The stormy weather finally has gone from Victor Harbor.   Today started  with a glorious spring morning--crisp, clear and still.  As there  was no early morning  cloud cover,  so the 8x10 black and white shoot that I had in mind was  a nonstarter.  I needed soft or diffused early morning light for the shoot.

So I took a walk along the boat ramp  near Whalers Inn  Resort at sunrise in order to  photograph the  sea at the edge of breakwater in Encounter Bay.  I had some abstractions in mind,  which I wanted to explore in the early morning light:

The sea is gentle in this part of Encounter Bay,  and so I was able to sit on the rocks at the water's edge without worrying that I'd be swamped  by every  seventh  wave.  I didn't have that much time  before the sunlight became too bright and the highlights on the white caps of the waves blew out. 

The wild southerly storms eased on the weekend and I ventured out with cameras in the morning to photograph the  roadside vegetation  and to  photograph the rock forms  along the coast in the afternoon.

Though it was low tide in the late afternoon,  the sea was still very turbulent.   It was too  dangerous to go right  to the edge where the sea pounded  the rocks. The odd wave--roughly every  seventh one- -- was very high,  and the rocks were  slippery underfoot.

So I played it safe.

The three days at Victor Harbor have been frustrating in terms of photography.  I've been painting the lounge room  of  the   weekender whilst waiting for the conditions to be okay for a couple  large format  black and white pictures of roadside vegetation. One  was an early morning shoot, whilst the other  was  a late afternoon one.

It has been frustrating because when the southerly wind wasn't blowing  it has been raining early in the morning and late afternoon and then quite sunny during the day. Finally things fell into place late this afternoon after I finished painting a seciton of the wall-----there was little wind and it was overcast and fine. Ideal for the afternoon shoot that I'd lined up. 

I'd forgotten just how meditative 8x10  photography is. It takes a while to set the gear up  for the shoot,  and that means you really are in the moment.

I could feel the light changing as I tried to figure out how to use the new Pronto Professional  3 shutter for the Schneider 24mm lens that had recently been serviced. The  Prontor has no T position to hold the lens wide open  so you cancompose a representation of the objects in front of the camera. 

I finally figured out that I had to use a locked cable  release to do the same function as the T positon of holding the lens open using the  B position. The light was fading fast whilst I sorted things out.

I've come down to Victor Harbor after a three week absence, which  included a small  trip to Melbourne.  There has been a lot of rain on the Fleurieu Peninsula recently, and it was difficult to access Kings Head this afternoon  due to  the landslides along  the Heysen Trail. It was very muddy.

On the way Ari and I met a couple of photographers walking the Heysen Trail on their  way to Kings Beach. They werre  taking lots of photographs.   One  photographer had   a big, fancy  Nikon DSLR with a zoom lens--he also had two standard poodles which I'd  previously seen --- whilst  the other had a Mamyia DM22 medium format camera , which he had bought second hand  from a guy in Japan for around $3000.   It was cheap because it had a 3 year  old 16 megapixel digital back.

These kind of cameras are  not readily  available in Adelaide second hand.

As  we walked along the trail towards  Kings Beach I mentioned the medium format guy that I once started out with an old  Mamiya RB67, but that I found it heavy and had swiched to Rolleiflexes.   He added that he also  had a Mamiya RZ33 in his studio but  that it was too heavy to take into the field. 

When I remarked about the cheapness of the digital back  he said  that it wasn't  necessary to go beyond a 33 megapixel digital back,  unless you were doing billboard posters. That was useful information for me.

What I gleaned from the brief encounter was that a  new digital medium format camera is now under $15,000,  and  it can be acquired for around $10,000 new. Suddenly a digital medium format camera  becomes feasible.

Ari and I  pushed on to our favourite  location at the foot of the Newland Cliffs to check out the tide and  the wind conditions for an early morning shoot. The two guys weren't interested in coming down to the rocky outcrop--it was in deep  shadow and the rocks  were very wet and slippery.

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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This is beachside villa is another example of the old style seaside architecture at Victor Harbor at Encounter Bay.

  It  ought to be heritage and preserved from the developers who would pulll it down to build a block of apartments or several townhouses.  It's a premium location as it is on the waterfront. 

This is a favourite area  in Victor Harbor for the poodles, Suzanne  and myself. It is the estuary of the Hindmarsh River near Hayborough, and it includes a board walk through the melaleucas,  a lagoon and the beach itself.  The latter is very popular.

The afternoon in winter is the best  for photography  here. The river is flowing,  the western sun  lightens up the estuary and the colours are quite intense once the sun has gone behind the hills.  

This pink gum  is on the side of the road to the Council Rubbish dump.  I noticed it one day when I was walking  along the road with the  poodles. It was probably the first time that I'd started to look the roadside vegetation as a photographer.

The shape intrigued me so I took a quick snap. I've returned a couple of times to photograph the tree with different cameras and in different conditions. It is significant  moment for me because I  then started to look more closely at the roadside vegetation on the back roads. 

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.