I don't recall when I made this b+w abstraction.
I know the location though. I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla. It was an intuitive rather than a planned photo.
I don't recall when I made this b+w abstraction.
I know the location though. I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla. It was an intuitive rather than a planned photo.
This is another picture in my little experiment in a black and white poetics:
The picture is of a small salt pan near Petrel Cove on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It was made in the summer of 2023. The two earlier pictures in the experiment are here and here
This hand held picture was made of some roadside vegetation whilst I was walking down a country road in Waitpinga on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in the late winter of 2022.
This was a low light situation as we were walking along the road around sunrise to avoid the traffic. The above picture of a tree trunk was made around the same time as the bark abstracts I'd shown on an earlier post on Leica Poetics.
The two bark abstracts below were my initial attempt at abstract poetics with black and white film (IlFord HP5 Plus 400 ASA). I was reading Lyle Rexer's The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography at the time. Most of the recent photographic abstractions are digital and in colour eg., the various artists in the Helsinki School. I had little interest in the cameraless photogram or directly changing the surface of unexposed photographic papers by burning, soaking, inscribing them etc as did Marco Breuer.
Could abstraction work now by returning to back and white film? So after Leica replaced the damaged range finder of the M4 I decided to experiment by using 35mm black and white film. I was more or less picking up from where I'd left off prior to the photographic culture's shift to digital technology in the first decade of 21st century.
I had stopped photographing in 35mm black and white in the 1990s when the range finder of the M4 was damaged and it could not be repaired in Australia. Since my return to photography around 2006 I have only photographed with 35mm in colour using an M4-P rangefinder.
I purchased my silver Leica M4 rangefinder in Melbourne in the late 1970s. It quickly became my walk around camera and I became very comfortable with a rangefinder as opposed to the then popular and more versatile single lens reflex film cameras. Unfortunately, the Leica's rangefinder was damaged when it fell to the ground in Brisbane around 2011. The camera strap broke and the camera hit the concrete floor with a thud. I then lost it for around 10 years or so.
It was found in 2021 and in early 2022 I sent it to Leica in Germany to have the rangefinder repaired and the camera serviced. I then bought a second hand, modern Summicron-M 35mm f/2 lens.
Despite being made in the 1960s this 60 year camera now looks and works as if it were new. I could see why it's classically minimal, industrial design or aesthetic would appeal to collectors; and why it has a much higher monetary value today than a contemporary digital camera. (The Leica's value keeps on increasing).
I started photographing with the unmetered Leica M4 using black and white film in a very modest way this year --the M6 was the first metered M rangefinder (manufactured between 1984 to 2003). I made photos using Ilford HP 5 Plus film whilst I was on the various poodlewalks in the local bushland. This one of bark along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga is one of the early photos that I made:
The picture below is an archival image from the time when I'd just picked up film photography again after a 20 year break. The image was made whilst Suzanne and I were travelling in Tasmania on a holiday with our standards poodles (Agtet and Ari) in the 1st decade of the 21st century---it was in late 2006 judging from these posts on my old Junk for Code blog.
This was our first trip to Tasmania, and we were travelling down on the west coast of Tasmania at the time. There'd been a fire in the hills in the hills around Tullah, Lake Rosebery and the MacIntosh Dam. So I took some photos. I was rusty judging from the fact that most of the black and white negatives from this trip were badly underexposed.
The camera I was using then was my old Leica M4 with an old Summicron 50mm lens and Tri-X film. The picture was made before I'd shifted to using colour film and Mac computers. The film was developed and scanned by a pro lab and it was scanned as a jpeg--a low res scan.
I didn't know what a low res scan meant then. I knew nothing about the shift to digital that had been taking place in photography since the 1990s. I 'd just picked up from where I'd left photography 20 years earlier- I was more or less naively starting over again but without a wet darkroom.