I've been mulling over where to next after the Edgelands exhibition  at Manning Clark House in Canberra in November 2014. What project do I pick up and start to work on? Something that is different from the topographical approach of Edgelands. 

I thought that a  modest exhibition of abstractions would  be an easy step as I can select the images from  the archives. They'd be a mixture of colour and black and white and they would include abstractions from the urban and the natural environment. I'm not sure where the exhibition would be at this stage---probably in Adelaide and possibly at the Light Gallery in late 2015. 

Abstractions are a bit passé these days ---retro probably, given the  current emphasis on street photography.  Or  its a niche,  even though abstraction has been intrinsic to photography. On the other hand, there  is the retrospectivity of contemporary art that is nostalgic for, or repurposes,  Modernist art.  We could do without modernism's  main themes: the transcendental, the contemplative and the timeless.  

Read more

I finally managed to use the  old Cambo SC monorail to make some 8x10 colour pictures of  the bark of the redgum in the reserve.   

I mucked up one exposure---the first one--- as I'd forgotten to take off the yellow filter on the Schneider Symmar 210 mm lens that I'd been using for my black and white exposures. 

The next step  is  take the  sheet film to Atkins Technicolour to have them  to process the  negatives. That service will not be cheap-- probably around $16.50 for one sheet of film. The next step is to  scan the negatives  myself with  the Epson V700 scanner. 

I did  two abstractions of the  peeling bark in  the open shade:

I'm not sure that 8x10 colour is an economic  proposition or that it is worth the expense.  I had the sheet film in the fridge and I needed to use it before it expired.