Thoughtfactory: Leica poetics

Leica, film, snaps, chronicles, cliches

Posts for Tag: Fleurieu Peninsula

flowing bark

 My Leica M film rangefinder is locked in the past. I bought the analogue rangefinder  on the basis of craftsmanship in the 1970s when it was already  being marginalised  by the innovative, Japanese SLR cameras. In 2022 the film M is technologically  obsolete but it works.  

 I am no True Believer in Leica, its  myths or seductive mystique.  What I currently have  is a well made, vintage  film camera with a minimalist industrial design that requires a considered approach to photographing the world around me.   

 This picture was made in 2021 when I was starting to photographically  explore   the Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

Spring Mount  is a local stringybark conservation park in the ranges that run alongside the Inman Valley. It  lies  between, and separates,  the Hindmarsh Tiers and  the  Inman Valley.  

summer light

This picture of roadside vegetation  was made whilst  I was walking along  a back country road in Waitpinga, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was in the late  summer in 2016 and  I was on an early morning   poodlewalk  with the standard poodles. 

I was forcing myself to take photos of trees and the agricultural landscape around me so as  to keep my  photographic eye hand in. This was the area/locality  in which I now live,  so how can I photograph it? I recall that I didn't have the confidence to  set things up to  do tripod based photography. 

Though film has quickly gone  poof (poor Kodak) as the medium of choice   for photographers,  I am part of that 'bridge generation' between film and digital. Digital, including rangefinder digital,   is simply easier, faster and immediate since the camera  is really a portable computer (with a sets of options,) and a sensor and  lens.   My technique is far slower and more measured with film.  

My doubts  about 35mm film photography are beginning to ease.  I can see that there is still some life in 35mm film photography,  in that  it has a different quality to the digital version.  But it is only for some subject matter, as I'm beginning to discover.  Unfortunately, I cannot predict which one.  

That  filmic quality is hard to pinpoint,  but it  has something along the lines of  providing a more emotional response to what is photographed, as distinct from a technically perfect image that can be quite bland.   Digital images are  unfilm like and so perfect that camera software manufacturers are now adding  adding "grain" enhancement plugins. 

seafog

A rarely experienced moment during the summer months on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula near Waitpinga- dense sea fog:

It  happened  for a couple of days. It would roll in across the landscape  in  the late afternoon.  Then it disappeared.