The  pictures below of melaleucas at Rosetta Head (Kongkengguwar) in Victor Harbor  were my  early attempts to start photographing my local neighbourhood in the Fleurieu Peninsula using the 8x10 Cambo  monorail.  This  vintage  camera -- it's an all metal Super Cambo  IV  from the early 1960s --- was purchased in the 1980s when I was living in Bowden, Adelaide.   I came across it  lying unwanted in a cardboard box in the corner of a camera shop in Semaphore, Adelaide.  At the time this suburban camera shop had the Sinar franchise.   

I only used the  Cambo  a couple of times in Bowden  because   there were  holes in the bellows and the shutter was corroded. It  sat in the cupboard unused. Around 2010  I renovated  it: a new bellows,  the 240mm Symmar lens  was  repaired and cleaned,  the old "electronic" shutter  was replaced with  a second hand  Pronto  professional shutter  and a wooden case was built to store the camera when it was not in use.  I was ready to go.  I was  eager to reconnect with the large format  photography in the Bowden Archives project of  the 1980s/1990s, and  to break new ground.

At this stage (circa 2014-5)   I had no darkroom and  no way of processing the negatives at home,  even though  I did  have  an Epson flat bed scanner to make digital files.  I had given away the idea of a darkroom  in favour of converting the negatives into digital files, processing the files in Lightroom,   and posting the image on the internet.  The idea was that selected images could  be digitally  printed for  exhibitions using a master printer. 

Old and new technology.  The best of both worlds.   I was excited by the possibilities being opened by this hybrid  approach to print making in the 21st century.  

This approach  was so  much cheaper than medium format digital, which at the time was the price of a new car. I had come across male photographers using a medium format digital camera to photograph along the coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. When I asked them about their snazzy camera they proudly remarked  about the quality  and dynamic range of medium format digital, and confidently stated that this was where still photography was heading along with fully colour managed workflows with custom profiled papers and screens.   I felt humbled. As  I didn't have that kind of finance I could not be part of photography's innovative  technological future.  I belonged to the amateurish past, the  bankrupt world of Kodak. Poor me.  

These  photos  of melaleucas  were  spur of the moment,  rather than a studied approach.  I didn't really have much idea of what I was doing in terms of what latter became the Fleurieuscapes  project.  I just wanted to get into action. Get started.  Point and shoot. Take a snapshot. I had no idea of poetics. 

The above  old fashioned images were never used.  I didn't think much of them at the time. I was keenly disappointed in fact.  All that historical effort to produce results that had turned out to be so mundane, ordinary  and boring.  They are are not saying anything and there are no compelling elements.  

Point and shoot was obviously not the right approach. I also needed to relearn how to see in black and white and not in  colour.   It had just rained and the bark lying on the ground was a vibrant red. Those  melaleucas  had looked so good when taken with  my small (APS-C) digital camera. Maybe photography's  future is snazzy high end digital.