I have started scoping for a large format photo session with the Cambo 5x7 monorail. This pink gum (Eucalyptus fasciculosa) in the local Waitpinga bushland is one possibility:
small steps
I have finally undertaken some small steps towards making the necessary shift to what the photographic industry calls digital medium format photography.
One reason that started me to make this shift is the trouble I have recently been experiencing using the 5x7 large format with colour negative film: eg., bellows yaw on the Cambo SC-3; the poor quality commercial lab film processing of colour negative sheet film; Newton rings from scanning 5x7 negatives on a flat bed Epson scanner; and then the difficulties with the subsequent colour correction in Lightroom. These ongoing problems over a couple of years led me to more or less give up using both the 5x7 format and the Cambo SC-3 (circa 1960s). Time to cut my loses I thought.
Below is an early image of the wetlands in the Hindmarsh Estuary in Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia using the 5x7 Cambo monorail. It was exposed on colour film (Kodak Portra 160 ASA), but then converted to black and white as an experiment to see if it was possible for me to make a return to b+w. Yep was my response. It looks okay.
Though some of the above issues have been resolved -- eg., those with the pro-lab and then using a hand made 5x7 film holder for scanning -- the encountered difficulties with the work flow convinced me to start making some small steps to shift from using large format colour negative exclusively, and to begin to start using black and white sheet film. I have more control over the work flow process as a result.
.... and another mistake
Yet another mistake!
I loaded the 4x5 b+w sheet film incorrectly -- the wrong way round ie., back to front! This is something that I have never done before. I cannot explain how made this mistake.
I do have an image after processing the film in Rodinal, but the image quality is poor. There is little detail in the blacks. To my suprise there was vignetting in both the upper corners, despite using a recessed lens board and a wide angle bellows.
The particular subject is the railway yard at Quorn in South Australia. It is early cloudless morning during the winter months. The camera a 5x4 Sinar F1 monorail, the lens was a Schneider-Kreuznach 75mm f.5.6 Super Angulon, and the sheet film was Ilford FP4 Plus. Though the camera is a monorail it is light enough for field use, which is how I use it.
a small study
A small study of a melaleuca in the Bluff Reserve using the Super Cambo 8x10. It is from the archives and it has been forgotten and overlooked.
Ignored really, because I was embarrassed by it. It wasn't a hero image. It was plain and ordinary. I recoiled from its implicit dissonance, its lack of meaningful unity or harmonious whole. Its appearance is that nothing is happening in the image and that it could have been taken at any time. It looks like kitsch, low art as opposed to high art.
quartz: an imagined historical site of violence
This picture of the appearance or shining forth (Schein) of the quartz form amongst Cambrian Kanmantoo rocks along coastal Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia is part of a long term, ongoing littoral zone series in my local area. This particular location is near a natural spring of fresh water that flows through the coastal rocks into the Southern Ocean.
Unfortunately, the picture is yet another example of me, as the large format photographer, making mistakes on location. The scanned digital file is over-exposed and the bottom half of the picture is out of focus. I cannot recall why or how I slipped up, as the file is from the archives, and I have no explicit memory of this photo session.
I've reworked the file into something that is ok as a place-filler for the absence of any memorials of the violent, early 19th century encounters along the coastal region of Encounter Bay; ie., one between the white sealers from Kangaroo Island and the first nations Ramindjeri people.
Port River Estuary: history
The two pictures in the post are from the archives.
They were made when I was photographing around the Port Adelaide /Osborne area on the Lefevre Peninsula (north west of Adelaide's CBD) in the 1980s. The photography would be interpreted as a mirror with a memory as the photos represent a part of the history of industrial Adelaide that is being marked by absence.
This picture is of the Port River estuary and it is looking across the river to the suburb of Taperoo and the Penrice Soda ash plant, Osborne. The gas-fired Torrens Island Power Station is just outside the right side of the frame.
The Penrice Soda Holdings Ltd company, which was established in the 1930s, went into receivership round 201 and its Osborne soda ash plant has been decommissioned and dismantled. The remediation of the site is ongoing. Most of the area along both sides of the Port River have been closed off to the public -- ie., the land has been privatised. I would not be able to make the above photo today.
Waitpinga Hill
This is a local southern Fleurieu Peninsula view that I see on those days when I drive up Willunga Hill from Encounter Bay on my way to walk in the local Waitpinga bushland with one of the standard poodles. We are looking across the grazing land of a local farm to rain falling on the southern ocean.
I had scoped the view a number of times with both a digital camera and a 35m film camera --- an expired Velvia 50 version can be seen on this post . I chose an overcast wintry day for the large format photo session using the 5x7 Cambo S3 monorail as I wanted some atmospherics.
I have struggled with a poorly developed/underdeveloped colour negative from the professional lab. The colour was all washed out. The initial scan looked awful -- the post processing has a substantial amount increased saturation and contrast whereas I normally do the opposite.
Mt Arapiles + Mitre Rock
I came across the image below whilst going through the archives looking for photos that I'd made in April 2022 when we stayed overnight in accommodation behind the coffee shop at Natimuk. We were on our way back to Encounter Bay in South Australia from walking in Wilson's Promontory in Victoria.
I'd forgotten about the image below which I'd made on my first visit to this part of western Victoria. It is of Castle Craig at Mt Arapiles (known traditionally as Dyurrite by the Djurid Balud clan of the Wotjobaluk people) and it was made pre-Covid with the 5x4 Linhof Technika IV Some other colour images from Mt Arapiles are here.
Mt Arapiles, which is in the Mt Arapiles-Tooan State Park near Natimuk, is a large rock outcrop overlooking the Wimmera plains and surrounded by the agricultural country. It is a well known international climbing spot.
Waitpinga bushland + the Anthropocene condition
Living on the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia has meant that I've become familiar with both the local, banal or unscenic bushland that is considered unworthy of aesthetic attention, and making large format landscapes of this region. Since the past three decades have witnessed a growing awareness of climate change and its impacts on people and the natural environment, photographing nature needs to take this impact into account. How to do that with a camera and a lens is something that I struggle with without resolving.
The two pictorial realist photos in this post are ones that look at the non-human world in the context of what is happening to nature in the context of the background climate heating. A first attempt, as it were, to link landscape photography and climate heating, to push the traditional centre of the human experience and the human aesthetic preferences aside and to initiate a photography of mourning within the tradition of landscape photography.
This has made me aware of my unease with the views of those who hold that we live in a post-natural world. A post-natural world means that nature is no longer independent of human activity. The world we inhabit is the one we humans have made.The cultural concept for this new planetary epoch is the Anthropocene condition in which the geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. This cultural concept is used by many to describe an era of accelerating human impacts such as climate change and biodiversity loss.
However, if climate change is the emblematic crisis of the neo-liberal Anthropocene, turning the world’s climate into a joint human-natural creation, then nature is still ontological independent of humans --- it existed before us and will likely go on existing after us. Though the world we inhabit will be one that we have helped to make, and in ever-intensifying ways, there is no need reject terms such as the natural world. By “the natural world,” we mean the material structures and processes of the non-human world. So we should say nature is no longer unaffected by human activity. Humans are dependent on nature but nature is not dependent on humans. Nature will continue to exit without us and will produce new species and forms of life without human intervention. .
the photographic image
A historical post with two large format photos of wetlands in South Australia from the archives.
Traditionally art photography has been foundationally tied to the fine print as this provided the aesthetic criteria that enabled photography for find a place in an art gallery/museum. Tying photography foundationally to the fine print was especially important for the large format photographers in Australia from the 1970s onward, especially so for the photography circles around The Photography Gallery at 344 Punt Road in South Yarra, Melbourne.
This foundation was historically significant as it ensured that photography became part of art's traditional value system that was centred around authenticity and originality. Photography's entry was an event of the new that then required a readjustment and re-evaluation of the boundaries of art's traditional value system.
If history is all there is then we belong to this tradition, which holds that art is something that challenges and breaks with our usual comportment towards things. We cannot disregard this tradition, simply leave it behind, overturn it, or dismiss it as an error. We can, however, reinterpret this tradition as distorted, or as having its legitimacy reduced, in the sense that the photographic print was but one of photography's reproductive forms.
(Wetlands, Hindmarsh River, Victor Harbor. Cambo 5x7 monorail, Schneider-Kreuznach 210mm, Kodak Portra 160)
Photography's multiple reproductive forms historically included slide and video projection and, currently there are different technological forms of monitor display. Today, with the emergence of the networked digital image, the print is but one of photography reproductive forms. So the photographic tradition's foundational emphasis on the print is a distorted one. Perhaps photography no longer needs foundations to justify its status as art?
Multiple reproductive forms of photography in our contemporary digital culture suggests that, if that the photographic image need no longer be foundationally tied to the reproductive form of the print, then we need shift to thinking about the photographic image as image instead of the photographic image as print.
This is an important shift given the massive circulation of images associated with the emergence of the digital image associated with the host media technologies such as computers, internet, video games mobile devices. Our world is saturated with moving or circulating images of all kinds including prints. We are moving towards a world where everyday life and digital technology seamlessly blur. It appears that with immersive video the internet is moving off our screens and into the world around us as spatial computing given that Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets brings VR content into our real-world surrounding so we see what’s around us while using the device.