I've  realised that I have been making roadside pictures without being consciously aware of my doing so.  My  concentration was  on the pieces of bark themselves, not their location.  This is a good example.   This  is another one in  black and white.  Then I realised that the location was often the roadside. 

The roadside pictures usually happen whilst  I'm  walking down back country soars (eg., Depledge Rd)  in Waitpinga on the  early morning poodlewalks with Maya.  A case in point -- in  the late summer of  2024 

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During the   winter storms the trees fall down and branches break off in the Waitpinga bushland.  The bark  then peels off  the fallen trunks and branches during the summer months,  and the wood slowly decays over the years.   

The picture was made whilst on a poodlewalk with Maya in the early morning -- around sunrise -- to avoid the snakes. 

The picture below  is another one of my  attempts  at converting a colour digital file to b+w. A previous attempt on an earlier post  is here. These  pictures of the details of  the landscape were made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in the local Waitpinga bushland in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia.  

These b+w conversions haven't been successful using an old digital camera and I've never been able to even approach  the rich tonality  that Sebastian Salgado achieved with his  impressive b+w Kuwait photos.   One response has been  to return to using b+w film. 

In both cases my  intimate bushland pictures  were made with a very  old  Sony NEX-7 digital camera (2011),  a  modern Voigtlander closeup adaptor, and a vintage Leica M 35mm Summicron f.2.0 lens (1960s). This  combination is trying to keep my old  photographic equipment going rather than discarding it.

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Another interpretation  of dead leaves in the local Waitpinga bushlandmade whilst on an autumn  afternoon  poodlewalk.   This time it is the leaves that have  fallen to the ground:

The leaves  become part of the ground cover  that we walk on, and often than not they are not  noticed.    As the leaves  slowly decay  during the winter months they lose their colour.  It was the colour that initially attracted me. 

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I have spent quite some  time walking  in  the local Waitpinga bushland this autumn.  I walked with Maya on the morning walk and with Maleko on the afternoon walk. Whilst being preoccupied with dipping my toes into making  walking art I noticed  the dead leaves hanging from the branches of the eucalypts as well as the bark. 

 I'd ignored them up to now as  I had been primarily focused on the bark with a 35mm film camera. The leaves were concealed -- merged into the background.  In the last couple of weeks of walking I started to look at the dead leaves as I walked past them. Their speckled brownness   stood out from  the background  world of green.  I started to  photograph them closeup.   

What emerged was  the  simple awareness of something present-at-hand in its sheer presence-at-hand. The seeing involved in the encounter with the present-at-hand gives precedence to the entity and it does so precisely because it detaches itself from the background context. The emergence of the dead leaves  into presence can be understood as an event of the un-concealment of the dead leaves  out of concealment. The photography discloses this coming into presence. 

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Like the Littoral Zone and poodlewalks this Rhizomes blog has been on the back burner since September,  even though I have been walking in the local bushland with Maya (in the morning) and Maleko (in the afternoon) and continuing to make photos whilst on the poodlewalks.  

There was even the occasional  photo session, such as this one, which was an early morning photo session on Boxing Day, 2023.  

It was an early morning photo session on Halls Creek Rd, which  is a minor link road that is part of the Heysen Trail in Waitpinga.  It has little traffic and so it is safe to both walk along with Maya and to stop to make photos.      

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The local bushland is becoming off limits in the afternoon due to the snakes coming out of their winter hibernation with  the warm spring weather. It is still okay to walk in the bushland  in the early morning before sunrise when it  is cold or wet from the heavy dew.  

I notice that this  Rhizomes blog was neglected during the autumn/winter period this year -- there is a gap between March and August. There is even greater neglect  with The Littoral Zone blog. I'm  sure this neglect  was the result of me struggling to put  the walking and the photography together as a process-based  photographic project. 

The photo below was made in early September 2023 whilst I was on a poodlewalk  in the late afternoon with Maleko:

Going back through the archives Rhizomes  and seeing what  I had photographed in the local bush during that March-August period I can see that an immersive style of walking was emerging: one that was reactive to what was occurring around me, rather than going into the bushland to photograph a  particular object in certain lighting conditions that had been pre-visualised.

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This macro photo was made whilst I was on a hobbled walk in the local bushland. 

It was late in the afternoon. I have looked for this bark since, but I have never been able to find it. The winter winds would have prised it loose from the branch of the pink gum.  

This is what happens to old piles of bark in the bushland that have been lying on the ground for a year of more: 

The colours  fade, the bark slowly breaks up, then it starts to crumble.  

I came across the above  pile when I returned to walking in the bushland with Maya  after a long break over the summer.  I was  introducing Maya to the bushland. I recognised the pile  from a year ago. 

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This is another interpretation of  the hanging bark  along Depledge Rd in Waitpinga. 

 In contrast  to the early morning version that was uploaded  in this earlier post the above  version was made in the late afternoon.