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
]]>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.
]]>The repaired Leica M4-P has returned, a Summicron 50mm lens was acquired whilst I was walking in Japan, and some very expensive Portra 400 ASA colour film has been ordered from B+H in New York. We are back in business after the camera has been out of use for a year. It's good to be back as I missed using an analogue rangefinder and colour film to explore the nature of photographic poetics.
In that year of layoff I have been thinking that using a machine as a way of situated sense making is different from the act of drawing as a tracing, a copy, a representation in the realm of appearances related to, and dependent on, the presence of real being -- eg., an ideal form as in Platonism. The machine sees differently -- both in excess of what is intended by the photographer and what is hidden from the photographer's eye.
A seascape from 2022:
During that layoff time I have been reflecting how much the culture of photography had been shaped by that of the natural sciences in modernity. The latter's emphasis was on mathematical precision: being objective, clear, precise, exact and truthful in order to gain knowledge about how things in the world worked. Hence photography as documenting the world, its objects and ourselves.
Poetics is contrary to this since a poetic image puts poetry before objective reason and is about the sensuous appearance of things. So the image has been traditionally seen as misleading, fuzzy and ambiguous, which is what was needed to be avoided to achieve the certainty of objective knowledge.
]]>Leica Australia have just informed me that the camera body of the salt water damaged M4-P rangefinder (circa 1980s) has been repaired and that it is on the way from Wetzlar in Germany to Sydney, Australia. Sadly, the Leica 50mm Summicron f.2 lens is unrepairable as was the basic Sekonic light meter (a Sekonic L-308 S) that I'd been using. I need to buy another 50mm Summicron and, unfortunately for me, these lenses aren't cheap, even the second hand ones. So it won't be going with me to Japan in October.
I have missed not using the M4-P (one camera one lens) the last 10 months that it has been in Germany. I found the simplicity of the camera (one body, one prime lens) so appealing. The simplicity of the rangefinder is that it reduces the gap between meditative seeing and the camera's sight. It is a shift towards becoming one with the camera.
I made the above photo in the winter of 2022. It is from one of the 5 rolls of 400 ASA Portra that I'd exposed prior to the M4-P becoming badly damaged. It was the late afternoon winter light that caught my eye as I was walking along one of the various paths in the bushland that were made by the kangaroos with Kayla.
]]>I have 5 rolls of 35mm colour film that were exposed before the Leica M4-P was damaged by saltwater and sent back to the Leica factory in Germany to be repaired. That was in December 2022. It now increasingly looks increasingly likely that the rangefinder won't be repaired before I go walking in Japan in October.
3 of those 5 rolls were processed a while ago and I scanned them over the weekend. It's a slow process and whilst doing so I realised just how much I enjoyed the process of using an analogue Leica rangefinder to make a picture. I miss the analogue process as techne --- the working of materials by a craft person who knows effective ways to use the camera equipment to make good moves in the design space. This conception of the work of art as techne is quite different to the Romantic and modernist idea of creativity as a product of individual will, subjectivity, imagination.
The realization about techne was a kind of awakening or interruption to the flow or naturalised continuum of the myth making and the beautiful semblance of digital photography.
The interruption was not analogue nostalgia in a digital world, or a conservative romanticising of what has gone and been lost. I realized when I was scanning the negatives that I liked the look of film. Digital is a much superior technological but film, with all its limitations, has its own materiality and appearance. It is also much more unpredictable than digital. So technological progress is not linear. There is a discontinuity here. In this discontinuity or interruption the idea of techne emerges.
]]>My salt water damaged Leica M4-P is still at the Leica factory in Germany, either being repaired or still in the queue waiting to be repaired. I have no idea which it is. Leica did advise that it would be repaired and returned to Australia at the end of June. It is now more than eight months. The repair times have blown out, but not to worry. The camera's value is increasing all the time -- it would be in mint condition and so worth around $A4000 dollars. Unfortunately, I need to replace the Summicron 50mm f2 lens as Leica advised me that my 1980s damaged Summicron lens was unrepairable. Sad, as it was a good lens.
In the meantime I am going through the archives. The two pictures below are from 2020 and they are details of the ground in the beech forest along the Kepler Track, near the shores of Lake Manapouri in the Fiordland National Park in the South Island of New Zealand.
There were heaps of people walking the track that day. I was only doing a days walk as Suzanne had decided to go on a day trip to Doubtful Sound / Patea. This beech forest was an all green world, and it was such a contrast to an arid South Australia which has no forests. he photos were made around the same time as this picture.
We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time. The news was all about the emerging Covid-19 pandermic. We had started to worry about whether we would need to cut short our holiday and return to Australia early. We were closely monitoring the news for any policy hints about Australia closing its borders. We did not want to be stranded in NZ if Australia did close its borders.
]]>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 third in the series of the salt-water damaged roll of 35mm film:
I read in The Guardian that Wim Wenders now regards photography as a thing of the past. His argument is this:
“It’s not just the meaning of the image that has changed – the act of looking does not have the same meaning. Now, it’s about showing, sending and maybe remembering. It is no longer essentially about the image. The image for me was always linked to the idea of uniqueness, to a frame and to composition. You produced something that was, in itself, a singular moment. As such, it had a certain sacredness. That whole notion is gone.”
The modernist understanding of photography has gone to be replaced by the network image.
]]>Since film is undergoing a nostalgic resurgence --Pentax says it is planning to make film cameras again-- I thought that I would post a second example from the salt-water damaged roll of 35mm film. This was in the Leica M4-P rangefinder when a rogue wave crashed over me, soaking the camera and destroying the lens. The camera body is currently in the process of being repaired by Leica in Wetzlar who have recently advised that it should be returned to Australia by the end of June.
Here is the photo:
It is actually a more interesting photo of the wooden structure of the old Granite Island causeway than it would have been if the film was normal or non-damaged. What it shows is that it is the materiality of film that opens up opportunities to treat the film differently during the developmental process. You can play around with the filmic material if you want to, but colour film is now expensive.
]]>In this earlier post I mentioned that in December 2022 my Leica M4-P and the Summicron 50mm lens was damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing on the rocks along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.
Leica advised that the lens was unrepairable but that they could repair the camera body. The rangefinder body is now with the Leica workshop in Wetzlar, Germany and I've been advised that there is a 6 months wait for analogue camera repairs. So I will need to acquire another 50mm lens.
The film (Kodak Portra 400 ASA ) that was in the camera at the time of the salt-water accident was developed and I have recently scanned it. This is one frame:
The photo below was made on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in 2022 in the local bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The photo was made around the same time as this black and white one.
Kayla and I did a lot of our early morning walks in this particular bushland, as it was one of her favourite places to walk in. We would come across foxes, rabbits and kangaroos in the winter/spring months and so there were lots of scents for there. She would wait whilst I photographed. On this occasion I was attracted by the subtle colours of the bark and the leaves.
This image is produced by a form of lens-based photography as distinct from the photographic. Then former involves creating images using light, a camera and film. (Digital technology replaces film with a sensor.) We need to make a distinction between photography and the photographic and to see them as two distinct entities, given the emergence of AI-generated images. Our photographic language has become a free floating entity separated from (lens-based ) photography and it now has a life of its own.
That is our starting point in the current situation.
]]>From the 2020 archives and a trip to NZ pre the global Covid-19 pandemic.
I didn't take many photos with the analogue Leica M-4 P rangefinder on this trip as I was in the process of giving 35mm film photography away. Digital photography was far better in low light situations and Kodak colour negative film was becoming rather expensive.
The photo below is of trees on the banks of the Waiau River at Lake Manapouri in the Southland region of the South Island.
We were staying at Lake Manapouri at the time, monitoring the pandemic situation and keeping an eye on whether Australia would close its borders. We wondered if we would be able to finish our trip. The Europeans that we meet still thought that they could keep on travelling between countries. The possibility of Australia and New Zealand closing their borders was considered to be remote.
]]>This picture or representation of quartz was made whilst I was on a coastal poodlewalk in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia with Maleko, our standard poodle, in the late afternoon. It was made around the same time as this image which is on the same 35mm roll of colour negative film.
If it was overcast in the afternoon we would often wander amongst these rocks on the poodlewalks, as the afternoon light is behind us and the soft light brings out the muted and subtle colours of the rocks and quartz.
This representational image of quartz is deemed to be a document created using a transparent medium to produce an image that is readily intelligible. Hence it is a cliche that needed to be subverted by opening up the photographic process to explore the possibilities of the photographic mediation of the world. That rejection of photographic transparency is the perspective of art history's account of the history of photography and it highlights how the logic of 20th century modernism is a culture of negation.
]]>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.
]]>The pictures below and over the page were made in 2021 whilst Maleko and I were on an afternoon poodlewalk in the littoral zone in Waitpinga in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. We often walk along this section of the coast in the late afternoon. Photographically speaking, this littoral zone works best in low or flat sunlight. It is no good in the bright afternoon sunlight of summer.
The pictures were made with my Leica M4-P with a rigid Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens. As mentioned in an earlier post the rangefinder recently became salt damaged from a rogue wave surging over me whilst I was photographing. Leica in Germany have since informed me that the lens is kaput (ie., unrepairable), but that they can repair the camera body. I have given the go ahead to repair the camera and I am hoping that the insurance will cover most of the cost of buying a second hand Summicron 50mm pre-asph lens.
That decision means that I remain committed to what some call vintage photography that many understand in terms of being wrapped up in nostalgia. Though not born into a digital world, but subsequently embracing it, I accept that I am a nostalgic photographer whose optimistic belief in the digital future is becoming outmoded. What then is analogue nostalgia?
]]>This photo of an old log in the bushland in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia was made in 2021 when I was on an early morning walking with Kayla. We spent a lot of time in the bushland, mostly in the early morning, throughout 2021 and the winter of 2022. Sadly we had to put Kayla down this week, as she had cancer of the lymph nodes.
This is a memory of our times together in the local bushland; a memory of nature as transience:
During our times together in the local bushland I recovered a conception of nature as transience--conceptualizing the bushland in terms of change, passing away, perishing-- and not just as shapes and colours as in a modernist aesthetics.
]]>The photo below is of a branch of a tree on the side of a backcountry road in Waitpinga on the Fleurieu Peninsula. I often walk down this road or both the early morning and the afternoon poodlewalks. The road runs alongside some bushland, which is where we wander around after walking along the length of the road. We usually wander through the bushland back to our starting point.
The photo was made in low light on an early morning poodlewalk.
]]>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.
]]>The two pictures below was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in my local coastal area along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. They were both made with a 1970s handheld Leica rangefinder with Kodak Portra 400 ASA film. Its bare bones photography. The film was then processed in a commercial lab and the negatives were scanned to create a digital file (jpeg).
This classical and hybrid approach to the photographic is in marked contrast to the AI and computation that has entered the aesthetic realm in the second decade of the 20th century. Aesthetic machines such as Midjourney's Discord server can generate images that appear to be human made. This AI imaging is a machine-learning system, and it's software enables you to create images that look like photographs, oil paintings, cartoons, etc. You can leave your expensive camera in the cupboard.
]]>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 abstraction of a section of the trunk of an eucalyptus tree in the Veale Gardens section of the Adelaide parklands in South Australia. It was made using an old Leica rangefinder camera from the 1980s ---- a M4-P with a 50mm Summicron prime lens. This very basic and simple film camera (manual focus, no light meter) is the complete opposite to the modern technology of contemporary digital cameras (Sony, Canon, Nikon).
I had some time on my hands that afternoon, so I wandered around looking at the tracks of the various eucalypts. I was looking for the possibilities for abstraction. The colours of this particular trunk caught my eye.
]]>The picture below is a snap of some tree roots in a dry creek bed on the eastern side of the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges in South Australia in 2021. We had traveled on the gravel Arkaroola-Junta Rd along the eastern edge of the ranges, then turned into the North Flinders Rd passed Wertaloona Station, then crossed the Wearing Hills through the Wearing Gorge.
I cannot remember which creek it was. More than likely it was Wearing Creek as we drove through the creek bed whilst the gorge.
We need to speak bluntly today.
The bushfires in Australia are becoming more common and they are now more severe than they were due to climate change.They have become firestorms.
This connection is often denied politically by those on the conservative side of politics who spin, dissemble and gaslight. They say that historically Australia is a land of fire and flood. Nothing new here. It is just the eternal recurrance of the same. This response represents a denial of the danger of fire storm and it is a part of the conservatives doing every thing possible to frustrate climate action.
But the bushfires of yesterday are now the firestorms of today -- eg., the fires along the Great Dividing Range of the Black Summer of 2019-20. These fires were far from normal.
]]>Over time, this minor weblog has evolved from being a Leica snapshot blog into one about visual poetics in photography. Based on using a 1980s film Leica rangefinder camera this approach stands in contrast to the Leica being associated with, and traditionally used for, photojournalism and urban street photography in the 20th century. Recall black-and-white and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander.
My equipment is simple: a hand held Leica M4-P camera, a standard Leica 50mm Summicron lens, a basic handheld lightmeter, and Kodak Portra 400 ASA film with the negatives processed in C41 by a commercial lab and then scanned by me using a little Plustek Opticfilm 8100 scanner. The post processing, which is done in Adobe Lightroom 6, is minimal. It is basic technology with the construction of the image is done in camera.
This image of the Balcanoona shearing shed in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park in South Australia when I was there in the winter of 2021, is an example of my approach.
Though I struggle to make poetic images I often wondered what poetic photography means, or refers to. People usually say that poetics is the opposite of documentary and that it is a form of art photography and so distinct from photojournalism. That doesn't get us very far since it just identifies a genre of photography that is deemed to be experimental and outside the constrictions and the traditional structures of photography.
]]>The photo below was made in the early morning in the Balcanoona Creek bed in the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park in South Australia in the winter of 2021. The Balcanoona pastoral Station was acquired by the park in 1982 and is in Adnyamathanha country.
It was the colours, textures and light that caught my eye.
I was there for 6 days walking throughout the Vulkathunha- Gammon Ranges National Park with friends under the auspices of ARPA bushwalkers. This ARPA event was known as the Balcanoona Camp, and we were based at the old shearers quarters at Balcanoona Station, which is now the HQ of the national park. This was my first time with the ARPA bushwalkers and I was a C grade walker. I wanted to be able to have some time to take photos, and to do so whilst walking through the ranges on the various hiking trails.
]]>This wood abstraction is from 2013.
It is an abstraction of a tree trunk in the Adelaide parklands:
I would have been on a poodlewalk in Veale Gardens at the time. The tree would have been cut down because it had been damaged in a storm.
]]>This picture of bark hanging from a branch of a pink gum was made on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla. The walk was along Baum Rd in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.
The picture was made around the same time, and in the same location, as this picture. Both pictures were made using an old, hand held, film Leica rangefinder camera during the Covid-19 lockdown. The negatives from the anachronistic, unmetered, mechanical simple Leica M4-P were scanned using Plutek Opticfilm 8100 scanner, which is a dedicated 35mm scanner. The scan is a piece of raw material, for later editing in Lightroom.
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