BOW FIDDLE ROCK
The path to the sea is a thread of darkness before the dawn, and the tripod’s weight is a familiar ache across the shoulder. Below, in the half-light, Bow Fiddle Rock crouches, less a landform than a leviathan sleeping in the slack tide. Its arch is a drawing-in of breath, a stony inhalation that has lasted fifty million years. To come here with the 5x4 is to seek a different kind of time, to step away from the fleeting instant and into the slow, deep pulse of the land. The air is salt-sharp, cold with the memory of night, and the only sound is the shush and drag of water on the shingle, a constant turning-over of old stones.
Setting up is a ritual against the cold. The legs of the tripod splay and bite into the gravel; the wooden body of the camera unfolds, a precise and delicate architecture of mahogany and brass. Under the dark-cloth, the world is inverted, a ghostly upside-down theatre. The rock swims into focus on the ground glass, its familiar shape made strange, elemental. The lens, slow and wide, gathers the gloaming. It sees not just the rock but the air around it, thick with sea-fret and the coming light. The first exposure is a long one, a minute or more where the shutter lies open and the film drinks in the scene, averaging the waves to a silken indigomist, recording not a moment, but the passage of moments. It is a photograph of time itself.
Then, the horizon cracks. A sliver of apricot light spills across the water, and the rock’s eastern flank catches fire. The Cullen Quartzite, ancient and sea-worn, blushes a fierce pink. This is the light that the digital world captures with ease, but the field camera demands patience. A quick shift, a new sheet of film slid into place, a frantic recalculation for the rapidly changing light. This second image is different. It is not about stillness, but about the sun’s sudden arrival. It captures the warmth on the cold stone, a meeting of the ephemeral and the enduring. The rock is no longer a silhouette but a solid thing, its texture and form revealed in sharp relief, its shadow stretching long and black towards the shore.
As the sun climbs higher, the magic recedes. The light hardens, bleaching the colour from the stone and sea. The rock becomes ordinary, a geological curiosity for the daytime visitor. The ritual reverses: the lens is capped, the dark-cloth folded, the precious, exposed film plates secured in their holder. The camera collapses back into its box, heavy now with the weight of captured light. To walk away is to carry more than just the equipment; it is to carry the memory of the earth’s turning, of the slow conversation between stone and light, witnessed and held fast on a thin sheet of silver gelatin.