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.

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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.     

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