This was made on a recent  early morning poodle walk   with Ari and Kayla  just before Easter.  We were walking  on a  back country road in Waitpinga. It's all agricultural landscapes around this part of Waitpinga,  with some  roadside vegetation and a  rows  of eucalypts--mostly pink gums--between the various fenced paddocks. Though this is land seen in terms of  property and its usefulness, you only occasionally  see human beings working the land.  

The sun burst through the cloud cover for a minute or so whilst we walking along a roadway.   I didn't make it to the spot  that I was aiming for (the two trees over the page).   I had no time to set up the Linhof Technika 70 on a tripod,   which was what I'd been hoping to do. It was either this  handheld photo  at this spot  with the  Sony-NEX-7 digital camera,  or nothing. 

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When I was in Melbourne recently, I continued my  photographic exploration of  the Southern Cross Railway Station and the inner suburb of Richmond.  I hung around  in the former and I continued with my walking the latter. 

I had  briefly visited Victoria Street, Richmond,   with Stuart Murdoch after  our  Kodak shoot for a quick meal at the no frills Thy Thy restaurant. Whilst walking to the restaurant  I noticed that the Victoria Street  part of Richmond had radically changed from the one that I knew when when I lived in Melbourne in the late 1970s. I was working as a conductor on the trams and studying at Photographic Studies College. 

There were no Vietnamese restaurants anywhere in Victoria Street, Richmond.  The notable ethnicities  were Turks and Greeks.  Then Richmond was  identified as Struggletown. It was a working class suburb with cottages, pubs and factories. Richmond, by all accounts,   had started to become a little Saigon in the 1980s.

 Richmond  today is in the process of gentrification,  as a result of the exodus of manufacturing to the outer suburbs thereby making the inner city a much more pleasant place to live. Victoria  St is still  a gritty street,  and it has a vibrancy that Adelaide lacks,  and  what inner city Adelaideans long for and Sydneysiders now miss.   The Gouger Street precinct near the Adelaide Central Market doesn't really cut it. 

I  only had time for a couple of quick, hand held  snaps at dusk with the digital camera before the evening meal.  When walking back to the car after the meal I decided to return to Richmond  the next day  and  walk  Victoria St. I wanted to see if it was a food strip or more akin to an urban village. 

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On our way back  to Adelaide from Melbourne we stayed a couple of days  near Johanna Beach, which is  close to the Great Otway National Park.  This stay had been planned  by Suzanne a couple of months ago. 

I had tentatively  planned to add onto this  stay some photography of  the effects of the bush fire at Separation Creek   and Wye River along the Great Ocean Road.  However, the  length of time it took to travel the distance to these localities and coastal towns was too great to photograph in the early morning light or at twilight.   

So I took the opportunity of the stay to go photographing in the rainforest  of the Otway Ranges. This is a scoping image made with my  digital camera--the Sony NEX-7 whilst  taking a walk along the Old Ocean Road:

I was exploring the rainforest outside the national park--the Otway Forest along the Old Ocean Road from memory. I used my baby Linhof---the  Linhof Technika 70---with  its 2 6x9  Linhof film backs: one was loaded with  colour film (Kodak Portra 160)  the other was loaded with black and white film (Ilford PanF Plus).  Alas,  I  had inadvertently loaded the colour film the wrong way.  So I've only  got the black and white  film negatives.  

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I've just returned from the  Melbourne trip via the Great Ocean Road and several days in the Otway's and in  the Coorong. 

On the way over to Melbourne we stayed overnight at a dog friendly place called Old Dadswell Town on the Western Highway. It  is between Horsham and Stawell.  I was carrying the 5x7 Cambo monorail  to begin to photograph  the silos along the Wimmera section of the Western Highway,  as I was hoping for some overcast skies. It was not to be.  The weather  was bright, sunny and hot.  I made no photos of  the silos.

I did manage to take some snapshots at Old Dadswell Town in the late afternoon as a form of consolation:

Old Dadswell Town  is a quirky place  full of collected junk,  and it refers back to the Australia of the 1950s, the Mad Max movies and the tourist pioneer theme towns. We had the place to ourselves on this occasion. 

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This behind the camera picture  was taken whilst  I was on  an early morning photoshoot along the Heysen Trail,  with my Linhof Technika 5x4 during the Australia Day weekend. The Heysen Trail photoshoot  was combined with a poodle walk.

I have avoided the beaches this weekend due to  the families  having summer fun on, and taking over,   the beaches The summer fun  also includes  playing on the rocks around Petrel Cove or climbing  Rosetta Head in thongs.  As expected there were more casualties  at Petrel Cove. It is obvious that people do not read the warning signs by the steps  to the beach or on the rocks; or if they do read them, then they ignore them.    

On the morning of the photoshoot the light was dull and flat.   I would have preferred  the soft, early morning light, which was there  when I had previously  scoped the  site,  but it was not to be.  I waited for a while to see what was happening with the cloud cover,   but I realised that  there was little point in hanging around waiting for better light to eventuate. The  cloud cover was  far too heavy.   

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The  Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs in South Australia's Fleurieu Peninsula has been hung,  and everything is ready for the 2pm opening on Sunday afternoon, the 17th of January.  The theme is people, space and place and this is the first part of the project. Rage second part is more historical in  orientation and the palette is darker.  

The exhibition  has been expanded from the Red Room, the main gallery  room,  to two rooms;  and it now consists of 22 images instead of the initial 16. The  images were made with medium and  large format  cameras,  and there is  a mixture of colour images and black and white ones, with the colours one predominant.  

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This seascape is Petrel Cove in the early morning. It is part of the Fleurieuscapes  project that I have been working on  since we shifted to living at Victor Harbor. 

The picture  was made when I  had returned to  the car after a  poodle walk  along Deps Beach with Ari and Kayla. I was taken by the softness and the quality of the light. 

The sea is a big part of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula ---playing on the beach, fishing, surfing etc-- and I struggle to find  a way to photograph  it. How do you do it? It's a slow working it out and hoping that an opening will eventuate. The opening would be  a photograph that's a doorway that is photographically interesting.

The classic seaside/beach photography project is  Joel Meyerowitz's  1979 book Cape Light: a book of  colour photographs of the seaside resort of Provincetown, Cape Cod and its soft natural light  made in the summer of 1976 with an 8x10. It is  considered a classic work of colour photography and the  8 x 10  camera meant  that his  stance  towards  summer cottages and ice cream shops  was both one of patience and meditative.  The images are  in and around his house in Cape Cod and  the mood is one of languid, forever-long summer days. These are not really colorised or pumped up. 

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On my last visit to Adelaide after the Ballarat trip I decided  to walked to my opticians appointment in the CBD  from Atkins Photo Lab in Kent Town. I had lost my glasses on that trip, and as I had  an hour or so to fill in  before the appointment, I wandered through  the Botanic Gardens. 

I was hoping to start by viewing a SALA exhibition of Kangaroo Island artists  at the Wine Centre but it had finished. So I meandered through the Australian native plants  section of the  Botanic Gardens.

I ended up among the strands of bamboo along a bit of a waterway near North Terrace.   I had briefly photographed these for an Atkins Film Challenge a year or so earlier. I was intrigued by them but felt that I didn't do them justice then. So I decided to take another look.  

I was in Ballarat for a few days to see the Ballarat International Foto  Biennale 2015. I had some photos in the Time exhibition  by the Atkins  Photo Artists,  which was  in the basement of the Lost Ones Gallery. The exhibition was part of BIFB15's  Fringe Festival.    

Whilst I was  in Ballarat I took the opportunity to  wander the streets taking  some photos of the architecture 

These snaps were mostly made whilst I was walking around the town looking  at the various exhibitions in the core and fringe programmes.  It was continuing on with what I  had done a couple of years ago when I was there for BIFN 13. 

This is the kind of  picture of silos in a landscape  that I plan to do with respect to that section of the silo project  which is based around the Mallee Highway.  I also referred to the project here. 

This plan is to make the pictures  in black and white  primarily using a Cambo 8x10 monorail. A few will made in colour using the Cambo 5x7 monorail.   The use of colour will be the focus of picturing the silos in the Wimmera.