While doing much research & making the many decisions about how to do this I decided to stage it – first I will get my cyanotype and alt print setup working:

So I’m using a powerful UV Grow light, which is suspended over the trays… And I just place a large old canvas frame across them while making exposures, using the contact printing frame or directly

I already had a stainless steel tray which is big enough to hold three large trays – dev, stop, fix… And after much searching I found an old shower tray with the drain outlet to the side (easier to fit & evcentually have plumbed in). There isn’t any existing water or drain to the dark room, but there is to the room next door to it – my foley room. So for now I will do washes in there…

When I bought the DeVere 507 enlarger the price reflected that it had a faulty Dichroic (colour) head. The previous owner said the EPROM needed replacement and they were not available any more. So it did still boot up and I could switch the lamps on but… it was noisy AF with two big fans running constantly to cool the two 250W bulbs, and the colour mixing/filters did not work – the EPROM remote controls them, so you would select eg Magenta, type a number and the correct amount of filtration would be moved in front of the bulbs. While messing around with it, I almost got it going – I could actually make the filters activate etc… But it was unreliable – one day it would work & the next not & it had no memory. Fully working they are a great idea as you can even calibrate them for a batch of paper & store the settings. So I knew I needed to replace the light source.

My plan all along was to replace the Dichroic head with an LED head, and there are a bunch of projects with full build details online showing how people have successfully done this in the past.

Also at one stage, a UK camera company Intrepid, made & released an LED head for the DeVere 504 enlarger as apparently thats what they had in their own dark room. There is an install guide on their site but for some reason they don’t still sell that particular setup anymore, and instead developed their own fully self contained compact enlarger using an LED head.

OK So I ordered in parts – 15 LEDs and an LED driver powerful enough to drive that many LEDs, all from LED Supply and an aluminium block to act as a heatsink, ordered online via Little Metal who were excellent to deal with. I’ve also replaced the two noisy fans in thee Dichroic Head with one very quiet 12V fan.

So as a project, rather than have to design and build an entire new enclosure for the LED head, I am adapting the Dichroic head light mixing box to house the LED panel and driver, so the only visible change is a power cable for the LEDs.

The other benefit is that the head remains a similar weight to the original. This avoids the issue of the weight balanced spring mechanism suddenly wanting to go through the ceiling once the weight of the head is removed or significantly changed…

This version I am only using white LEDs as I do not plan to print colour at all, it doesn’t interest me. But all of the pro LED heads use RGB LEDs and provide control to set levels for them, so as to calibrate for colour but also because blue & green can be used to alter contrast when printing B&W. So while I won’t be able to do that via control of LEDs, I can still use such technique by using filters on the enlargers lens. I’ll see how that goes, and have seen plenty of great prints online using this technique but I can also imagine building v2 of this LED head, with RGB LEDs.

To control the timing of exposures with the LED head, I luckily bought a dark room of gear ages ago and amongst all the gear was an excellent timer – the StopClock LE by RH Designs, who still exist and I found a PDF manual for my timer on their site here

This entire project has been an excellent and endless learning experience. And using this timer is just one example as I had never heard of F Stop printing before. Usually prior to making a print, you would make a test strip print, where you expose say for 5 seconds, then cover a section, expose for another 5 seconds, then repeat.. You would then develop the test strip, check the exposure and say somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds looked good, you’d do another test strip to narrow down the target best exposure.
But density of light is not linear, so making a test strip going 5,10,15,20seconds is not the best way – you should do 5,10,20,40 ie an exponential increase. And not-coincidentally, the same exponential increase we make when changing F Stops on a lens, for the same reason.

So this timer lets you change modes between linear time and F Stop/exponential time! It enables you to switch on the LED head to focus, and to make a timed exposure once the photo paper is in place. And it also controls the safe lights. It also has handy functions such a foot trigger eg if doing repeated exposures to dodge & burn parts of the print.

Anyway, all is great progress! And as with such projects, at times it feels like no progress is being made at all and then lots of progress occurrs all at once!

My plan has been to slowly escalate the types of prints.
So first of all is getting my cyanotype print setup calibrated & working:
UV exposure > wash > tone > wash

Then maybe I’ll make some lumen prints: UV exposure photograms > fix > wash

Then using the LED head with the Devere 507 I will make some photograms:
expose > dev > stop > fix > wash

Then using the LED head with the Devere 507 I will make 35mm prints, then 35mm XPAN prints and then 617 prints!

While some of this will always be experimental eg cyanotypes and lumen prints, the goal with the DeVere 507 is to document enough when making a print to be able to reliably reproduce it. That is the ultimate goal, as per these marked up Magnum prints which show the steps involved in printing each specific negative.

If of use to anyone else, a couple of books I’ve been referencing a lot:

The Darkroom Handbook – a complete guide to the best design, construction and equipment. By Dennis Curtin & Joe DeMaio

The New Darkroom Handbook by Joe DeMaio, Robin Worth and Dennis Curtin

surprised robot?

first power on test – its bright!
the heatsink plate & LEDs will rotate 180deg & point down into the box…
which goes through diffusion to the neg holder & lens…

next step!

Friend scored this at an auction & loaned it to me so I could scan the cover…
Not only is it black & white, but it must also be heavily edited to fit on a roll of Super 8

DJ Marky : Live D&B Sessions – 30th March 2026

DJ Marky : Live D&B Sessions – 7th April 2026

the tune is a bit painful but at least its not banjos, YMMV, but fun to see them wrangle bells…
Whats your fave song or piece of music with bells in it?
I so love this, from the score to Drawing Restraint 9:

the indie internet index

maybe useful: Advanced Search for YouTube
also maybe useful: Chrome plugin Search Fixer for YouTube

This is a great form of multimedia documentary journalism – “Photographer Julia Gunther and writer-filmmaker Nick Schönfeld have made multiple trips to Tristan da Cunha since 2023 to chronicle the rhythms of daily life. During their time there, NPR published their story “The Okalolies of Old Year’s Night,” which looked at the island’s unique New Year’s Eve tradition. They returned in 2025 to continue their work and help lead the expansion of the island’s community archive.”

Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself

This struck a chord with me: “There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of expertise. Expert judgement is learnable, in the sense that people demonstrably acquire it over time. It is also non-transmissible, in the sense that no expert can transfer their judgement to another person through explanation. If it was once learnable, why can it not be taught?

The resolution lies in a distinction between two fundamentally different modes of learning. The first is instruction: the transfer of explicit models, rules, and relationships from one person to another through language. The second is calibration: the development of internal models through repeated exposure to feedback in a specific environment. Judgement is learnable through calibration. It is not transmissible through instruction. These are different processes operating on different substrates, and conflating them is the source of the apparent contradiction.”

Try interacting with Japan’s power grid: visualizing power plants, substations, and transmission lines

Download hi rez stills from Artemis lunar malarky

Japan has the world’s best railway system. 28% of Japanese passenger-kilometers are by rail. Germany manages 6.4%, and the USA manages 0.25%. Just one Japanese company, JR East, carries more passengers than China’s entire railway system, and four times as many than Britain’s. What is the secret of its success? (if you cant be bothered following the link, the short answer is that the train companies own all the real estate around the stations, and operate very profitable supermarkets & shops to a captive market of commuters, which helps fund the railways that feed them… a win/win compared with the lose/lose of NZs feeble train system & supermarket duopoly)

A Particular Beauty: Irmin Schmidt Interviewed

AI validation is a psyop for the insecure…

love the icons on Aphex Twins controller in current VEIMA auction

Allan King gives us a tour of his darkroom and makes a 42″ x 69″ silver print

R cord – Deep State Dub

SND & RTN – ECHO LTD 010 EP

Mikkel Metal – Stream (Frenk Dublin’s Deep Space Rework)

Rhythm & Sound – Roll Off / S

Mechanical Techno 6.1 Technical Developments (PhD documentation) – Graham Dunning

Good news feels like a scarce commodity right now, so here is some:
Jason Momoa, Taika Waititi and Cliff Curtis buy Studio West (Auckland, NZ) in major screen industry deal – same studio that new Evil Dead movie is shooting in…

OpenAI’s Sora Was Reportedly Losing Around $1 Million Per Day Before Being Shut Down

The Sudden Fall of OpenAI’s Most Hyped Product Since ChatGPT – was losing $1million/day worth the hype?

‘Thank You for Generating With Us!’ Hollywood’s AI Acolytes Stay on the Hype Train

Agentic douche:

my bio says ‘noAI’ – how’s that fit, agentic dipshit?

Interview: nobonoko, Master of the Minimal Sequencer
mentioned & fun to jam in your browser: JummBox and UltraBox

Post-Music with Subwoofers as Instruments

lol now THAT is how to troll…
I think the “Never heard of her” line is a Clint Eastwood quote?

A blogger writes: “Can I hear a difference between MP3s and uncompressed audio?” but I dont really recommend reading it as the author really needs to do a bit more work to make their opinions more valid.

First, what speakers were they listening on and in what environment? If attempting to do critical listening, you do not use low quality speakers in a reverberant listening space with room mode colouration & cancellation.

Second, why not do a null test? Invert phase of MP3 and mix it with uncompressed WAV file. The remaining audio IS the difference, and it is audible.. But it is only significant if you have a good sound system & have ears capable of critical listening.

Third, what volume SPL were they listening at? A compressed JPG looks ok on a small screen but project it large and the image becomes blocky. Same applies to audio.

Fourth, tester fails to mention age and results of a recent hearing test. Maybe they have no perception over 12kHz? We do not know.

Failed test.
Confirmation bias.

But do you know what does sound fckng GREAT?
Uncompressed audio. No streaming, no latency.
Its the open secret of every studio owner.

The other thing with such ‘tests’ is that they ignore modes of listening. For example I can happily listen to an mp3 in my car because the sound system is already compromised & I’m paying most attention to driving… & surviving. Put the exact same MP3 up in a studio, with a WAV to blind A/B test against, with full attention. Different story.

Bob Marley stage rig – 1979 Western Springs, Auckland

climate change mapped by monks

Hunter S Thompson

Not how I imagined them…

Drone wars

Behind the Scenes: Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick, 1964) with Peter Sellers and George C. Scott
vid is cued for title design

Machinedrum – NO 1 KNEW

Shed – Applications II

Pugilist – Found Sound

While recording the WIND FLUTE SPINNER I accidentally recorded some gaffer tape rips while attaching pipes to the potters wheel… I didn’t even notice it at the time, but while editing the recordings I came across them & got totally distracted for ten minutes, playing with the gritty tearing sound. So I made a note of potential & carried on editing… This new miniFX Library is a result of revisiting that idea.

Next time I was at a hardware store I grabbed a bunch of gaffer tape as well as some 1″ and 2″ wide sellotape. Recording with the Sanken CUX100K mics and Sennheiser MKH8040 I started performing moves, pulling lengths of tape off the roll, then rips & tears.

Using proximity I figured I could rip past the mics and listening later on studio monitors the fast rips reminded of times when automating a pan is less efficient than cutting short passbys as hard cuts between speakers, with or without overlap. Encouraging!!

Next I experimented using resonators – the large wooden box used for PIANO HARP recording, a metal trash can & a plastic road cone. These provided ‘body’ to the sounds, but when I switched to sellotape I made a little discovery when using tension – if pulled slowly, the sellotape ‘pinged’ the resonator! So i spent some time exploring slow pitchy moves – have a listen to the vid & preview sounds to hear what I mean. Apart from slowly decreasing in pitch as the tape got longer, I also performed some phrases, pulling tension & then releasing it slowly, so the pings almost doppler up & down in pitch…

The noise aspect of these sounds also means they will respond well to processing and I can easily imagine designing some great projectile passbys & scifi weapon whizzes that cut through busy mixes…

HISSandaROAR FX033 100K STICKY TAPE

If it can’t be fixed with Gaffer Tape then you aren’t using enough!

“During an event in Taiwan, strong winds caused 7-Eleven Taiwan’s mascot to disappear into the sky accompanied by pleasant background music…”

Rita Moreno is one of just three people to win an Emmy for The Muppets, the other two: Bernadette Peters and Peter Sellers. The comedy timing during her performance of “Fever” while Animal attempts to railroad her is incredible. It was also done in one take

this perfectly describes so many online interactions

How to search better – Google has a secret reference desk

Too many plugins? Check out free plugin manager app PLUGOFF – my unused Waves plugins are going bye bye!

gulp!
I do not like researching something & the original site is long gone so next stop is the wayback machine and yikes, only one snapshot…

squiggles for bass from a soundbar

Studio Visit with Tomás Saraceno

I’m pretty wary of medical procedures etc… ironic I know to have worked on plenty of films with max gore.. but my Friday in NZ involves traumatising myself by watching The Pitt! Why!? Idk… But also interesting to learn that film/TV subsidies & tax breaks work!
Similar evidence in NZ – many productions would not occur here without similar support.

“She doesn’t really care what pitch it is,” the cellist Charles Curtis, her friend and collaborator, told me. “She’s not looking for nice pitch relationships or intervals. She starts with all those ringing properties and chooses the fundamental tones based on that. I think that’s how her listening is wired. It’s a unique way to listen to sound, and it may be the biggest factor in the music that she makes.”
from this article on Éliane Radigue, this also a good read

One of her patch charts for ARP 2500… looks like a graphic score!

Who knew ‘monitoring the situation’ would be such a necessity in 2026! This podcast interview is worth a listen if you’d like to be aware of how the energy shock of the war will be reaching each of us in a few weeks time due to the lag of existing pre-war oil shipments arriving to their destinations, and likely supply issues from then on… One comparison made in the interview is between the likely scarcity requiring reduced demand versus the demand loss at peak of covid lockdowns. Price escalation is one thing, scarcity & potential rationing is another… Global energy crisis 2026

build a simple acoustic panel using old clothes

Foley artists fever dream?

My house backs on to a quite large bush reserve/forest and I often hear them calling late at night… But I learned long ago, that if I go stumbling out in the dark with my microphones, they hear me coming a mile away & silently disappear… So if its calm every day for the last week at dusk, I’ve been setting up a pair of MKH70 shotgun mics pointed out a window and then leaving my SD722 recording overnight. One night I rolled for six hours & only got a short 2 minute burst, but another time captured a 20 minute minimalist symphony!

Their call is so evocative & plaintive partly due to tonality, but also partly for timing – they space their repeating calls beautifully & sparsely…

But they also feel slightly mysterious, since in all of my life I have never seen one, I have only ever heard them.
An artist friend Denise Batchelor created a beautiful video work when in very close proximity to a ruru – have a look at the video here
It is utterly mesmerising to see it’s huge pupils move, like an F0.9 camera lens I could never afford…

Below are a couple of pieces my Ruru recordings. I am slowly collecting up a library of NZ Night Ambiences, so rest assured the Ruru will be well represented!

Ruru – Morepork – typical call at night

There are two other kinds of calls that I have recorded them making, one is a ‘creee’ call, and another is more like a clucking…

After each overnight recording, I load the files into ProTools and then skip along the waveform looking for the repeating ruru call… So imagine my surprise to find this:

Not sure what caused the branch to break but it obviously gave the Ruru a fright as they react…
The wings that you hear are from a Wood pigeon, who must have also gotten a fright.
Ruru wings are silent… and deadly!

Ruru drawing credit via Alexander Turnbull Library.
Keulemans, John Gerrard, 1842-1912. Keulemans, John Gerrard 1842-1912 :Morepork, Spiloglaux novae-zealandiae; Laughing owl, Sceloglaux novae-zelandiae. (One-half natural size). / J. G. Keulemans delt. & lith. [Plate XX. 1888].. Buller, Walter Lawry (Sir) 1838-1906 :A history of the birds of New Zealand. 2d ed. London, John van Voorst, 1888.. Ref: PUBL-0012-20. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
/records/23044210

On Sunday I was vacantly browsing FaeceBook marketplace, which at times is like the wild west of online secondhand junk being sold.. And unfortunately you have to be careful. I was looking at a lovely Gretch hollow body guitar for sale locally for $500 and suddenly noticed the same model for sale in Auckland for $1100. And when I say the same model, the photos looked identical including the background, shot on a deck with a particular kind of ferns behind it. The $1100 model had lots of photos including a photo of the serial number inside the guitar. The cheaper guitar only had four photos, ripped from the Ak seller. So for ‘fun’ I message the seller of the cheap guitar & ask if I can see the serial number and guess what? He sends me the same photo of the serial number from the AK guitar. At this point I reported his account & lost all interest… But then noticed this photo:

Conduit!
And lots of it, in different sizes & lengths… and they wanted it all gone for $40 cash!
This morning I jumped in the car & went & picked it up… and I took a battery saw to cut some bits that were too long to fit in the car…

Not sure I can totally predict how all of this will be used but… On the drive home I started imagining handheld chords: five or six shortish pipes tuned to a lovely complex chord… And an ensemble of tones, attached to the roof rack on my car, recording doppler drive bys… And maybe some will even be used as electrical conduit – stranger things have happened! I have also seen it used for creating structures for vege gardens to support netting, so some might find its way there eventually too… But feel free to hit me up if you have some wacky idea? I do want to build multiples of the little potters wheel too, so I need to do a bit of research on appropriate motors and how to mount & control them…

It is UV stabilised as its designed for outdoor use…

Mark Pritchard – Under The Sun bc

Ryoji Ikeda – Luxus 1-3
Ryoji Ikeda – Space (Altered Version)
(surprisingly unstressful!)

SkeeMask – F bc

Surface Access – Transfer bc

Spomenik by drone

The Fron2 Plays itself….. by Fron Reilly
this is so lovely!

Soundcheck Heckeshorn
thanks for tip Frank – “Reminded me of this thing. It can be seen in action in a scene in #BabylonBerlin.”

The ingenuity of autofocus point illumination – This article examines the gradual development of Canon’s superimposed display systems. The project visualizes the most significant steps from Canon’s very first to their most advanced superimposed display system… (me: reading this made me realise how much I loathe cameras with an EVF. Canons solution was much smarter – overlaying vital info on to an optical viewfinder!)

nifty models!

There’s a saying ‘The best two days in the life of a boat owner are the day they buy their boat & the day they sell it’ which may or may not be true, but I’m pretty sure the day you find a walrus hanging out in your boat would be an excellent day… or highly memorable at least!

actually me: shouting at the computer!

https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/page/awards-season/

Amazing huh?
With all the ability & convenience of digital cameras & ‘film emulation’ available…
and AI bros spouting ‘Hollywood is over…’

“Pinhole Journal was published from 1985-2006. After 22 years of publishing, Pinhole Journal ended publication with the December, 2006 issue. 38 back issues are still available at special reduced prices. These will become valued collector’s items.

Pinhole Journal was published three times a year for the subscription price of $37.50. Each issue was 32 pages, 8-1/2″ high by 11″ wide, beautifully printed in color and black and white on clay-coated paper with no advertising except products available to pinhole photographers from Pinhole Resource.”

Some excellent reading & inspiration!

AVAILABLE WHILE THEY LAST!!!
Pinhole Journal 38 Back Issues Available:

Pinhole Journal Archive

Vol. 3#1 Images by Women
Vol. 5#2 Multiples
Vol. 5#3 Flinders Petrie
Vol. 6#1 Figure Studies 2
Vol. 6#2 Cameras 2
Vol. 6#3 Still Life
Vol. 7#1 Landscape
Vol. 7#2 Apertures
Vol. 7#3 Self Portrait
Vol. 8#2 Cameras 3
Vol. 9#1 Portrait 3
Vol. 9#2 Elvis!!!
Vol.10#2 David Lebe
Vol.10#3 Contemporary Images 2
Vol.11#1 Contemporary Images 3
Vol.12#2 Paolo Gioli
Vol.12#3 Zone Plate Images 2
Vol.13#1 Sarah Van Keuren
Vol.13#2 Contemporary European 2
Vol.16#2 Contemporary Images 7
Vol.16#3 Contemporary Images 8
Vol.17#1 Dominique Stroobant
Vol.17#2 Contemporary Images 9
Vol.17#3 Commercial Pinhole Cameras & Pinhole Objects
Vol.18#1 Marnie Cardozo
Vol.18#2 Contemporary Images 10
Vol.18#3 Contemporary Images 11
Vol.19#1 The Enhanced Mishap
Vol.19#2 Contemporary Images 12
Vol.19#3 Portraits and Figures by Women
Vol.20#2 Entropy and Chance
Vol.20#3 Contemporary Images 13
Vol.21#1 Michael Mideke
Vol.21#2 Circles and Squares
Vol.21#3 Contemporary Images 14
Vol.22#1 International Pinhole Photo Gallery 1
Vol.22#2 International Pinhole Photo Gallery 2
Vol.22#3 That’s All Folks

Fuji Natura S with Cinestill 400D

Within 24 hours I got a marketing email, trying to sell me the second product I already own. So its a double fail: firstly if I subscribe to your emails I expect an email only when a new product is launched, and for a small company like this, that’s likely one email a month. And if they have a sale or time-limited discount, maybe there’s a second email a week after the first.

But if you opt me in to some fckng lazy automated marketing system the result is pretty simple:
I will unsubscribe.

What a fail. Marketing a product at me that I already own is a fail, but its not as egregious as presuming that within 24 hours of buying a product they feel entitled to start sending unwanted emails at me FFS! If you’re a musician or producer you likely use many, many different products from many different companies – maybe even hundreds. Despite this, every time I buy a product I will give them the benefit of doubt and subscribe, but if they reveal such a short sighted belief that they can spam at will, then they lose the right to email me ever again.

Fail better!

This was over near Mahia – the farmer would have been relieved his paddock of corn didn’t go up in flames!

Tokomaru Bay

parked up, East Cape

Had a near miss with that last photo… I drove past that old school, did a U turn & went back to shoot some photos… Had to walk across a paddock of overgrown grass that was almost waste high… Took some shots with my XPAN, put it back in my camera bag… took out the little Natura S camera & fired a shot, put it in my pocket & walked back to the car… But when I went to put my camera bag back in the car, the Natura wasn’t in my pocket!!
Oh shit!! I retraced my footsteps through the very long grass & didn’t find it until I was standing in almost the same position as when I shot the photo. Phew!!! It was a good reminder to always, always follow my standardised systems/methodology. A shortcut or a ‘do it later’ can be very costly, especially eg if using filters with my XPAN… i.e. properly & securely stow gear before going to/from a location!

Priori – 9 bc

Deepchord – Campfire EP 1997

Les Vampyrettes
“Conny Plank & Holger Czukay’s deadly 1980 anomaly remains one of late krautrock legend’s strangest studio productions…”

Music By – Conny Plank, Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Phew
Producer – Conny Plank, Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Phew, Yoshitaka Goto

I need to read the manual on Patchwork as I feel like I am using 1% of its power. (Same for Stepic!) But even having this setup working reliably is excellent, AND it can be instantly recalled from a saved preset.

mmmm sweet potatoes… is charred ok?

a great read: IN SEARCH OF BANKSY – The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name. – one funny quote: “It appears that if people find a Banksy added to their wall, most of them call Sotheby’s rather than the police”

tuning vs video frame rate vs nerds

How To Vote For Sound Awards

The Death of Social Media is the Renaissance of RSS

ultra nostalgia: Art Bits from HyperCard

Every time someone promotes nuclear power as the ‘safest solution’ I wonder how life is in Fukushima – similarly shakey isles as NZ.

a prescient read: We will come to regret our every use of AI

The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan

Conductor: “Stop! Stop! Stop! Trombone 2, you’re playing too loud!”
Musicians: “…he’s not here…”
Conductor: “Well, tell him when he gets back! Now, again…”

Solutions?

silence is violence

A long while later I got a Trace Elliot amp & 15″ bin… and a Washburn acoustic bass, along with a weird old Silver Star violin shaped bass, a replica of the infamous Hofner. All good… until I blew the speaker in the Trace Elliot bin – for a brief moment it sounded awesome, with some minor sparks flying from the cone… I got it reconed, all good. But recently blew the Trace Elliot amp and I haven’t been able to find someone local to fix it (suggestions welcome!!) so to placate my bass playing I got a small Orange bass amp/combo. Its tiny & convenient but it really doesn’t produce the SPLs of bass that are necessary for serious fun… ok as a practice amp I guess, but I always play bass through a Moogerfooger LPF101 and rolling off my bass into the Orange amp just makes it disappear… So I’ve had a vague urge to replace my old Trace Elliot rig and… today was the day!

I keep an eye on every auction at a local auction house, as they deal in deceased estates & lost property ex Police & liquidations etc… But they are also old school. No online bidding. You have to be there to bid & all goods have to be removed by the end of the day, to make room for the next auction. I’ve picked up lots of great gear via them… So todays auction I noticed there was a Gallien Kruger bass amp with a 15″ bin… and further in the auction was a Gallien Kruger quadbox!?! I googled the models and they all belong to the same kit – the amp is actually a bi-amp: it powers the 15″ bin and the quad box seperately… So I went to the auction with no great plan but when the bass amp came up, no one much was interested & I got the amp & 15″ bin for NZ$300!! I think I paid that much or more for the tiny Orange bass practice amp!! I waited for the quad box to come up & got it for NZ$180, so my total for this beast of a bass rig was NZ$480 = US$284! I’ve paid far more than that for a single plugin or synth module… and look at it:

I got it home, hooked it up & powered it up & it sounds great… and makes my entire house rattle!! I only did a quick test with trusty Ibanez bass but tonight will plug in a Yamaha CS01 and maybe my SH101 or TT303 and hear what analog synth bass sounds like through it… with maximum squelch!

Whoever it belonged to also had three bass guitars in the auction and no one was really interested in them, so I got them too… but they each need work to restring and/or set them up, so its a little hard to tell how much use they will be. But again, having not spent too much I can always resell them cheaply & get my money back…

– Strinberg Bass
– Ibanez Axestar headless 4 string
– Ibanez Ergodyne 5 string

The weird shapes of the Ibanez basses makes me think they are from the 80s/90s… and hah a quick google and the ‘Axestar’ is from 1985 lol… and the Ergodyne: “It’s a very ergonomic somewhat lightweight design built off a synthetic material calmed Luthite. They have a single humbucker pickup in about the middle position and piezoelectric pickups in their bridge saddles”

Both the Ibanezes don’t appear to have been played in years… And the Strinberg buzzes a bit so needs to be set up properly…

One last thing. There was a bunch of PA gear at the auction which got a luke warm response, so I ended up buying a Fender PA passive sub with dual 15″ drivers in it for $50 lol… I’ve got an old 300W amp somewhere that could drive it, and for NZ$50 there was nothing to lose… But I do pre-apologise to my neighbours because when I get it hooked up to the Gallien Kruger rig, they may be getting their chakras realigned whether they like it or not!

which led me to get a melodica…

The second one I got from a junk store, only because it had its original case… and two mouth pieces, one white, one black. I love how the C key is ridged, so you have a reference when you can’t see the keys… Stumbled across this vid showing Augusts Pablo actually playing melodica:

REVOLVER – HÄR ÄR KARUSELLEN
Short animated film directed by Stig Bergquist, Jonas Odell, Martti Ekstrand & Lars Ohlson.
Produced 1994, digitally restored by the Swedish Film Institute 2018.
Original title: Här är karusellen.

Peter Gabriel & Laurie Anderson – this is the picture (excellent birds) Mexico Mix
so interesting to hear acapellas!!

Laurie Anderson – Excellent Birds 1984

Peter Gabriel – This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)

Peter Gabriel / Laurie Anderson – Excellent Birds (This Is The Picture)
DEMO version featured on the 25th anniversary reissue 4-CD set of Peter Gabriel’s “So” album in 2012

I’ve always loved that ’84 version by Laurie: the sparseness of the arrangement & the offbeat rhythm that’s almost like a one drop.
Peter Gabriels version has such rich production, presumably recorded & mixed at Real World, but there’s some awful bland live versions by him…
Fascinating to hear the demo, with a static drum machine pattern – rock pattern on an R8?

More nfo at wikipedia here

Personnel: “Excellent Birds”
Laurie Anderson – vocals, Synclavier
Peter Gabriel – vocals, Synclavier, LinnDrum
Bill Laswell – bass guitar
Nile Rodgers – guitar

Personnel: “This is the Picture (Excellent Birds)”[7]
Laurie Anderson – vocals
Peter Gabriel – vocals, Synclavier, LinnDrum, Fairlight CMI
Bill Laswell – bass guitar
Nile Rodgers – guitar
Daniel Lanois – twelve-string guitar
Manu Katché – talking drum

Managed two trips out to 3 Sisters – only accessible a few hours either side of low tide, so have to schedule & take what you can get. Low tide was like midday-ish… One day will coordinate to be there for low tide at dusk!

First visit was sunny AF!

Second visit was cloudy… and focused on different shots to visit 1. We also got there 2 hours before low tide & waded out the track, getting wet up to the knees but had to take it carefully as was also very slippery – I saw one tourist fall over with his phone in his pocket… Meanwhile I am VERY carefully sloshing through with Linhof Technorama & gear in backpack, XPAN & gear in shoulder bag & tripod in my arms… VERY determined not to fall over!!

It really is quite mind altering & almost exhilarating to be out in environments like this!

Stayed on this farm, 15min drive inland from 3 Sisters. Found it via Book a Bach although they are also listed on Air BnB

The drive in from the road is quite fun & might be a challenge in winter if wet & in 2WD…

Thats the main road in centre of photo & access driveway to the right

I spoke to the owner who said there are kiwi living in the bush around the farm, so next time I’ll do some night recording… Only stayed one night this time & spent most of it light painting that old horse float…

When checking my Air BnB it stated I’ve been on 90 trips using Air BnB! But one aim is to always remember the good locations that warrant repeat trips… I’ll definitely be staying here again!

kentaro
“I’m back to developing tonemata. I’ll push through to completion.”

cellular automata–driven granular wave generator

https://kentaro.tools/

soundtrack for these times…

Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

The interdweebs most-read sites Lost 58% of their Google traffic since 2024

What the web looks like when you subscribe to 2,000 RSS feeds

Why we need ‘consciousness hygiene’ to defend ourselves from AI and dopamine-driven algorithms

Growing mushrooms to replace eps – eat the packaging?

the peculiar case of japanese web design

Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon…” – JFC is back?

Phosphor is a free spectral synthesiser for OSX that turns images into audio. Draw on a spectrogram canvas, load any image, and hear the result instantly.

Alan Splet x David Lynch

The Man with a Million Records | Inside America’s Largest Record Collection

Doctorow: The Supreme Court has just turned down a petition to hear an appeal in a case that held that AI works can’t be copyrighted. By turning down the appeal, the Supreme Court took a massively consequential step to protect creative workers’ interests

The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should

Found: The 19th century silent film that first captured a robot attack

Funny looking at the iPhone app charts and how I don’t use any of the ‘top apps’ – Google Maps at #18 would be the first I use often. But the prevalance of AI apps reminded me of this news item:
News Corp is essentially an AI ‘input company’ as I suspect the same is true for all those AI apps. They appear to be tools to assist you, but are really data capture apps, just as those creepy Meta glasses appear to be in service of the wearer, when they are more likely AI input devices.

super cute for the kids: The Sound Collector

It turned out to be right by the entrance to the farm stay, which meant a late night visit was easily possible as I had my LED lights in the car… So after dinner & a few drinks…

These were all shot on my Canon 5D3 DSLR with Zeiss 21mm prime lens… But I also shot them with my XPAN and the Linhof Technorama, so some B&W verisons will be interesting to see once back from the lab!

We’d been there for an hour or two when a car came driving along… It pulled up & stopped & while we weren’t doing anything destructive & had no reason to be defensive, I was still hoping it wasn’t some angry local asking WTF we were doing… But it turned out to be the original owner of the horse float! She was stoked to see what we were doing & said it had become a sort of landmark with locals. Talking to the owner of the farm we stayed on the next morning, he said at one point someone went & unseized the brakes etc and was going to move it & there was an outcry by locals who quite liked it being there! And I concur… its very much out of the way, on a back road that doesn’t get much traffic so its not really causing any issues… I sent copies of these to the farm stay owner, who will forward them to the float owner.

Respect to the talented graffiti artists who decorated it! Love the negative space typography

Also a great reminder of how fun it is to be outside at night, shooting bulb exposures

While in dropping off film at Splendid Lab I noticed a pile of photo paper with ‘FREE’ written on it… The A4 pack has the date hand written on it: 6-8-84… so at 42 years old it is more than a little bit expired…

I’ll do some very basic tests with it first – test strip/block chart… and then some contact prints & photograms! Old film tends to become less sensitive with age so I’m not expecting any rapid results from old photo paper… but slow can be good!

I’ve also been thinking about a long term project, where I deploy biscuit tin pinhole cameras, hiding them all over NZ & returning later to retrieve them….

The shape or form of it is A5 vertical, and after a first read my bookmarks reveal how good it is:

In this terminally online world there is something great about ordering a physical artefact from the other side of the planet, so the shipping takes long enough that you forget about it… and then are surprised & gratified for supporting physical media. It is also beautiful, with colour prints of many graphic scores:

“From graphic scores and musical structures to resonance, vibration, and listening, this issue brings together artists who turn sound into image and image into sound. Some works follow the pulse of music, others trace the invisible currents of electromagnetic fields, the voices of whales, or the inner sound of thought and memory.

Featuring Richard McGuire, Christina Kubisch, Daphne Oram, Dannielle Tegeder, Ariel Guzik, Katja Pudor, Zita Borbély, Lauren Housego, Camille Norment, Christine Sun Kim, Raven Chacon, Christine Ödlund, Clara Mosconi, Eduardo Partida, Henrique Vaz, Iannis Xenakis, Jorinde Voigt, Wei Ting Tseng, William Engelen, Diogo Pimentão, Irma Blank, Violaine Lochu, Dom Bouffard, Volodymyr Agafonkin, Channa Horwitz, Margaret Watts Hughes, Satch Hoyt, Julien Gachadoat, Satoshi Tomiie, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Brian Eno.”

FUKT #23 – The Sound Issue

Excellent & so worth the €20.00 + postage!

Editor-in-chief: Bjørn Hegardt
Editors: Max Parnell, Erika Clugston
Writers: Faye Campbell, Max Parnell, Joana P.R. Neves
Creative Director: Ariane Spanier
Cover animation: Lara Gessner

The best indicator of an awesome road trip!

Dropped off to SPLENDID Lab in Wellington

LTK Bukem – Mood swings

Little Sims – Mood swings

Apparat – Glimmerine

Do you notice how search is getting worse? As time passes, old sites & forums slowly disappear, but with AI even search results are less useful. Rather than be able to keep searching to more & more obscure sources, it seems that search now seems to end with unreliable AI summaries. I often make use of the wayback machine but it is usually as a last resort, after I know something exists but cannot otherwise access it.
When going through these books I do appreciate that they are specialist & were collected back in the 1970s and 1980s, but they are practically impossible to find now for one simple reason: its hard to search for something that you don’t know exists!

I laughed when I looked inside that Zone VI book, as it had a small Whitchoulls sticker inside it. Whitchoulls is an NZ book store company with shops in most NZ cities & towns. So it amuses me that back in the day you could walk into a normal local book store & buy such a specialised book. But back then it would have been the height of analog film photography, so I guess its not radically different to walking into one today and finding a book on Photoshop or digital cameras.

But the pleasure of finding such gems from the past is all the resulting discoveries. As a good example one book that caught my eye was this one:

PINHOLE PHOTOGRAPHY – Redoscovering a Historic Technique by Eric Renner, FocalPress 1995

Now I’ve researched Pinhole photography lots before, after shooting SolarCan pinhole cameras for very long exposures, first for 50days and then a second one for 365 days…

But I had never come across this book before. So having this realisation means it is worth sharing such info. If you do a search in future for ‘pinhole photography’, one link might well lead to this post. So I will aim to at least share the titles of uniquely excellent books I find now & more so in future.

Along with that book, there was a slim A4 book, or really more like a zine or pamphlet:

A quick search found the Pinhole Journal site:

“For 34 years Pinhole Resource has supplied products for the pinhole artist, ranging from pinhole cameras, micro drilled pinhole sets, pinhole and zone plate body caps for digital and film-based cameras. We also carry books specifically related to both the artistic and technical facets of pinhole photography. Pinhole Resource is also an active archive for pinhole photographs contributed by pinhole artists from around the world. Our pinhole products are of the highest quality. Look to the left menu to buy pinhole and zone plate body caps for digital and film-based (analogue) cameras, as well as books, pinhole cameras, pinholes, turrets, and a pinhole based exposure guide.”

As I flicked through issue #27, I had one of those fantastic discoveries that afterwards I could only think – genius!! Along with an interview with pinhole photographer David Lebe were some drawings of cameras he had designed, and he specialised in cameras with multiple apertures!

A camera with 9 pinholes! The magazine featured many of his excellent panoramic multi-aperture photos… But during the interview he mentions how at the same point in history (mid 1970s) there were a few people scattered around the planet, working with multi-aperture pinhole photography without any awareness of the others, including artist Gottfried Jäger

Gottfried Jäger was working with a ‘camera’ with a grid of apertures, which he went on to develop what is now considered some of the first generative photography works.

Inspired by what I discovered in just one issue of the Pinhole Journal, I rechecked their website & found they sell an archive of all past issues so of course I simply had to order it.

“Pinhole Journal was published from 1985-2006. After 22 years of publishing, Pinhole Journal ended publication with the December, 2006 issue. 38 back issues are still available at special reduced prices. These will become valued collector’s items.”

Also interesting, on the site they mention: “In April of 2012, Pinhole Resource donated 6,000 pinhole photographs from 500 photographers from around the world, 60 pinhole cameras, and 200 books and catalogues to the New Mexico Museum of History, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. If you go to their website you will see the Pinhole Resource Collection already has more than 1300 or more photographs from the Pinhole Resource Collection represented, which will give worldwide access to this unique collection.”

How brilliant!

But hopefully you can also see my point: from a random visit to a secondhand book store, I now have access to resources that I never knew existed & despite much searching had never stumbled across before. its hard to search for something that you don’t know exists!

It feels quite odd & dystopian that the degradation of online search has reached this point. The silos of social media are partly to blame. Before social media, such info would be shared via a blog (like this one) or a forum. These are all easily searchable open archives. But the same info shared on a social media site does not turn up in a search – it can be an incredibly frustrating experience trying to locate some info you saw on social media, as there really is no archive of the algorithmic timeline you doomscroll… & external links are often demoted, as the social media platforms want to retain your presence to show you ads.

If this feels nostalgic, it definitely is… and its a feeling that is going to get stronger as I suspect the Internet will continue to degrade as more & more AI agents come online. An admin on a favourite music forum recently shared an example of what they are now having to deal with.

Now imagine that kind of abuse attacking every website online, everywhere!
Whether the motives are malicious, entitled or ignorant doesn’t even matter if the result is the same.

Soon the current issue of companies trying to force AI use on us may well be a lesser concern, and maintaining a functional Internet against massive proliferation of AI agents could make us very, very nostalgic for the ‘free’ Internet of only a decade ago… Back when clever people were creating amazing images using pinhole apertures…

I will take a photo & make a list of all the books I got from Neil Penman’s estate. Some of the specific dark room books are excellent as they show examples of photos with (1) the raw negative as shot and (2) the finished print and (3) a marked up work print with dodging, burning & exposure notes on it. Fascinating to see & so much more fun and organic than staring at Photoshop.

Filmumentaries Podcast 144 – Randy Thom – Director of Sound at Skywalker Sound

This Is What It Looks Like When Nothing Matters: Welcome to the internet’s nihilism crisis

Australia from above

“Taste” for Makers

How to Make a Living as an Artist – useful/aspects are debateable…

there follows much funny history #fanfiction

Laurie Spiegel on the difference between algorithmic music and ‘AI’

Apparently “there’s been a saga in the Sheffield subreddit where people are going to a specific co-op on eccy road and delighting in the freezers that are seemingly tuned to a C# chord…
Someone finally recorded it, it’s fucking beautiful.

Thanks a lot, AI: Western Digital Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year

Despite all their $$$ they live in fear

Myopia is driven by how we use our eyes indoors, new research suggests
interesting Aldous Huxley wrote a book on the same subject
also to say i dont see myopia as just a problem to solve, myopia is beautiful!
the bokeh and shallow DOF of my eyeballs is unlike any close up camera lens…
fastest lens I own is a Zeiss ZE 50mm prime 1.4F wide open its shallow AF but maybe 100mm F2.8 macro lens is closer… Beyond that its all bokeh!

“I like beautiful mistakes”: Adrian Sherwood

Michael Kenna – An Encounter in Fukushima, Japan

How To Visit Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Secret Tokyo Library

instagram benjamin kellett shares some fun vides of paragliding trips he does, but edited to the highlights with live voiceover while chasing thermals…
eg Flying from Queenstown to Aoraki/Mt Cook

SD084 WIND FLUTE SPINNER

Eight wind flutes spun on an electric potters wheel to create tones & drones
Captured 32/192k with pair of Sennheiser MKH8040 cardioid and MKH80920 omni mics.
172 x 24bit 192kHz stereo WAV files = 12.5GB
Discount available until 1st March

And now I will be searching for multiples of that little potters wheel,
as I crave to hear a few of them, spaced far apart, in a large reverberant space!

by Jim Hensen – pre Muppets… 1961-62
music by jazz drummer Chico Hamilton

Fela Kuti / Africa 70 Live in Berlin @ Berliner Jazztage 1978 Full Concert

Tony Allen & Moses Boyd Masterclass

Quite unreal how much land has been reclaimed.. I’ll try & work out where the photo was taken from & go reshoot it now!

Evans Bay Power Station 1924-60s

Inside Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force

Small Prophets trailer

Nifty native macOS sample manager SampleStack built for Eurorack and hardware samplers. (Presumably no Assimil8or support as an A8 Sample Manager already exists)

Japanese artist Takanori Aiba creates entire miniature kingdoms around bonsai trees.

In Memoriam: Conversations with Béla Tarr

Who Sampled – Zero-G: Datafile One Edition
lol wow what a nostalgia hit

CoPilot?

“We are not appeased…”

Felt a need to spend some time with a Ralph Hotere painting so tried TePapa & no paintings accessible, but this beautiful installation Black Phoenix was on display!

via TePapa

My De Vere 507 Enlarger came with a standard set of Neg holders, which includes 5×7 for the Linhof 617 negs, and one with mask for a single 35mm frame, but nothing that will mask for XPAN 35mm panoramic photos… So I searched online and ordered these 3D printed XPAN masks from CrazyLab in France via eBay as above.
Why two? Well they offer four types, and I ordered a Normal and a Wide

Normal: Masks out negative edges completely
Wide: Slightly shows negative borders for black borders on the print
Ultra Wide: Shows full film edge including frame numbers and perforations – popular for “film edge” printing style
Effect: Shows negative borders with irregullar “filled” texture – with the popular vintage filled border style

Building a dark room around the De Vere 507 is like a puzzle with many pieces for specific scenarios, and which all need assembling & calibrating before the fun really begins…

Apart from the big Saunders Easel, I’m also waiting on machined lens mounts for medium format printing. I have a Schneider Componon 210mm F5.6 and a EL Nikkor 180mm patiently waiting for their mounts, as both suited to the 617 negs ex the Linhof Technorama but require larger diameter mounts than the spares I have.. But at least now I can print XPAN using the Nikkor 50mm and 80mm lenses.

Patience, grasshopper!

My lightmeter BFF: Sekonic L758DR + Pentax 1 degree SpotMeter – modified by Zone VI

So I should be able to print up to 24” wide with it eg slicing a 20″x24″ paper in half for two panoramic prints… To go larger than that would be with roll paper, so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it… but that would more likely involve a DIY easel… I’ve seen some clever ideas eg using magnets to hold paper down & also seen some nifty vacuum ‘easels’ which use a pump to create a vacuum & via tiny holes in the baseboard, it pins the paper flat.

Now the waiting:
– XPAN masks from France
– Lens boards (for Schneider & Nikkor lens for medium format negs) from Canada
– Saunders Easel from Vegas, USA

It rained pretty much all the way home!
I had plans to camp in Rakaia Gorge for a night, and in Port Underwood, but the rain followed me up the East Coast all the way home.

Having left Clyde and driven through Middlemarch to Dunedin, I only made a few stops…
one to shoot this old building, in the drizzle

Regardless of rain I had booked to stay a night in Dunedin, in an Air BnB I have stayed in before. Its in a very peaceful rural location, out in Port Chalmers… not far from Aramoana. Its fully self contained, and is best described as a very, very nice apartment, attached to a farm shed.

Air BnB: Mihiwaka Shed Stay

I arrived to Dunedin in enough time to visit Hard to Find Books Store and scored a few good NZ photobooks… And as my Air BnB was ‘out of town’ I figured I’d get take out for dinner & stopped to get a curry, and noticed that the building that Strawberry Sound used to be in X decades ago, was empty & for lease:

JAN 23 – DUNEDIN > PALMERSTON > WAIMATE > ASHBURTON

I got up & repacked my car somewhat, as today was the day I picked up the De Vere 507 Enlarger. So for example to create more free space in the back of my car, I took the sprung fold-out bed out and put it in the roof bag, along with the rescue tracks. But I still felt a bit nervous as to whether the De Vere would fit in, despite it being the entire reason for the trip!

One advantage of staying out at Port Chalmers was that I could take a back route South – I didn’t need to drive into town and then crawl up the motorway. Instead google maps led me through rural roads and eventually out on to SH1.

I drove to Palmerston and parked outside Ian Leedens gallery building. The following hour or so was busy, as I emptied my car out on to the pavement outside Ians building, so as to make room for the enlarger, knowing I would only then repack everything back in around it. Details of that process are in this blog post: 700km relocation but one funny event. After Ian and I had slowly & carefully wrangled the De Vere into the car, rotated it so the rear door could close and then packed everything in.. And had a great chat about shooting film & making prints, and Ian showed me how he ‘spotted’ prints to fix dust marks etc, I went to leave & shook hands with him at the entrance to the building and started to walk to the car & Ian shouted; “Hang on, we forgot the baseboard!!’ We both cracked up laughing – there leaning against the wall by the door, about 2 foot from where I had been standing was the base board off the De Vere 507!

Ian had done some basic disassembly before I arrived – removing the Dichroic head and putting it carefully in a box as it contains the two lamps. And another box with the lens mounts, three lenses and all the neg holders. And the baseboard which is really just a large piece of flat wood, but is held in place by four long bolts with double nuts & wingnuts, which enables it to be levelled when calibrating the enlarger. I was so close to leaving without it… The next issue, where to put it? The car was absolutely jammed full, such that it was hard to even change gears!

Luckily the roof bag only had the bed & rescue tracks so I unzipped it, slid thew baseboard it, rezipped it, tightened tie downs and had a laugh about it with Ian before tooting & heading off.

I have a golden rule of travel:
when leaving anywhere, first pack up & get everything out of the building
then do a reality check. Check mental list that you have everything.
Do a final physical visual scan of the place, that nothing is been left behind.
In the excitement guess who almost skipped a crucial part of the process!?

I headed North, making a stop at a small town junk store & buying some old patterned glass for bending light:

Then a stop at a junk store in Oamaru, scored a couple more big saw blade gongs…

Then a stop at a junk store in Waimate, where I scored two old very heavy fire extinguishers and some tiny plastic toys like you used to get in cereal boxes…

I got to Ashburton in time for dinner from excellent Middle Eastern restaurant The Ottoman and I had booked to stay a night at the Tinwald Domain Campground. Very handily they are in the suburban outskirts of Asburton & have a huge domain/gardens area for all modes of accomodation – from tents to campervans to bunks to cabins to apartments. Since the weather was crap I booked an apartment & had a super comfortable stay. Highly recommended & the apartments are much better than a motel or hotel imho, as they are in such a quiet park location.

ASHBURTON HOLIDAY PARK & LODGE

JAN 24 – ASHBURTON > BLENHEIM

My motive for stopping in Ashburton was to visit my 94 year old Aunt. After breakfast I headed over to her place & we sat around & chatted for a couple of hours, I showed her photos of where I’d been etc before heading to a cafe for lunch at excellent Robert Harris, Ashburton

I still had a five hour drive in front of me, so after lunch I headed off, stopping at Chertsey Book Barn to do a quick scan through their stock and finding these gems and somehow finding space to jam them in the car…

The weather was grey & drizzly all the way up the East Coast, through Kaikoura and across to Blenheim. The forecast was rainy so I had abandoned the idea of camping at Robin Hood Bay again and booked a great Air BnB cottage on a lifestyle block in quite a remote location, and yet it was only 15min drive from Blenheim… So after picking up a nice Thai green curry from a shop in Blenheim, I headed there & had an excellent stay:

AirBnB: Crooked Gate Cottage at Tuamarina

A really interesting location with lovely hosts, who left me eggs & tomatoes and also said no rush to leave in the morning… So after a peaceful sleep I made an omelette, relaxed & then headed to Picton, then around Queen Charlotte Drive to Ngakuta Bay to shoot a few frames… On the way there I noticed the bizzare sight of a cruise ship parked up at the industrial wharf for log exports…

No thank you!

I went & checked in for my Bluebridge ferry crossing, got on board, got to my cabin & had a snooze for a few hours… It was really quite a nice time of day/week to get back to Wellington, arriving 6pm on a Sunday evening. Unlike any other night of the week, the motorway was not super busy… So it was an easy drive home & then the fun exercise of unloading the car & carrying everything up the zigzag path to my house. My little green trolley did a great job… but I left the De Vere 507 in the car overnight, as I wasn’t sure how to get it where it needed to be… as per 700km relocation

To finish up this 7 day road trip, a few things always strike me when I get home from such a mission.

First is that travel is such a buzz, as you pack so many unique experiences into the available time. When I think of a ‘normal’ week for me, the routine of a weeks work etc is such a contrast to the huge range of experiences on a road trip.

A second observation is how great it is to get home and enjoy all the comforts of home but appreciate it with ‘fresh eyes’. Familiarity breeds contempt is a truism that needs to be actively fought. When I first started professional work and moved to Auckland, after a while I came to realise I only really enjoyed living in Auckland if I got away for a weekend each month. So I’d get a few friends together & rent a bach or holiday home in Corromandel or up North, and once a month go away for a couple of nights. And I’d always return, totally refreshed & appreciating my existence in ways that I had been taking for granted. Its easy to get caught up in work schedules & deadlines etc.. but even just a Friday & Saturday night away somewhere rural contributes so much good to mental health! A useful reminder to myself as I start three months work on the BLACK SHEEPS film!

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force @ Gaswerk Music Days, Berlin

Daniel Stefanik – Reactivity 8 – 2009

Porter Ricks – Redundance 3

Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe – Faith

If you ask most kiwis what the Obelisk is, you’ll likely get a blank stare back. I thought I knew NZ very well, especially down South, but had never heard of it… But I found out about it via a search tactic I have used for a while now, to find photo locations worth exploring. I noticed that many secondhand book stores have lots of old NZ Travel Guides, which due to lack of demand they sell for very little. But the thing is, they may be old but they are often very well researched & made.. and they are full of extraordinary photos, shot on film.
So every time I visit eg the Chertsey Book Barn, or go to a Lions Book Sale, after checking through the Photography section for film & dark room books, I always make a point of scanning through all the old NZ travel books. I tend to target two types, big bound books about NZ, as I figure if they went to the trouble of making a large bound book then it will be well researched & they will have had a budget to commission and/or license great photos. The other type are books about specific areas or regions of NZ – their research tends to involve local experts & history, and often include locations the larger books can not. My library has developed a healthy stack of old NZ books, and not at great cost when slowly accumulated…

Back in September 2024 I visited Chertsey Book Barn & picked up a big book of NZ and knew it was an instant-buy when I came across a page with this incredible photo in it:

What an alien looking landscape!?!
HOW have I never seen it before??
AND where is it???

The subtitle simply says: ‘The obelisk on the Old Man Range”

My next stop was google maps and after entering ‘The obelisk, Old Man Range” there it was!
GOOGLE MAP LINK

The Obelisk sits at 1,682 m (5,518 ft) on top of the Old Man Range in Central Otago. After doing some searches I found a few trip videos on Youtube where people had driven up there in Summer and documented their mission eg this one or this one

It looked easily possible although the road up there warns that 4WD is necessary and in Winter access may not be possible at all. I talked to a few locals & only rarely met anyone who had been there, but one friend of my Dads told me a horror story. Apparently back in the day, two transmitter techs went up there to do maintenance work, heavy clouds & fog rolled in and they got lost and it took them five hours to find the road back out again!

Being at altitude means the weather can change fast, and while I enjoy road trips on my own I do not take risks off road. While I have 4WD and some recovery gear (including a shovel, tow ropes & rescue tracks) I don’t as yet have a winch and if the worst possible happened – blow the motor, break an axle, diff etc… being stranded could be life threatening.

My brother has a place in Clyde & has ridden his off road motorbike up through there many times, so he was keen to join me for a visit. I also invited a cousin & partner, who I know love 4WD trips… So we had three 4WD vehicles and coordinated to all get to Clyde by 11am on Jan 22nd.

The weather was good as I drove through Haast Pass, alongside Lake Hawea, bypassed Wanaka & drove to Tarras, then along Lake Dunstan to Clyde and arrived, finding everyone ready to go. We set off soon after as the weather was forecast to get worse later in the day…

This was the path:

A = where you turn off SH8, on to Symes Road
B = top of the ranges, where you turn right across to
C = The Obelisk
D and E = the route we would come home, if the weather & track was ok

As you drive up Symes Road, we passed a beautiful old stone cottage – known as Mitchells Cottage, the history of which is worth a read on the DOC website. When I bought my Linhof Technorama camera from Ian Leeden, I also bought a selection of prints from him and I especially asked him for prints that he would have shot with my/his camera. One of them is of Mitchells Cottage, but in a very different season – in a hoar frost in winter. Check it out:

Mitchell Cottage by Ian Leeden
(not a scan, just a photo of a beautiful darkroom print sitting on my couch, sumimasen – its still wrapped in plastic)

Only a short distance past the cottage was the first gate, with DOC signs warning about road conditions etc… Along the way there would have been four or five closed gates, and we naturally fell into a pattern that the first vehicle would unlock the gate, go through & park on the curb while the other two passed through, the gate was shut again. So we cycled through each of us having turns opening & closing gates.

The area is known as Kopuwai Conservation Area – DOC site and while the road is very rocky & bumpy, during our visit in Summer it was dry with no traction issues at all, but the degree of bumps & rock outcrops meant it was a slow, careful drive uphill.

Once we got up to the top & turn off to the Obelisk, the view was utterly spectacular – it really felt like we were on another planet!

There was a bit of a cold wind & we could see across the valleys to darker clouds so we drove the short distance – a few kilometres across to The Obelisk, and stopped and had lunch there.

For scale, my car is parked at the bottom of the Obelisk

The photo above is looking East, back towards the turnoff & the road across to the Waiakawa Bush Rd turnoff

The Obelisk is 23 metres tall = 75 feet!
What crazy erosion that it has survived…

After shooting lots of photos, flying the drone etc we headed back to the turn off point, and were surprised to see a bus had driven up! But the road was dry & in great condition, so the only real issue even with 2WD would just be that you have to drive slow & carefully…

The track across from point B to point D looked good, so we headed off along that route

4WD road from Symes Rd to Waikaia Bush Rd – DOC site

Now this track was a different story to the stony road up from Symes Road. The road across the top to the Obelisk was mostly quite smooth dirt surrounded by barren dirt & tussocks, with no gravel or stones. I could easily see how with some heavy rain, the tracks would become slippery and god forbid being up there in snow, as the track would disappear.

Along this route were some beautiful wind-sculpted rock outcrops

But in places the track became more challenging again, with some deep ruts, mud holes and a couple of places where I thought I was going to get stuck, as I needed more ground clearance… One particular point I decided to just floor it & use the momentum to carry me through, and it worked… but… my muffler has sounded a bit different ever since, lol… It’s not leaking, but it has a different resonance… I’ll get it checked soon.

We eventually got through to point D, where there were lots of these weird yellow plants amongst the tussocks:

The drive down Waikaia Bush Rd was fairly easy – much like the road up from Symes Road it was mostly gravel, rocky road which eventually came down through farm land and out to the main road again.

We headed back to Clyde and had a BBQ for dinner, still buzzing from the days mission!

JAN 23 CLYDE > THE OBELIX AGAIN!!

I thought about it overnight & decided if the weather was ok, I would go back up to The Obelisk to do more shooting. The road was in such good condition I could feel confident about it, and it would be a shorter trip if I just went straight up & back down the same route, from Symes Road. I had an AirBnB booked for that night in Dunedin, which was a 3 hour drive away… So I figured it was worth doing the repeat Obelisk mission in the morning, before I headed off towards Dunedin.

As I made my way up from Symes Road for a second time, it was obvious that the top of the ranges were covered in cloud. But I figured I keep going until I ran into cloud or rain, and could make a decision then…. I got almost up to the top before I reached the cloud layer, and OMG it was literally a pea soup fog!

Visibility was about 10 metres but weirdly it wasn’t cold or windy – the fog was just sitting there, being opaque! It was really quite surreal to slowly drive across the top towards The Obelisk

Ocne I finally got to it, it appeared like one of the aliens in THE ARRIVAL.

When I’m driving I tend to have google maps running and as I turned around & headed back, I actually kept an eye on the map onscreen while driving, as the fog was so dense it was like being in a dimensionless space and it was good to have reassurance I was going in the right direction and was on the track….

What an utterly fantastic location!

I’m patiently waiting for the XPAN and Linhof Technorama shots from the lab… But I will be revisiting the Obelisk whenever I am in the area, as it is safely accessible with a 4WD & I would love to photograph up there at dawn… and at dusk… and in the snow, even if it meant having to use chains to get up there… The only place I’ve been that felt even remotely like it, although at a lower altitude is the Castle Hill area in Canterbury, and especially Kura Tāwhiti (Castle Hill) – DOC site but I have to confess that every time I drive past there, the carpark is absolutely packed full of tourists… So I might have to time a revisit there for whatever the offseason is!

If you know Aotearoa & know of similar iconic barren landscapes please feel free to comment. Of course I know Desert Road well, and have been up the access road to Tukino Ski Field – DOC site which I highly recommend – note you need to get the key to the gate from the DOC office in Turangi.