Well the winter we had to have has arrived with rainfall and low temperatures. That’ll be a great relief to the local farmers, although I don’t think they’ll be dancing in the street. This has meant that I’ve not been out and about much so I’ve been working on my passion project – doing a book that documents all of the terrestrial orchids that can be found in the York area. This has been a long undertaking, nearly twenty years. Why so long? Well a lot don’t flower every year as the require a bushfire the previous summer to stimulate them. The list of orchids has grown quite considerably longer from when I started. I naively thought it would be about twenty as initially I kept seeing the same few species over and over again. Now it sits at 80 and I’m pretty sure I still find more if I devote another 20 years to the project, but I’ve decided to draw a line and crack on with selecting the photos and writing the accompanying text.

The last couple of weeks has seen me proof printing and this has been quite informative. Firstly I use a colour profiled system. I shoot in the Adobe RGB colour space and the screen is profiled as is the printer. So in theory what I see in the camera should be what appears coming out of the printer. Except it hasn’t. There’s no weird colour casts or shifts the problem is the exposure. Because I’ve not printed anything since my last exhibition my pictures have become progressively darker as I’m just producing photos to be viewed on a back illuminated screen rather than an opaque surface. Consequently most of photos are underexposed and don’t print well. So what I’ve been doing is shooting a 10x15cm test print for every proof print. I’ve worked out that I’ve under exposed by 1 stop, but it isn’t as simple as increasing the exposure by that amount as that affects colour saturation and contrast. So it’s been a slow process of individually adjusting each photo. I will have made the shareholders of the ink and paper companies very happy. I’m nearly finished – at the time of writing I’ve got just ten more to do. During this I realised how much I’ve missed printing. A good print is a beautiful thing and I really should get on and make more. I’m also getting the itch to have a darkroom again and make black and white prints.  But, first things first lets finish this project.

By now you will have noticed that the photos accompanying this entry bear no relation to it. I thought pictures of prints emerging from a printer would be boring as would shots of the ink cartridge mountain. So I did have to go into Perth for a meeting and when that had finished I decided to have a walk around the back streets of Northbridge. I must say Perth is in danger of becoming interesting – I know that the citizens of Melbourne and Sydney will be derisively laughing at this – but Perth is looking a lot more colourful and brighter than it did when I first arrived here. It’s good and I hope it continues.

I’ve included the photo of the poster adverting Ecoland Kangaroo Essence as the thought of it just cracks me up.  I looked up what the manufacturers say about their product and it made me laugh all the more.

I’ve visions of lots of elderly oriental men bouncing around chasing their wives.