it involves climbing down the cliffs via waterfall.  So the camera gear needed to be as lightweight as possible.  I did lug the Cambo 5x7 monorail down there on a latter occasion.

The picture has been posted in my Flickr stream and it was processed in Silver Efex Pro software using a gold toning filter.

The Heysen Trail  starts from Petrel Cove and wanders along the cliff tops. We walk  the section from  Rosetta Head to Kings Head  with the standard poodles when were are in Victor Harbor. It's a lovely walk.