The  b+w  picture below is of roadside vegetation in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It  is from the archives,  and  it was made with a large format camera--a 1950's  Super Cambo 8x10 monorail. 

I used this  picture of the local landscape as my contribution to the online print viewing/sharing of the Melbourne based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG). I've linked up  with FOPG due to my isolation  as a large format photographer in Adelaide.  There are very few people doing this kind of slow photography in Adelaide, and I have little connection to, or empathy with,  the few that  are.  I decided to  share some of my photos I've made  of the local landscape in  Encounter Bay/Waitpinga  with FOPG,  since  most of the photography the members of  FOPG do  is orientated towards the genre of  landscape.    

I am on the fringe  of FOPG due to living in Adelaide. It's not practical  for me  to attend their face-to-face print viewing sessions in Melbourne, but I  did plan to go their field trip to Apollo Bay and the Otway Ranges in April. Unfortunately,  that field trip was cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  I plan to submit a photo of the  Waitpinga  landscape from those that  I have been making during the lockdown to their upcoming online exhibition.  

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Now that Ari no longer with us we are  now able to  go on longer walks that allowed us to explore our locality.  

Yesterday afternoon  we all went exploring along Tugwell Rd in Waitpinga. The country was farmland and we just walked along Tugwell Road. 

I was scoping  for possible photographs with the film cameras. This is one  possibility. 

Finally some photographic action:

There was some  sunshine early on Sunday morning. So I took advantage of it  to make a 5x4 black and white picture.  I rushed the photoshoot  though because the light had changed from the time I'd scoped it. It hit the tree about 10 minutes earlier than last time. 

I've done little film photography since the start of winter, though  I have  been scoping with the digital camera.   

It's been  too cold, wet and windy along  the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula to use the film cameras. Today was the first time, in fact, that I used a film camera on a tripod since  the  photoshoot along the Mallee Highway.  

I  re-photographed this image  late this afternoon whilst on a poodle walk ( with Ari and Maleko) using my  medium format cameras--( the Rolleiflex SL66 and  the Linhof Technika 70).  This is the digital image from my earlier scoping with  the late afternoon light: 

That re-photographing  felt  like I was picking up the threads again re film photography after going through a fallow period---it's been  about a month since  the Mallee Highway  photoshoot.

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Now that summer has passed  into autumn I've started using my  old 8x10  Cambo monorail. This morning was the first time I 'd used the camera since late spring. I was a bit rusty and  things didn't go very smoothly.  I made a number of mistakes on the shoot.

It was a local  photoshoot that I'd previously scoped,  and I'd  been  waiting for  the right conditions for the photoshoot:

Over the summer I'd  changed the lens  on the Cambo from a Schneider-Kreuznach  Symmar 210mm to a  Schneider-Kreuznach  Symmar  300mm in preparation for  photographing the silos along the Mallee Highway in the next month or so.  The  former lens  didn't cover  the camera's rise and fall  movements very well, especially with the front standard, which  needed  to be raised quite high to get  the  top of silos in the frame.  

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