Snapshots

Updated July 2010

All photographs on this site are copyright © John Austin or Rae Starr 2010 and may not be used in anyway without the prior written permission of John Austin or Rae Starr

Originally this page was about about my 0.1Mpx digital camera purchased at the Quinninup Villiage Fete in south west Western Australia for A$2.00. A camera which proves all the bad things I have said about digital image quality. Subsequently I have changed it to Snapshots page with the old News Page added

21st July 2010
New Work, Naked Portraits, women needed

I need women to work with for an exhibition of naked portraits planned for Fremantle in March 2012. The main locations for the photography are in the Southern Forest Region of Western Australia and two studios in Fremantle

The images will be of beautiful, strong naked women with the emphasis on the subjects personal qualities, hence Naked Nortraits

The work will all be black and white fine print from large format, 10x8", negatives, so women must be able to work in a quiet and considered way and women from a performing arts background are preferred

This exhibition will be open to the public during an arts/photographic festival so the prints shown will be considerate of that fact

I am not looking for glamour, pin-up, excessive make-up, expensive hair styles. Natural pubic hair preferred to Brazilian

If you feel strong in the power of your natural beauty this is the place for you

16th July 2010
ABC Collectors Programme

Tonight on ABC TV1 Collectors programme is an item on someone called Peter Michael, who is a camera collector, I quote

"Peter Michael?s camera museum in Melbourne is world famous, not just because its 8500 objects include 3000 cameras of all ages, but because the oldest date back to the 1880s, which is very early in the history of photography. They range in size from sub-miniature to 12?x15?, and include one of the best collections of Leicas anywhere. It?s a popular reference collection, accessed by people the world over, because it covers the entire history of photography and photo equipment"

What Michael and all other camera collectors should realise is that their foolish hobby is making life difficult for real photographers who need equipment like Leicas and large format lenses to make real photographs. Equipment of this age is now difficult to service and find spare parts for. It is the photographs made with real cameras that collectors should be collecting

14th July 2010
Rally for Concerned Photographers

This is a bit late, the rally was today the 14th, but is mentioned here as it is also a concern here in Western Australia. This article is an extract from http://www.artsfreedomaustralia.com/blog/

14 April 2010 PHOTOGRAPHERS TO PROTEST ATTACKS ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Australian photographers are losing their rights to freedom of expression. And it doesn?t matter whether they are full-time professional, part-time or strictly amateur, as every person who has a camera can be threatened with unjust laws and regulations

"We must be the only country in the world where you could get a criminal record for taking a picture of a rock," said Ken Duncan, the Chairman of Arts Freedom Australia

"And because of this shameful situation, I am asking photographers and other concerned citizens to protest against the undemocratic regulations which now restrict film-making and photography in many of our public places," Mr Duncan added

To this end, Arts Freedom Australia (AFA) will hold a rally near Campbells Cove on Sydney Harbour on Sunday, August 29th between 10am and 12 noon to reinforce its message. ?We need to make the Australian public aware of this threat to our freedoms,? Mr Duncan said

6th July 2010
Profound Changes

First plays with the 10x8" Sinar Norma show it may well have a more profound affect on my photography than anything before it. So far I have only tried it with a 165mm Angulon and a 480mm Goerz "red dot" Artar. The main difference between the 10x8" and all my previous cameras is its theatricallity and this is already affecting the ideas developing in my sketchbooks. These sketchbooks themselves are already showing post 10x8" developments

29th June 2010
10x8" Sinar Norma

I have finally started using the standard professional format, 10x8". The camera is a Sinar Norma and the lens set is being assembled. Ideally a Cooke XVb as the standard, but I will have to make do with whatever I am loaned, a 165mm Angulon to start with, and a 300 or 360mm Congo on its way. The camera comes with a 400mm Schneider Claron, but the seller could not find it when I picked up the camera. I will collect that on my next trip to Perth

Looking through this camera and making my first test negatives I feel an excitement I have not felt for new equipment in years. Coupled with this are the sketches in my workbook, more theatrical than before, which will suit the theatricallity of the camera

I have already been treated to jokes about this camera, like it being the ultimate camera to pose beside. Anther suggestion is that I make a brass tube with a flat glass at the front and hold a compact digital camera inside to make the real pix

17th May 2010
Website coding updates "Nothing will go worng!"

I have just finished reloading the renamed pix, so a few images may be missing for a day or so, there was a lot of writing in HTML

Next work is to clean the white borders from the doco images and reload them after cleaning and checking them

There are bound to be some things which do not work immediately as I am a photographer, not a professional web designer and it is long past my bed time and I am about to get myself a glass of Cognac

26th April 2010
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day results

My dawn pic of our woodpile with ax	Rae's pic of the Quinninup Kids Club humpy

In my rush to use the time advantage of Australia I was too hasty to use very first light and a quick fix tin can camera, so I am not pleased with the image I posted. Next year's camera is ready with next year's pinhole already cut. Now plan the loan of a neg scanner

I find pinhole photographs generally unrewarding. To me pinhole images are flat, I as the viewer am only allowed to view the first layer, beyond that pictures disapear into obfuscation. However, I am glad we took part in WPPD and I have decided to continue with my policy of one pinhole picture per year rather than abandon it altogether

Despite my personal reservations about the medium I very strongly support World Pinhole Photography Day, held on the last Sunday in April each year. It is fun and it is a way of drawing communities to play together for very little cash outlay

Next year we plan a WPPD workshop here in Quinninup, or at the Cannery Arts Centre in Esperance, both in Western Australia. Rae and I eagerly await the results of Pin Knowle West Pinhole Day, Bristol, UK, organised by Justin Quinell

The WPPD 2010 Exhibition is online at

24th April 2010
Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

WPPD is on again tomorrow, so just time to clean an old tin can, spray the inside black, drill a hole in the side of it, stab a bit of old yoghurt lid with a pin etc etc

This being done and your Sunday pinhole picture made go to http://www.pinholeday.org/ and submit your pinhole image. Those wonderful and enlightened beings living on the western side of the Pacific Ocean are raced with a well deserved time advantage

A note of caution on using old tins recently painted with black paint. We did this and when we tried to get the lid off to process the test strip the lid was stuck fast and we had to destroy the tin to get the test strip out. Tin number two is smaller and will use black plastic for the lid. A picture of the destroyed camera will be featured after we have returned from the Quinninup Tavern, that is if I am able to

When this year's WPPD is over I shall be back to using my beloved Sinar and Linhof with Cooke and original Voigtlander lenses. Some people work with pinhole cameras more than one day per year, they are odd, very odd

10th January 2010
Website Reworking Plans

From early April this website will be much altered. This alteration will be the removal of menu links to the environmental pages, the SFA page and a few other pages

Coming in will be a greater emphasis on my personal work

Now that it is too late to save the environment, or even worry about it, I am concentrating on what beauty there is left in the world, rather than attempt to use this site as a vehicle for environmental information. My environmental documentary pages of images will only be available by direct request for their URLs

7th January 2010
The Great Negative Disposal Continues

Neg' refiling continues, I have bought a back-of-ute tool box to hold my negatives and log books, as it will fit in the back of our Volvo wagon if a forest fire is coming in our direction

The problem is that when full of negs it is too heavy to drag from the house to the back of the car. To solve this problem I am doing the big cull. Everything that was colour went first. Now negs that are too pale or have any other fault that will make them difficult to print. Next will be a resorting of portraits, lesser arts practitioners like textile and theatre design workers have gone aqlready. Anything of mine I consider too boring to print is going next, OK, I admit it, this is the big weight loss item

There is, of course, a subtext to this cull. Now I am officially retired it is time to consider what will happen to my archive of work. I consider it to be of historical and to some extent artistic value. To dump the entirity of it on an archivist is unfair, so I am doing a sorting at this stage to make the job easier and to make a greater concentration of possibly valuable work

5th January 2010
Text In Websites

This is normally the time of year I do serious work on my website, although this time I am putting the end wall back on my darkroom shed after it fell off after I killed the termites and was cleaning the remaining wood. Anyway, back to the subject. I have been considering an artist statement to boost my "profile" and found this little gem to put me off the idea for a while. I quote the second paragraph

"I use my photographs as a basis for exploring the organizational methods, systems and practices we use to comprehend our environment and to make connections between the slice of the world that is human-scale and that which is not. I am interested in the complexity of spaces - both mental and physical - where disciplines, ideas, perceptions, instincts and attractions intersect; and then, how this complexity is ultimately communicated, or not, with others"

The photographs shown on the site are good, so why excess of words to say something very simple. This is almost as bad as the drivel we have come to expect from FotoFreo in Western Australia

30th December 2009
Disposable Memory Project

Disposable Memory Project is in the fun category, to balance the heavy metal lenses referred to earlier today and the silver jelly paper mentioned on Christmas Day

The Disposable Memory Project involves disposable cameras being passed on or left around to be picked up, used and passed on again. When the cameras return to DMP the images are uploaded to the web. For details visit http://disposablememoryproject.org

My contribution is an Olympus Trip 35, a simple 35mm camera that should sit within the spirit of the project

31 December 2009
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Negative Refiling

I am going through my negative log and discarding everything that was boring and commercial boring. I am slightly erring on the safe side, keeping all my architectural photography of the reconstruction of Georgian Bath, arts festivals like ARX and Festival Fringe, artists portraits etc. However, the workroom floor is already knee deep in negs. Even supposed important stuff like portraits of composer Tristram Carey, of Dr Who music fame, are discarded as they were on chromogenic BW film. A later set have been kept as they were on real silver BW film. No BW commercial from the last 10 years is being disposed of at this stage. All colour negative work has been discarded already

So, anyone who might have BW negatives over 10 years old they want kept or delivered to them are asked to contact me as soon as possible for free delivery

30th December 2009
Sanity Is Returning

The three lenses pictured here are the Cooke XVa and the Schneider 550 and 1100 XXL lenses. The Cooke XVa is the finest lens ever made for 10x8" negatives. In its previous incarnation as the Cooke XV it was Ansel Adams' favourite. It is now reformulated, made with the latest lensmaking techniques and being re-reintroduced by Cooke Optics, Leicester UK, the finest lens manufacturer ever. As Cooke Optics almost only make the lenses for professional cinematography they are rarely heard of. The other two lenses shown are XXL from Schneider, a good lens maker, and cover negatives up to 20x24", that is 50x60cm I think, anyway, 0.9 mtr diameter image circle

This, coupled with the rebirth of Agfa paper by Adox, is a sure sign sanity is returning to photography

I have just been reading a few things sent to my by Pat, who mainly uses 10x8". There is John in Melbourne using a 20x24" camera, so my 5x4" Sinar and Linhof now seem small fry by comparison. However, my partner has noted that I can't afford assistants to carry bigger stuff around and at 5'2" and skinny she is not even going to be carrying my Linhof kit

Boxing Day 2009
Rebirth and Resurgence

With the news that came to me from Andreas in Switzerland regarding Adox/Agfa MCC paper comes an indication of what I have known since the dominance of digiography, that black and white photography with real cameras using real film and real silver jelly paper would increase again. Silver gelatine is the superior medium for producing photographic prints

If there is any regret it is that I gave my Epson R1800 K3 printer to John Patterson instead of smashing it to bits with a block splitter, which is what is really deserved. That would have been good healty fun. Now I have the guilt that I am encouraging John in his digiografic folly

For information on materials the following links are duplicated here
ILFORD PHOTO
ADOX
MOERSCH-PHOTOCHEMIE

31st May 2009
Quotes

Yesterday saw the part re-enacted documentary "Eloquent Nude" about Charis Wilson and Edward Weston. In this film came a quote from Ansel Adams on camping necessities "All you need is salt, bacon, flour, whisky and jelly beans" - Why the salt, bacon and flour?

A Paul Caponigro quote when he was talking about Minor White. "As one of my contemporaries who went through the whole Zen thing with Minor said: 'I tried everything. From dancing, to psychotherapy, to hypnosis, to touch sensation. Scotch worked best'." From Kurt Markus interview with Paul Caponigro, Creative Camera, London, November 1978 p387

So they drank whiskey, but think what far greater brilliance they would have attained had they elevated their tastes to a fine Cognac

More information on Eloquent Nude

15th February 2009
The Madness Continues

With global warming running away and changing our land to a more fireprone environment the stupidity of ancient forest logging continues

Two Log Trucks with old growth forest
Pemberton, 30th January 2009 © John Austin 2009

Log Truck with old growth forest
Pemberton, 13th February 2009 © John Austin 2009

8th January 2009
New work 2009 onwards

There is a page, under Nudes, Portraits and Other pictures 2009 +, set up for nude in landscape black and white photographs from 2009 onwards

For this work I am looking for a woman or women to collaboate with me for these images. Preferably from a dance or visual arts background, in 20s to 30s and able to work in the Western Australian Southern Forests. Please contact me on mail2@jbaphoto.com.au for further details

8th June 2008
LOGGING TO EXTINCTION

Logging to extinction of the south west karri forests of Western Australia continues. These two photographs were taken 3 minutes and 10 seconds apart, according to the camera's EXIF data

Both were taken in the main street of Pemberton, a dreary little south west Western Australian town dominated by a timber mill

Pemberton, like the nearby towns of Manjimup and Northcliffe, does not have duelling banjos, but they could

PS In response to a question from England regarding this item
Clearfelling is continuing in Western Australian forests, despite the promises made prior to the 2001 Western Australian election. The WA Labor Government's claim that logging has ceased in old growth forest is based on the WA Department of Environment and Conservation DEC reclassification of the remaining ancient forest, or anything else that contained big trees, as "two tier", making it available to the WA Forest Products Commission FPC for clearfelling

The new national parks largely consist of "non-production", poor quality, forest and clearfell areas. The non-production forest often contains greater biodiversity than tall canopy forest, but tall canopy forest is needed for a balanced conservation system. Re-generated forest is an even aged monoculture plantation. Regen has the visual excitement of Regency wallpaper

John Austin
mail2@jbaphoto.com.au