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.
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:
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.
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.
This picture was made early in the morning whilst walking along Baum Rd in Waitpinga on a poodlewalk with Kayla.
It is a freeze-frame of a transient moment in early spring that was with a handheld Leica M4-P rangefinder and Kodak Portra 400 ASA film. The picture is an exploration of visual poetics.
This picture was made whilst I was wandering around an old Council rubbish dump in the late afternoon:
I was on a poodlewalk in Waitpinga, which is in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The dump is empty now.--its an edgeland.
A picture of tree rings in an old rubbish dump from late 2018 that I have just got around to scanning.
This abstract was made in the late afternoon in Waitpinga whilst I was on a poodlewalk with Maleko.
There is a view that film photography after digitalisation provides a way to create poetry because the convenience of digitalization also tidies things up, correcting mistakes and eliminating chance. If this analogue media of contemporary art involves a backward glance to what has been, as we become ever more immersed in digital media, it also keeps photography open to chance.
You don't know what you are going to get with film, even when the photo has been carefully scoped and theme of the shoot carefully selected.
Made on a poodlewalk along the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga, South Australia, in 2016
I went back in the autumn of 2017 to rephotograph with bigger cameras, but the bark had fallen to the ground from the winter storms.