This is the last picture from the recent New Zealand road trip from the work produced with my digital camera that will be uploaded to Flickr. It is the greenery of the Canterbury plains and water of the Rakaia River that immediately jumped out for someone living in Adelaide, South Australia during a long drought.

There are still some pictures of the exploratory road trip that I shot on film (using a Lecia for 35m and a Rolleiflex TLR for 6x6), which I have yet to have processed and scanned by the lab (I do not have a scanner). I have to save the money up now that I've ended the full time Canberra policy wonk contract.

Canterbury plains, originally uploaded by poodly.

I'm back in Adelaide with more time on my hands. I'm currently picking up on the Port Adelaide project from where I left off. I want to link it more within the New Topographics tradition of the 1960--70's; or rather to situate the project as a contemporary reworking of that initial American exhibition.

A contemporary example of the New Topographics photographic tradition can be found in this echo of the original altered landscape style. The The Exposure Project blog says that:

In the 30 plus years since this exhibition took place, the expansion of residential and industrial development has continued to rapidly sprawl to meet the demands of our global community. Many contemporary photographers have picked up where the "New Topographics" artists left off, weighing the effects of consumerism on the environment and the culture

These structures were erected in a utilitarian and institutional fashion, however, they have outlived their commercial use and been abandoned.....These industrial expanses are easily overlooked. Often isolated on the outskirts of cities and towns, these areas are largely uninhabited and unfrequented. The stark absence of people in these photographs emphasize the barrenness and anonymity of these places. Even so, there is a pervading sense of humanity in these images.... Now discarded, the context has changed, and the interactions between people and these spaces has changed with it.

I want to shoot some of the pictures in the Port Adelaide project in a more deliberate fashion using the ground glass style of medium format camera (using my very old and battered Linhof Technika 70.) This is a desire to return to the more deliberate style of photography of large format photography (and to eventually start using the even older 5x4 Linhof).

This is a way of working that is premised on using the digital camera more as a sketch book that gives me a body of images, which I can then select particular images and then work slowly on them using a dark cloth, ground glass and flexibility of a large format camera.