Thoughtfactory: large format

a minor blog about the trials, tribulations and explorations of large format, analogue photography in Australia

Kings Head, Waitpinga

The picture below is from the archives. 

I had just taken up large format photography again after a 20 year absence.The absence started after stopping work on  the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia  project to do a PhD and then working in Canberra. I  had started to pick up photography again around 2006 ---though not large format.   

I was just finding my large format feet again with this picture. It would have been around 2009 2010.  From memory it  was an attempt to represent the brightness of an early summer morning along the coast at Kings Head:

It was meant to be the  washed out, very dry,   late summer look. It failed.

I noticed that I'd converted the coloured image  to black and white as an experiment: 

This  picture would have been  made  after I had acquired a new bellows for the Cambo SC-3  (circa 1973) with its square monorail. I had bought it second hand in the 1980s to use for the Bowden project.    

I  decided to renovate my old large format film  cameras because of  the very high prices of medium format digital cameras--eg.,the Leica S2 which I'd  had played around with after it  had been launched  in late 2008.   I reckoned at the time that it was cheaper to continue using film.  $A30,000, the price of the Leica S2,  bought a lot of film and film processing and the large format quality was better than digital.  

I'm glad that I made that decision.