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.  

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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:

I was trying to see the world around me in black and white after years of photographing in colour.  A colour version is here.

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.  

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