Covid has thrown many massive spanners into the works of all our lives this year. For many of us, photography has proved to be a useful lifeline to help maintain our equilibrium or even sanity in such trying times. For a few, it has been a year to do much less photography and in two cases I know personally, to give it up entirely. Not by me, fortunately, altho like many, I found myself shifting gears and delving into new or long-neglected aspects of my cameras, image archives and darkroom.
At the start of 2020 I was madly rushing about in southeast Asia, shooting old architecture, a pastime I've indulged since the 1970s and since my retirement in 2012, pursued with what has at times turned almost into a frenzy, with more time spent away shooting in Asian countries than at home in Australia.
In early March I realized I had only about a week's time to finish up what I was doing in Malaysia and Indonesia and return home to Australia before our country went into lockdown. After a brief stop in Bali to secure our rented house and organize care for our rescue cats, I flew back to Melbourne and while quarantining for two weeks, made several decisions about my image files, my photo gear, and my photography pursuits in general.
Organizing the Asian architecture collection took six months. During this time I found many long-forgotten or lost images and there were times when the scanning seemed endless, enough for nine lifetimes. Careful sorting, entering data I had kept for the most part in random brain cells, culling and in a few cases destroying, has brought a strange order into my files. I can now find almost everything I've shot since 1980 on my computer spreadsheets. Films from the '70s and '60s are yet to be looked into as by October I was heartily sick of checking negative and slide folders, but will be done when I can face up to this task in early 2021.
About 30 unprocessed films mysteriously turned up during my cull, I've processed the black-and-white that for the most part revealed mostly blah! images, which may be why they were forgotten. Also some slide films I intended to do at home via an E6 kit, but have since decided to get them lab processed for convenience.
Next came gear disposal. A stash of old Nikons and Nikkormats were sold off, also several other old SLRs and some small point-and-shoot cameras from the '60s and '70s, purchased on Ebay and never used. Ditto darkroom gear I had accumulated and forgotten about. Film stocks were evaluated, some disposed of, some sold at discounted prices. One enlarger gone, one now left. Still eight or nine cameras to go, quality gear - Rolleis, Contax G kits, Zeiss, I had intended to put on consignment sale with a reputable dealer in Melbourne who alas! has now downsized and relocated out of the city, so no longer feasible for me. I may use Ebay, but I have some serious qualms about the site and its partner in, well, whatever, Paypal. So unsure what to do.
I want to take January 2021 off from all this and try to do some more, well, human pursuits. It's looking likely I will be stuck here in Oz until at last midyear when i hope to return to Asia to take up my volunteer work and help my friends there to set up an animal rescue center. So I've six months left to continue my photo clean-up, culling and maybe when I feel up to it, shoot some more. After all my years in Asia the prospect of photography in Australia tends to leave me cold, but I do acknowledge there is a lot here to be photographed.
Today is Christmas Day and after some preparation at home, I'll grab my Lumix G1 kit (gifted to me by a friend who now passed) and go walkabout in the paddocks behind our town. I'm not a bird or a landscape shooter but there are things in our bush that inspire me. Colonial era farmhouses, old barns, fences - and somewhere along a back lane an 1860s convict stone building fallen into ruin in a copse of gum trees on a farm property long returned to wilderness. When I find it, a detailed architectural shoot awaits.
That's pretty well me for this year. I feel I've done a lot - and I've written far too much about it as usual. My mom says I spoke in complete sentences from age two and my Aussie friends say I was vaccinated with a gramophone needle as a child. That's me summed up in one sentence, imagine that!
