It is rare for me to convert my digital photos into black and white. I nearly always use medium format film  for my black and white  photography of the details along both the coast and the landscape of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. I avoid the grandiose or the panorama.

However, as  I have no b+w film  at the moment,  and the spare film back for the Rolleiflex SL66 that I used  to use for  my b+w  broke when I was in Queenstown earlier this year and cannot be repaired, I  have done  a quick conversion of  a  digital colour image  into black and white using  Adobe's Lightroom.

I dislike the way that Lightroom converts colour digital files into black and white files.  The  tonal richness disappears and the image becomes rather drab and flat. There is no punch to them.  

So, like many others, I've been  using the Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 plugin software to process my digital black and white images in Lightroom.  I was happy with what I was using,  and I didn't bother  looking for alternative software  because I rarely  converted my digital photos into black and white. Digital black and white photography  didn't really appeal. 

This is  just a small step into the world of digital black and white photography. Though  I  will eventually buy more black and white film  to  use with the  Linhof Technika 70,   the new iMac (currently running the  High Sierra O/S)  is forcing me  to  think in terms of upgrading my  Sony NEX-7 digital camera to a full frame mirrorless one,  and updating my Adobe post processing software.  

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The times that I have photographed along the coast with my  film cameras have been few and far between.  It's been nearly all digital photography this winter and spring--building up an archive of images  for The Littoral Zone propject. 

This was one  of the few occasions with a medium format camera:

I am running my stock of film stock down before I order any more film from New York.  All my 5x4 colour film has been used. 

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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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Thanks to Madeline taking Ari for a walk this afternoon  I was able to walk along the foreshore rocks with Kayla and Maleko this Sunday.

There were  heaps of people  walking along the cliff top path, which is part of the Heysen Trail,  in the afternoon sunshine--with children, in groups, with their dogs.  They were still walking at 5pm. 

I suddenly realised that it was a long weekend--Queens birthday weekend.  People had come down the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast for the weekend.   

Whilst Suzanne is in Cuba and Mexico  for 4 weeks I have been minding the standard  poodles at Encounter Bay and trying to make a few photos whilst I am on the daily poodle walks.

The photos are for the Fleurieuscapes book  that I am slowly working on.  Slowly because I am not  sure where I am going with this body of work about the Fleurieu Peninsula, or what I am trying to do with it. It is about the specifics of the place whilst avoiding the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful as much as possible. 

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On Thursday the wild, stormy winter weather eased and we had a day of overcast skies, little rain and no wind. So I loaded the large format cameras into the Subaru Outback  and took off for  a day trip the Mallee along the Mallee Highway. 

I needed to continue to  photograph the silos with the 8x10 Cambo  for the forthcoming Weltraum  exhibition  in the Shimmer Photographic Biennnale. I photographed  at Peake and Lameroo.  The silo at Geranium was  difficult and I left it for another occasion. I didn't make it to the Victorian Mallee as 220 kilometres one way was  far enough for a  day trip.  

Maleko accompanied me on the day  trip.  It was his first time on a photo trip. 

After I finished the  silo photoshoot in  Lameroo   I briefly  photographed around the town.   I struck up a conversation with a wool buyer  who had seen me photographing the silos about the history of the Murray Mallee.  He informed  me that the  last train on the Mallee Highway  railway line had been around October 2015,  and  that the silos along the Mallee Highway now stand empty. The wheat is now picked at the farm gate up by trucks  and then taken by road to either Pinnaroo or Tailem Bend.  

That is  is the end of an era that began with the vegetation clearance,  agricultural development,  small farms and  the railway infrastructure in the early 20th century.  

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The wet,  cold  stormy weather has passed. It is still cold in the morning (I wore gloves on the 7am poodle walk  this morning),   but the wind has dropped, the sun has returned and the sky is blue.  I've picked up my cameras again,  and I've started thinking about photography.  -

I picked up the Sinar F2 5x4 yesterday, got  my pack out, and loaded the battery into the light meter  only to put it down again as I didn't have anything in mind to photograph.    However, I used the digital on yesterday's  evening  poodle walk.  The picture below  is a scoping  study that I made on this morning's poodle walk  along  Baum Rd in Waitpinga using my Sony  (APS-C)  digital camera:

I have photographed this tree before--probably a couple of  years  ago.  It was 5x4 film and I  choose an overcast day with light rain to obtain the dull, gloomy look. I  wasn't all that  happy with what I did in colour.

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The  Mallee group of photographers meet for lunch today at the Ramsgate Hotel in Henley Beach, Adelaide   to discuss the exhibition schedules of their lens-based photography work about the Mallee.  The Mallee photography group is small --it consists of Eric Algra, Gilbert Roe and myself--- and it recently came  together through our mutual interest in exploring the Mallee photographically.   

None of us live in the Mallee, but  each of us has developed a broad photographic  interest in exploring  the South Australian  and  the Victorian  Mallee.  For some  of us, especially Eric,  this interest  goes back several years. What is interesting is that we  approach the Mallee from diverse perspectives.  

What we  decided  over a convivial  pub lunch on a windy winter's day was to come together to put on a series of group exhibitions over a period of years as we gradually built up a body of work about this region of southern Australia.  We decided to exhibit  on a small scale in  Adelaide in late 2016, then produce more work for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale in 2017, then doing extra work to exhibit in some regional towns in the Mallee--eg., in Mildura or Murray Bridge.   This  photography gallery in Mildura was mentioned, for instance, as was this one in Murray Bridge and this one in Horsham.   

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On the last couple of coastal poodle walks I've started scoping subject matter  for the 5x4 Sinar F2 and black and white film.  I haven't been using this monorail much since I decided to use it for black and white photography.  

I took the Sinar  with me on the  recent photo trip  to the Mallee Highway,  and  I did find some suitable subject matter. However,  the weather was too bright and sunny on the last day for the planned  photoshoot at Torrita. 

This is one possibility along the coast that I  did come across:  

This location is fairly easy to access with a monorail--it's a short walk along the coastal path to the rocks.  I just need an overcast day for the photoshoot with no rain.   

I spent several days camping at Wallaroo on the Yorke Peninsula with Gilbert Roe, a fellow photographer based in Adelaide. We spent the time  exploring the region with our cameras:  Gilbert was using his pinhole camera and I was working with  my  large format cameras. I concentrated on the silos.

 This is one image that I made in the late afternoon with both the  Cambo 8x10 (using black and white film) and the  Cambo 5x7 (using colour film):  

It  was a trial run for me in terms of  camping whilst  being on the road with  the large format equipment. Renting a house,  staying in a cheap motel, or a cabin in a caravan park,  is too expensive these days. Camping was a  trial run because our camping gear is very old and basic,  and I haven't been camping for 20 years or more. So I needed  to see whether this mode of accommodation would work for me as a way of doing the photography road trips. 

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