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film

film, light, water

light

March 15, 2024

The image below is a continuation of the little experiment that I’d started  a couple of years ago to photograph light itself. At this stage I am not sure whether the experiment will evolve into a series.

This is early morning light over the sea at Encounter Bay looking to the right of  Wright Island across to the Coorong. It  is from the winter of 2022, and it  was  made whilst I  was  walking along Jetty Rd from  Rosetta Head in Victor Harbor on a poodlewalk with Kayla.  The image  was made with Franke & Heidecke’s archaic and retro  Rolleiflex TLR camera.

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abstraction, critical writing, film, water

Encounter Bay seascapes

April 14, 2023

I have been looking at some recent scans of the seascapes that I made during 2022 with my vintage RolleiflexF TLR. This is a 60 year old camera and so it is no surprise that the elements of its Planar 75m lens that were joined with balsam glue have recently separated. Apparently the issue of lens separation is often associated with the camera having been exposed to high heat situations during its life.  It can be repaired through baking the lens to de-glue the elements, but there is a risk of the elements cracking from the baking process. I decided to go ahead with the repair.

The 2022 seascape images that I made with this Rolleiflex TLR looked quite different to what I’d expected. From the traditional perspective of the quality of the image that is produced by a digital camera you could say that these are degraded images and so failures. That is how I saw them when I’d scanned the negatives and then compared them in Lightroom to the digital images made at the same time. I had initially thought that the degraded images resulted from the lens being salt damaged like the Leica M4-P due to by a rogue wave sweeping over me — but it was lens separation not a salt ladened camera.

Rolleiflex TLR
seascape, Encounter Bay, #1

I put the scans to one side and forgot about them. Some time later I went back and re-looked at Gustave Le Gray’s mid-19th century coastal photography of Normandy and the western coast of the Mediterranean.   I concentrated on his seascapes, that were made using the wet-collodion process and from different negatives (one for the sea and another one for the sky) being combined to produce an image that showed both sky and sea in one unified, double-structured picture. He produced an album of sepia brown toned seascapes of albumen prints called Vistas del Mar. These are images from the prehistory of an instantaneous photography, or pictorial instantaneity, which emerged after 1878.

I found these images created by the combination of two different negatives taken at different moments with different exposure times stunning. They also raised the issues of how does photography represent time? How does photography figure the temporal nature of the medium? What kind of philosophy of time, if any, can be found in photography?

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colour, film, trees

a favourite tree

November 26, 2022

In the In Memoriam post on poodlewalks about having to put Kayla down due to her having cancer of the lymph nodes I mentioned that her love of being in, and walking in the local bushland, helped me to photograph the local Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. Being-in-this-world with her helped me shift away from viewing nature (the local bushland) as simply natural beauty; or its re-enchantment (mythos) on offer in today’s tourist industry.

Kayla helped my photography in the sense that being with her enabled me to see the detail in the bushland, see the transience of nature, discover particular settings and individual trees, and to become attached to the earth beneath us. By seeing the changes in the bush I started seeing nature as history. Natural history as perishable nature refers to more than our evolving conceptions of nature because nature itself changes: bark breaks and falls to the ground, trees are uprooted, plants die,  animals are killed, the earth’s water becomes polluted from the chemicals in the farm, and so on. Nature shares with human history a passing away or perishing. Walking each morning with Kayla helped me become aware of the subtle changes.

eucalupt, Waitpinga, 2022

This particular tree in the Waitpinga bushland is one that I photographed in different weather conditions with different cameras and films. On this occasion I used a 5×7 Cambo S3 monorail. It had been raining during the night. The colours were strange and intense. My coming back to photograph the tree’s frequently hanging conditions meant that it became my favourite tree in this bushland.

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exhibitions, film, landscape

Feature: large Format #3

August 17, 2021

David Tatnall has started an online gallery at View Camera Australia for analogue photos made with both medium and large format cameras. The first exhibition: —August 2021–is now up. It was based around recent work — made within the year to August 2021. I sent 3 images for submission to August 2021, and one of them entitled ‘sea sky earth’, was included in the exhibition. It was made with an old 5×7 Cambo SC 3 monorail in the late autumn/early winter of 2021. It was early in the morning on an over cast day.

The image below is an outtake –that is, one of the 3 images sent for consideration. It is of a local wetland in Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was also made with a Cambo 5×7 SC3 monorail as a part of an ongoing series of photographing my local area. This is the traditional country of the Ngarrindjeri people.

Hindmarsh River estuary, Victor Harbor, 2021

There are some great images in the exhibition, and it showcases both the strength of large format photography and the diversity of analogue photography in Australia. The audience response to the online August 2021 exhibition has been extremely positive. As a result of the positive audience response David Tatnall plans to do another online exhibition in October. It is a good idea.

Hopefully these images will help to uplift the mood of the people in Sydney and Melbourne, who have been in lockdown for some time; and those people in Brisbane and Adelaide have been in and out of lockdown; and those in Canberra who have recently gone into lockdown. People are anxious and under stress with the rolling lockdowns, which are designed to contain the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19 by severely limiting people’s movement.

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film, landscape, photography, roadtrip

Australian Roadtrips

November 10, 2019

I am currently reading Rebecca Dagnall’s practice based research PhD entitled, Landscape photography and the imaginary of an Australian Gothic. It was done in 2017 at RMIT, and consists of  three photographic projects: In Tenebris, The road trip, and Absence and presence: states of being in the Australian landscape. This blog post refers to Dagnell’s research around Australian road trips.

Road trips is an interest of mine. I have been making them and photographing over a number of years. Previous posts on this topic are here and here. My work for the Mallee Routes project is structured around road trips into the Mallee country.

Dukes Highway, South Australia, 2019

Dagnall starts the research part with David Campany’s recent The open road — photography and the American road trip; a book that provides a history of photography on the road through featuring the work of twenty photographers to document how artists have pictured America since the decisive work of Robert Frank in the 1950s. She then turns her attention to road trips and photography in Australia.

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