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.
This snap of a found still life was made along the coast between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach in Waitpinga whilst I was on an early morning poodlewalk:
I have been looking at an exhibition of the early 35mm work made by Joel Meyerowitz between 1963 and 1978. The exhibition is entitled "Joel Meyerowitz: Towards Colour 1962-1978", and it is at Beetles and Huxley, a photographic gallery in London. These Leica snapshots are from Meyerowitz's very early days shooting in black and white on the streets of New York to the year he published his first book, "Cape Light", the pictures of which were made with a large format camera.
Meyerowitz worked in advertising for four months of the year to support his family and devoted the rest of his time to photography. A number of the pictures in Mexico and Florida were made with a Guggenheim Scholarship to take pictures on the theme of 'leisure time'.
This picture of roadside vegetation was made whilst I was walking along a back country road in Waitpinga, on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It was in the late summer in 2016 and I was on an early morning poodlewalk with the standard poodles.
I was forcing myself to take photos of trees and the agricultural landscape around me so as to keep my photographic eye hand in. This was the area/locality in which I now live, so how can I photograph it? I recall that I didn't have the confidence to set things up to do tripod based photography.
Though film has quickly gone poof (poor Kodak) as the medium of choice for photographers, I am part of that 'bridge generation' between film and digital. Digital, including rangefinder digital, is simply easier, faster and immediate since the camera is really a portable computer (with a sets of options,) and a sensor and lens. My technique is far slower and more measured with film.
My doubts about 35mm film photography are beginning to ease. I can see that there is still some life in 35mm film photography, in that it has a different quality to the digital version. But it is only for some subject matter, as I'm beginning to discover. Unfortunately, I cannot predict which one.
That filmic quality is hard to pinpoint, but it has something along the lines of providing a more emotional response to what is photographed, as distinct from a technically perfect image that can be quite bland. Digital images are unfilm like and so perfect that camera software manufacturers are now adding adding "grain" enhancement plugins.