From the archives:
The reserve was originally stripped bare farmland apart from 3 isolated pine trees straddled across a small creek bed. The original farmland has been sold and is covered in houses. The reserve It is now fully treed and the birds have returned.
In the summer of 2023 I spent a week walking in Wilsons Promontory in Victoria with the Retire Active Bush Walking Group ( ARPA). It was their summer camp. The solo walk that I did on the day off from the group walks was to revisit the western foreshore/littoral zone of the Corner Inlet Marine and Coastal Park.
The walk along this coastline was return visit. I'd explored it some 15 or more years earlier, and I was reconnecting with some fragmentary memories from that time. I vaguely remember this was part of a road trip to Mallacoota.
Remember the industrial world of film or analogue photography from yesteryear? It wasn't that long ago. The grey haired ones, if they are still active, were encultured in it. Since it was yesteryear we can look back at it.
In the early and mid-twentieth century -- probably up to the late 1970s or early 1980s in Australia --- we understood photography in a specific way. We carefully shot the scene, ensuring our originality, then culled carefully down the accumulated photos on the contact sheet to the best Images. We were carefully taught to examine a contact sheet and pick out "the good ones" and circle them with a red pen.
What were the good ones? Those that represented the Truth (an objective representation of the way things really are) or expressed significant form. We then carefully printed the good ones on paper in the chemical darkroom making sure that what was eventually produced was the fine print.
The photograph was a carefully made singular object, to be revered and inspected closely. It was fitted into that Enlightenment, linear, mechanized, system of being centred around progress. The idea was that it showed us Truth (though significant Form) about the nature of things. We were informed that we should accordingly inspect the picture carefully (or at least pretend to) and give it the respect it is due with a close reading. Only a few could make being a photographer. The art galleries and university departments adhered to modernist values—the authority of the artist, the expertise of the curator and the discourse of the modern as the new,
That world has long gone. In the 21st century digital photography is our current world. We are in a new era of photography that is shaped by the internet, social media and the smart phone. This is an image world of fleeting, fragmentary impressions, instant likes, pretentious Influencers and persuasive hucksters offering the real deal. Social media, the internet and their computational mode of production transform a marginalized film photography's precarious existence into something other than what it once was -- the internet transforms it into a networked image that is viewed on a screen. The analogue photo is a hybrid as it is shaped by an algorithmic logic, is treated no differently to a digital image, and it is no longer culturally significant how the image was produced.
I have just re-discovered the low-tech Leicaphilia blog of Timothy Vanderweert and his personal writing about film and digital photography. , what Vanderweert I learned that Vanderweert died in July 2023 from cancer, but thankfully, his wife has kept his Wordpress blog online so we can still read it. Leicaphilia's combination of image and text that reminds us yet again of how few are the blogs by photographers that interweave good photographs and insightful writing about photography and are in it for the long haul.
A number of Vanderweert posts on Leicaphilia are concerned with various experiments to compare digital black and white photos to those made with fast and grainy b+w film, such as Kodak Tri-X films and various digital attempts to emulate the Tri-X film look or emulate an HP5 negative. I personally think that is going down a rabbit hole. Why try to make digital look like film for though these are the same (photography) they are also different. The uses of photographs are different, the cultural impacts are different, the way they're made is different. Why not accept the differences between the film and digital technologies and the historical differences between the two eras/centuries and get on with digital photography?
The industrial world that film photography was a part of is long gone. That means turning away from the legacy ecosystem, then accepting and working with what Vanderweert characterises as the transparent, ultra-lucidity of digital files, their noiseless purity, lack of grain and what some see as a certain lack of presence or sterility. We have a new, albeit flawed photography.
No doubt, the technology of a digital B&W photography will improve as the resources of the industry are applied to overcoming that plastic look too often seen with digital B&W files. Eventually, the resources will pay off with an appealing graduated tonality emerging in digital B&W photography.
Reading Vanderweert's blog made me wonder if there were any other similar Leica blogs on the internet, that is ones involving writing about photography. Unfortunately, there are no links on the legacy Leicaphilia blog for me to follow up. It is very much a stand alone blog. The similar blogs, if they existed, probably have come and gone --- 99 per cent of new blogs die within their first year, primarily due to their failure to attract a significant number of readers. Even Still Searching, that was backed by Fotomuseum Winterthur, has packed it in.
A colleague vey kindly donated me some 35mm rolls of expired Fuji Velvia 50 transparency film amongst a bundle of various other kinds of film for me to use. The rationale was that it was better to use them than leave them sitting in the freezer. Fuji had stopped producing Velvia 50 in the 1st decade of the 21st century, so the film is quite old.
I played around or experimented with one roll once I realised that the E6 process was still available in Adelaide.( But for how long I wondered). I noted in the earlier post that my images didn't pop with intense color and vibrance. Many were just flat and dull. However, the occasional one turned out to be quite interesting, such as this one:
The processed film's magenta cast works with these coastal rocks near Petrel Cove, as they occasionally have an orange tint in certain kinds of lighting situations. It did take me a while though to come to terms with the odd /strange/quality, as the "unrealness" wasn't what I'd expected from habitually using a digital camera.
I don't recall the exact occasion when I made this b+w abstraction of the trunk of a humble and ordinary tree in remnant bushland. I remember the location though. I was walking in the local Waitpinga bushland on a poodlewalk with Kayla and it was an intuitive rather than a planned photo.
I also remember that it was made after I'd started reading Matsuo Bashō, the great haiku poet (1644–1694), whose self-image of a recluse/wayfarer and eccentric was the basis for the poetic possibilities in his Oku no hosomichi (The narrow road to the deep north, 1689). I was reading him in preperation for going on a Basho walking tour in 2023.
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
Throughout the winter of 2023 I would often spend an hour or so wandering through the local Waitpinga bushland with Kayla on an early morning poodlewalk. I'd be walking in the bushland just after sunrise, and whilst walking I started a bark series with the Leica M4-P. It would be one camera, one lens, one film and it would centre on the ontology of the object in the present moment. The bark is so mundane, that if we encounter it in everyday life, we would barely register it.
There are some earlier photos that preceded this series as a conscious walking art project, and they can be interpreted as pointing to what was to become. These early photos can be viewed here and here and here. Oh, and here. They emerged from drifting --from becoming lost in the bushland, being responsive to chance and to circumstance, and privileging the reactivity of the walk itself.
It is a low key walking art series, which explores the ephemera of the mundane bark peeling off the trunks and branches of the pink gums; or the piles of bark lying on the ground. The transience of the bark, its decay and disintegration (ie., perishability) is one of the more recognisable aspects of the flux, or the constant change in the bushland apart from the occasional fallen tree. It was slow walking whilst keeping an eye out for foxes, kangaroos, and rabbits so I could prevent Kayla from chasing them.
The series as a walking art project is premised on a meditative walking and seeing (of being in the ephemeral present) and on the photography being simple. It is underpinned by Japanese aesthetics, with its minimalist approach and complex and sophisticated categories with multiple interpretations (eg., wabi-wabi). It is a modest, walking art project that is contrary, or offside to, the currently fashionable photographic approach to make hero mages that celebrates the photographer's vision.
The pictures in this post come from a short experiment using an expired roll of Velvia 50 color transparency film to check if the Leica M4-P rangefinder and lens were working ok. The pictures show that both Leica's repairs to, and renovation of, the salt water damaged M4-P body plus the second hand 50mm Summicron lens that I had purchased whilst in Tokyo, are working perfectly. Great.
I did this quick experiment whilst I was waiting for the 35mm Kodak Portra 400 ASA film order from B+H in New York to arrive. The roll of expired Fujifilm's Velvia 50 had been gifted by a friend. It had been frozen for around 10-15 years.Thanks to this gift the only expense for me to check out the renovated rangefinder would the cost for the lab to process the roll of Velvia 50.
I knew nothing about Velvia before the experiment. Subsequent research informed me that it was created in the early 1990s [when it was known as Velvia (RVP)] and that it was subsequently rejigged/redesigned by Fuji in 2007. It is now known as Velvia 50 (RVP 50). My expired 36 roll of film was Velvia 50 -- the current version. I have never used this transparency film, but a quick search indicated that those who have used it love it for its vividness and brilliance.
I was was curious about Velvia 50 in the sense of wondering what kind of poetic images could result, if any. How different would the seascapes be from the seascapes using Kodak Portra 400 ASA? So I just made some snapshots whilst I was on the daily poodlewalks.
I was taken back when I picked up the processed film from the lab in Adelaide as most of the pictures on the expired 36 roll of Velvia 50 were underexposed. The images looked as if I didn't bother to meter, even though I was careful metering. They also had a strong magenta hue. Post processing the scans was basically a salvaging task to obtain some reasonable pictures. I was able to get the odd one to come out ok.
An example is the above pictures of light and clouds over Encounter Bay in the early morning before sunrise with the off-colour saturation and high contrast.They look suitably dramatic and suggest poetic possibilities associated with the vibrant colours of the early morning pre-sunrise and/or stormy winter conditions.
I have found that an appealing aspect of using the renovated Leica M4-P film camera after a year of being without it is its operational simplicity, especially when compared to the complex menus of the current mirrorless, full frame digital cameras. The film rangefinder's mechanics are so basic that the camera forces you to photograph differently.
The M4-P rangefinder was made before Leica included a light meter in its film rangefinders and the limits of film are quickly reached in low light situations. So it is not an all round camera like the latest full frame mirrorless digital cameras -- such as the sophisticated Sony A7 RV, the Nikon Z8 or the Canon EOS R5.
Within these limits the usability of the rangefinder centres on image making that is slow placed and premised on the characteristics of the film and the limitations of the rangefinder camera.
Due to the cost of 35m colour negative film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA) these days the 'in camera' image making has to be slow and considered by necessity. You are forced to slow down, evaluate what you are seeing, and then think about constructing the image as a poetics.