The time draws nigh for the federal Labor Government. It will be trounced in the September election and the Coalition will have won a substantial majority. That is what the opinion polls say and they have been saying it consistently.

Pope gives part of the answer for why this is the case---Labor 's disunity ever since Rudd was disposed by Gillard. This has also been a significant driver. Is it the equivalent of the plague in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal.

Fuzion Magazine No 3 is devoted to wetplate collodion photography. One of the photographers featured is Denis Roussel, who was born in France and now lives in Denver, USA.

His "A collection of somewhat random specimens” is a series specimens of Nature that are mostly ignored or overlooked, due to our focus on the wilderness landscapes.

Roussel says that he was drawn to wet-plate collodion because this method creates marks and artifacts that become an integral part of the photograph. The aesthetic of the collodion process transforms the series from an objective and straightforward documentation of Nature into a lyrical depiction of its beauty.

Mary McIntyre says that her photographs often present spaces and places that have been forgotten and overlooked. The atmosphere of each location resonates from the image. With this in mind she depicts the transformation that occurs to these locations at specific times of day, when for a fleeting moment, the play of light can transform the mundane environment.

When photographed at night and artificially lit, these spaces begin to take on a cinematic quality, imbuing them with a heightened psychological charge.

MacIntyre says that the Picturesque and Romantic movements in European landscape painting play an important role in her work. She is interested in making links between painting and photography, adopting the formal qualities of painting long associated with artists such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Jacob Van Ruisdael, to re-interpret them within a contemporary context.

I've started digging around the work of early 20th century photographers to see what they photographed along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. One photographer I've started looking at is Ernest Gall, due to stumbling upon his picture of the coastline west of Rosetta Head a month or so ago.

I know very little about Gall, other than he primarily photographed around the city of Adelaide but he did make some photographs in and around Victor Harbor around 1906.

As noted at conversations Nicholas Nixon's early black-and-white photos of Boston cityscapes were included in the 1975 "New Topographics" exhibit at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He photographed the city again from 2001 to '04, drawn in part by all the Big Dig construction.

As in the '70s photos, he initially used an 8x10 view camera and prints without enlargement from the negative for rich detail. This time the buildings feel close up and tightly packed together in a way that suggests the snug density of the city. Nixon then switched to an 11x14 camera (again printing without enlargement) and a lower vantage point. Instead of looking out or down from 30 stories up, he's now eight or nine stories up and looking across and straight through.

Alex Boyd is a Scottish photographer based in the West Coast of Scotland. Though he is best known for his conceptual and figurative landscape photography, most notably his series "Sonnets", I find his experimenting with the wet plate collodion process with respect to landscapes very interesting.

I have in mind the body of work known as The Point of the Deliverance, which is the name (translation of a Gaelic name Pointe a' Tárrthaidh) given to a prominent rock which sits in the natural harbour of Portacloy, in the remote North West of Ireland. This is one of the last true wilderness areas in Western Europe.

It’s part of a much larger project to document the edges of the Gaelic speaking world.

Vanessa Winship is a British photojournalist who lived for 10 years in the Balkans and Turkey when she won the prestigious 2011 Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award. This funded the long journey around the United States in 2011 to rummage in the rubble of the American dream.

This resulted in a black and white book of photographs of stark landscapes of America’s heartlands—and the isolated figures that reside within them. These were made with a large format camera, and are touched with melancholy:

The work in her book, She Dances on Jackson, consists of portraits of predominantly young people interspersed with the bleak landscapes

I've just signed up to an account at Ipernity because of the Yahoo recent changes to a functional but unhip Flickr, which are designed to reinvent Flickr as a new “hip” photo site.

I understand that the reason behind the changes is to make money from advertising to keep Flickr going. Flickr is just a business — and not a profitable one at that. The site has remained stagnant, unchanged with the exception of thousands of new members and a few social features. The site looked dated. Change was needed. However, I thought that the new layout design, though glossy, was poor in terms of functionality. The redesign looked rushed and it looks more of a mass photo storage site.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Lake Pedder, Tasmania, 2011

The retooled Flickr, user interface, which looks more like Instagram, and its new pricing is designed to push out the old Pro community users who had focused on quality and community. It represents a change from the old Flickr as a subscriber-based photography site to a new Flickr as an ad platform for everyone who snaps pictures with its Tumblr-style stream of large-format photos.

The key feature of Flickr has always been the community aspects, and the redesign diminishes or hides those in many ways. What I really liked about the old Flickr is seeing the work being done by my various contacts and then learning from the stream of work. This community of Pro users were interested in photography, art, composition and all the things that made taking photos good. This unhip Flickr gave you information on the camera used, aperture, shutter settings and allowed you to interact with the photographer to learn more.

Amy Pfitzner, an Adelaide based photographer, explores the disconnect in and around identity and culture in her series Identifying Culture at Tandanya--National Aboriginal Cultural Institute.

Identifying Culture brings together three discrete series of artworks ----Family Culture, Wood-Air-Bathing and Indigenous Ties--- that question a person’s identity and cultural history; in this case an identity that is slightly obscured, or hidden behind a new urban or ‘white indigenous’ perspective of place and culture.