Photography Pages

Natchwey, Griffin and a Brief Hiatus

TPP — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:46:04 PDT

Somewhat hypnotic film from Asa Mader.

Natchwey’s clever cousin Martin has joined the team at Duckrabbit. “Martin Nachtwey does a masterful job of capturing the dystopian cacophony of conflicting rivers of delusion of our modern day irrational existence.” Describes that film quite well, wouldn’t you say?

The authentic James: “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” here.

Martin Parr (whose brow is nothing like as furrowed, and who needs no linking from me) is going to be at Port Eliot Festival this weekend. He sent a contribution to the Falmouth Students’ fundraising cookery book. They asked famous photographers for recipes, and he sent them “beans on toast..“. Not a recipe for beans on toast, that would be too generous of him, too giving of his precious time. Just those three words. I’ll tell him what I think if I see him wandering about, but will not be going to watch him hold court.

It is perfectly possible in this industry of ours to get famous and even notorious, without pomposity or arrogance. We know that. Brian Griffin liked my photo on Facebook this morning, not for the first time. We can only love an artist like that, at the top of his profession and free, still, with his opinions and praise.

Griffin’s Road to 2012 Olympic preparations photographs at the National Portrait Gallery are here. Go and see them: I certainly will.

So while work progresses in the studio on the sculpture, for me, a few days in a tent, in Cornwall! I’ll be taking a sweet little rangefinder and some rolls of 3200 and 6400 Ilford Delta for the evenings, and possibly a monopod.

More from the darkroom, including a short one-take film so you can see exactly how organised and tidy it is, sometime around the end of next week. Meanwhile, this is my first, hopefully of many more, moving photos, as I believe they are becoming known. Turn off the sound, I haven’t worked out how to do that in camera yet. Feel free to follow The Photography Pages on Youtube.

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How to Hang a Picture

TPP — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 05:23:48 PDT

From a BBC arts blog I’m following. Very useful indeed. Please share freely!Similar Posts:

Family Cookbook [2]

TPP — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:26:05 PDT

Festival Salad

Summer is time for long bus or train journeys to Bestival or Latitude, or Port Eliot. This’ll get you through 5 hours on a hot National Express coach or a Cross Country train with no buffet.

1. Bring a pan of water to a rolling boil, add a splash of your favourite olive or locally grown rape seed oil, and a handful of pasta shapes. Cook for the time specified on the packet (maybe 8-10 mins), drain and add lots and lots of ground black pepper. Rinse the pan.

2. Add another dollop of oil, and finely chopped red peppers, celery, carrot You can use any veg, but this combo is less likely to drench the coach and your neighbours with cooking smells. Saute until softened. Set aside to cool.

3. Chop a couple of ripe tomatoes, snip the roots off your rocket thinnings and snip the tops off your windowsill basil.

4. Combine all the ingredients, taste for flavour, add salt & more pepper if you think it’s needed. Go on the strong side flavour-wise. This might have to sit about in your bag and will be better rich than bland. A few walnuts or sunflower seeds will add crunch.

5. Tip into a container, snap the lid tight, wrap in a second bag and tie with an elastic band.

Wrap a few thin slices of crusty bread and some Wensleydale (a big favourite with Jim Nelson) or some Yorkshire Fettle, and maybe since it’s high summer, a couple of nectarines or a bunch of grapes. The obligatory bottle of tap water, and you’re sorted.

If you haven’t got any rocket thinnings:

1. Go anywhere that sells seeds, buy a packet (about 99p) open, and sprinkle about half anywhere in your garden, or just a few in a pot or tray your windowsill. You can even grow micro rocket on kitchen paper towels.

2. Wait for about a week. If it doesn’t rain, add a can of water now and again.

3. Pick.

4. Eat.

Delicious, peppery flavour, handful after handful, almost free.

You are now a market gardener in the best tradition of the Raines and Nelsons in our family. (If you’re following me on Facebook you’ll have seen the pictures. I’ll upload them here, too.)Similar Posts:

Contacts and Sunshine

TPP — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:28:58 PDT

Four rolls of this PlusX 125, contacted. They’re a bit heavy, deliberately. It’s easier to pick out the detail when they’re darker. One more roll in this batch to be developed, when the new chems arrive.

These are the 4 rolls of Agfa Vista exposed at Easter and contacted especially for my meeting today. We agreed that it’s not particularly important to publish straight away. That immediate bang-bang live blogging imperative driven largely by digital and our willingness to consume large amounts of things of relatively low significance (me too, of course), is something I’m trying to avoid in this part of my practice. Incubation, gestation and timing of delivery. Crucial.

Colour negative film makes for lovely monotone prints, especially on fibre paper. The blacks are softer; it’s all low contrast stuff. Fitting for the subject matter. Someday my prints will come. Well, I’ll do them myself, but that pun is irresistible.

Three super-quick morning sun prints as a gift for my lunch companion. They really could have been exposed for double the time, but the light between 0800 and 0930 right here, was lovely, and just enough. Doing this is like scooping up the light in one’s hands and holding it, lightly, with the leaf, or feather, or whatever it is. Sharing the exquisite coastal light that falls against my skin each morning feels quite special.

There’s quite a bit more cameraless photography to show, but of course it needs scanning, or photographing, and it’s boxed, awaiting the right time. The portfolio website is being rebuilt, so they’ll appear there, but perhaps you’d like to see the before pictures, like these above? Or maybe see them as pairs? Just thinking aloud…Similar Posts:

Two of My Favourite Things

TPP — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:31:00 PDT

Chris Floyd is photographing his Twitter follower/ees and we’re trying to organise it so I can go along when I’m in London next week. I really hope he can fit me in. See the progress as he uploads the pictures to his blog, and follow him on Twitter.Similar Posts:

Replacing the Jetty

TPP — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 23:11:32 PDT

Way back sometime in 2004, the Swing Bridge on the Tyne opened its engine rooms in a tour part as of what are now annual Heritage Open Days, and, after a deluge of enthusiastic questions, the Chief Engineer offered to tell me more about how this unique piece of engineering works. Many subsequent visits have mapped the survival of this elegant piece of engineering and its battle against the elements, and it’s a great story.

In May 2005, the timbers of the surface of the Bridge’s decks, the jetty, were renewed. Not all of them, just the parts immediately around the central pier, and two narrow walkways along the lateral sections running out in both directions into the course of the river.

The pictures of this Bridge have become markers really, of my development as a photographer, or at least of the conscientious and deliberate application of time and energy and of course, money, to it all. Early pictures were little more than phone quality: 2005 was pretty much the beginning of the digital point-and-shoot revolution so the camera used in the pictures above is a mere 5 megapixel Pentax Optio.

Sadly it would be another year before I started using film. Not that I might have made a better job with film, not then, but if I’d tried, there would be a roll of 36 somewhere, maybe 10 of which might have been half decent, and all of which could have been enlarged to show some detail, some information of use to say, a structural or civil engineer or surveyor.

Most of the photographs taken in those years haven’t survived the impermanence of digital storage. It’s oh, 3 or 4 computers ago, and there are at least 2 storage hard drives dead in their boxes between now and then, and online storage clients behave so badly it’s hard to know who or what to trust. So I choose film for everything important now, and print everything else that I think I might need someday. I urge you to do the same, unless you have a scrupulously rigorous digital workflow and a gazillion Gigabytes of storage. For of course now, each 15 megapixel camera produces whopping big files that you do have to store somewhere, and while memory is comparatively cheap, it isn’t cheap to restore it when it fails.

Other things that have changed? I no longer take pictures out in the mid-day sun, as we’re all urged so often to do. Flat light, the kind of skies with a low cloud cover, dawn or dusk, the right light is so very important. Critical. If it’s absolutely essential to work in this harsh, contrasty sun, a filter would help, neutral density maybe, and if using digital, exposing for the highlights, so something might be brought out of the shadows in post.

But who would have thought these would be wanted, after all this time? So hey, here they are, as they were shot, small, they may be useful. I hope so.

There’s a slide show that’s survived from this period, shot from above on the Tyne Bridge with the little Pentax on a very useful monopod which is missing. I’ll dig it out and post if I can work out how to play it as an animated .gif. It’s fun. And if it’s you who borrowed my monopod, please can I have it back? Thanks!

These are some pictures made at the last evening swing, in early June. The Bridge was opened for one of the Tyne’s river cruise boats, commissioned by a group of medical doctors, celebrating their graduation exactly 35 years before. There are 40-50 ish pictures from that evening, a bit of a soundtrack to go with them, and an interview or two to do, and that’ll become my first attempt at a photofilm. Recording equipment is on its way. I’m a Duckrabbit trainee, now, learning all the time.

Five years. It’s flown.Similar Posts:

July in the Darkroom

TPP — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:08:15 PDT

Most of my recent work has been made using mini-lab developed colour negative film, or paper negatives, so the backlog of black-and-white awaiting hand developing has been quietly mounting. A little work has been made using this Kodak PX, which is lovely stuff, and there’s a similar amount of Fomapan in the fridge of which the one here is a test roll. No idea what’s on it, nor what’s on that roll of Rollei Retro. Eight rolls of 120 including some TMax and a 38 year-old roll of Verichrome Pan, 9 rolls of 35mm, plus 2 rolls of Elite Chrome for a try at stand development. Exciting.

If you don’t do very much film developing, it’s worth taking note that liquid developer goes off rather quickly. That squishy milk bottle of brown stuff came with a box of gifted tanks, spirals etc, and is emphatically off. The brown colour is the clue. Brown developer will clear your film, or actually it may not, but the stop and fix you add afterwards will definitely do the job.

A pack of ID11 lurking in the back of the blackout cupboard, mixed 1-3 makes 3 litres, which is great because the 5-spiral tank for the PX has a capacity of 1800ml. The jug in the background contains what was left over, and that’s a bit dark, but approx the correct colour of fresh, useable developer. Not enough chemistry then, to do the all the film in the upper picture, but more has been ordered from RK Photographic’s Ebay shop, including more ID11 and a bottle of Rodinal-alike. Souper!

The concertina bottle is one of two that contains the drained-off stop & fix, both of which are re-usable. The developer isn’t, unfortunately. That’s why it’s called one-shot.

The little stumpy dev tank on the right contains one roll of Elite Chrome and the rest of the black-and-white developer. Hmm.

The Massive Dev Chart on Digital Truth really has almost every single film and developer combination you might ever need, and most that you won’t. Nowadays I use the iPhone App, which has an inbuilt timer for each step of the process. It even does a little jingle every minute as a reminder to give the tank a jiggle, or a roll or whatever agitation method you use. Fantastic.

Mixical works out quantities of everything. My brain goes like porridge when in the darkroom. It’s a bit like being pregnant: simple maths simply evades. Perhaps it’s the soporific darkness, the rolling running water, Radio 4 burbling softly in the background. If you’re the same, give it a try.

The PX with the ID11 has a blue-ish tinge but it may well be slightly underdeveloped, since the sprocket edges are rather darker than they should be. Nice results though, so far.

There’s a landscape feature in lurking in here that probably needs some 5×4 treatment, maybe even tranny, and quick before it disappears. One of my photographic neighbours is Andy Martin, who is building a darkroom from scratch, and really from scratch. None of this namby-pamby spare room malarkey: a full building job, floor, walls, everything. I’m hoping he’ll go with me, one of these quiet evenings, golden hour, or dawn. We’ll see. definitely worth more visits.

Would you use a lab that returned your 120 neg rolled in an elastic band? Spectrum Imaging is closing its Newcastle Haymarket shop to concentrate on putting your mug on a mug, or your cat on a tee shirt. Four or five years ago, the owner went all crazy over the local Lomo community, producing cross processed livid green or red scans covered in dust and scratches, and that’s absolutely fine of course, if it’s what the customer wants. Great. But his outfit was incapable of supplying a dust-free, grumble-free service to anyone else. Newcastle Lomo has gone too, which is a shame because they were producing exciting work. Somehow I don’t think Spectrum will be missed by anyone.

Choices for colour film developing in the NE currently include RGB in Middlesbrough (who seem to have given up on 5×4), Colorworld in North Tyneside (whose website is currently kaput, but 2 years ago when I was in Newcastle a lot, were absolutely the best) and Digitalab on Stepney Bank in Newcastle, who’re definitely not as good since the frontline staff changeover, but now and again, when they remember, are rather spiffy on Twitter. Current 35mm colour neg developer of choice is Asda in Hartlepool.

Recommendations, particularly for 5×4 and transparency developing, would be great. Mail order outfit suggestions are very welcome if you use one, could certainly do with knowing about somebody to do the rest of the Elite Chrome and the Velvia in my fridge, since the demise of 7day Shop’s DLab7. Please do post your favourites in the comments.

In unrelated news, a Durham Brown Argus butterfly visited my little back yard early this morning. It has a very distinguished bright circle on its upper wing, and mine was a lot browner than the one in the picture on that website. Notoriously evasive, as you can see. It’ll be back: it can’t resist the lure of my luscious broad bean flowers.

A fantastic freecyling person has donated some shelving so there was much moving and reorganising today, and the darkroom has been dusted, mopped, cleaned and tidied. After drying overnight, the above film has been sleeved, ready for contact printing. So that’s next, the contact prints. I may even have some for this fantastic project. At last.

What happened with the Elite Chrome? It was left overnight: 22 hours from 1400 to 1200, then rinsed for about 20 mins in running cold water, then stand stopped and fixed for about an hour each, with the odd shake. Probably didn’t need all that stopping & fixing, but it seemed appropriate. It’s dense, probably too dense to shine the enlarger light through, but it’s not reversed anyway, so would have to be copied, or scanned, or something, to flip it. I’ll post a picture of how the neg looks should any of you like to see.

And finally, the mighty Andrew Sanderson is running his advanced darkroom course in Edinburgh on Monday and Tuesday 12th and 13th of this month, and he’s still got spaces at the super bargain price of £100 per day. Go if you can: I’d love to do it! Tweet or email him, but be quick, it’s next week.
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The Family Cookbook

TPP — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 01:39:32 PDT

Lots of people do them. This one will be ours. Yesterday Connie and I wrote an introductory piece to send out to everyone who’s not (as far as we know) on the internet. She’ll be posting them out this week sometime. If you’ve a family connection, this is your invitation:

Family Cookbook: for contributors

Background
Connie & I have been talking for some time about a joint publishing effort, where she writes the words and I do the pictures. She has a lot of rather good short stories, but neither of us seems to have really begun. When my friend Gill Cawley made a very sweet family cookbook featuring her own delicious cake recipes we thought it a superb idea, so the plan is something similar.

Publishing
I’ve used Blurb before: you create your book on your own computer using their software and upload to a system which allows people to buy copies for themselves. Obviously we would want to get the balance right between top quality and affordability, so initially we’re thinking something approx 10cm square, choice of hard or softback, and running to maybe 50 or so pages, costing maybe £10 per copy. But the size and format would depend entirely on contributions, and on suggestions and ideas from contributors.

Contributors
Anyone with a family connection to any of the Coates or Burrell people, however remote, would be absolutely welcome and wanted. So that’s relatives however close or remote of the Willington Coates family, the Brafferton & Ingleton Nelsons, and the Birmingham and more widely spread Burrells.

We’re including dead people: my grandmother’s famous custard, aunt Sylvia’s favourite Battenburg cake, recipes from the renowned Audrey Burrell, jams from the magnificent Armstrongs, and we have a few vegetarians and many dedicated carnivores and cake addicts.

Tom Burrell is a fantastic cook and has come up with good suggestions about layout. But, and this is very important, you don’t have to be a fantastic cook to have a recipe in the cookbook. It can be your own favourite pasta sauce recipe, or the way to make your own perfect cup of tea.

We have a long history of ‘bait’ boxes in our family, so a section on packed lunches would be perfect too. Sandwich fillings and maybe pie suggestions, anything that used to go in a working lunch parcel in the old days, and/or anything we take to work for lunch now. They’re bound to be different.

Layout
The idea is a combination of useable recipe book and an interesting read for anyone connected to the family, so good pictures and clear descriptions, with a sprinkling of old photographs and family memories will be what we’re looking for.

An example layout would be a double page spread per recipe, with photo on the left and text, recipe and a few words about the author or the ingredients on the right.

There will also be room for whole page articles about individual contributors with a photograph or two, and memories of people who are no longer with us.

Next steps
Tom, Connie and I will be spreading the word around the family. We’ll be printing several copies of this so they can be mailed to people who don’t have the internet, and I’ll be making a blog post, and posting it on Facebook. Please feel free to do the same.

We’ll be spending the next few weeks/months contacting people and assembling recipe content & old photos, and gathering stuff up that comes in to us. By about the end of the year (Dec 2010), we’ll have a sort of editorial discussion to work out how the pages will start to flow, and I’ll begin publishing it, a (draft) recipe at a time, on my blog, with photos, so people can comment there, change or add anything, before it goes in the book.

We’d love you to join in! Send your handwritten recipes by postal mail to Connie, or by email to me brenda@b13.co.uk

Any questions, ideas or thoughts, please contact me Brenda

We look forward to hearing from you.

Here’s how to make an ice bowl like the one in the photograph above.

1. Choose two bowls, of any size, but of a similar shape, and one smaller than the other, and do make sure they’ll fit inside your freezer.

2. On your draining board, fill the larger bowl half full with water. Gently add the smaller bowl and top up with water between them. Add small pebbles or marbles until the levels of the water are to your liking.

3. Water expands as it freezes: put the bowls on a tray to catch the drips and gently place in your freezer. Leave overnight.

4. When thoroughly frozen, add warm water to the upper bowl and wriggle in a circular motion to gently ease out. Put back into the freezer for another hour to set the inner surface.

5. Gently lower outer bowl into a basin of warm water and remove your finished ice bowl. You can freeze again until needed.

6. You can add herb leaves at 2. for a summer salad bowl, flower petals or small pieces of fruit for a dessert bowl, or slivers of lemon for a prawn cocktail.

Enjoy.

And please do start sending me your recipes!Similar Posts:

Steve and a C330

TPP — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:28:17 PDT

Several years ago, someone I didn’t know told me my photographs were utter crap, and that I’d better do something, quick. We had quite a long exchange involving me agreeing and asking how he thought I could put it right. A quick flick through his own work showed an amazing range of grizzly trees, dark copses, lots of ’street’ and this, what he called ‘Cheap Foreign Surrealism.’

Phil Coombes at the BBC discovered Steve Harrison’s street photographs a few months ago, and there was a flurry of excitement through the blogosphere, but possibly not nearly enough. Here’s the slideshow they published:

Steve had moved quickly on to digital and couldn’t understand at all what I was doing faffing around with film and developing. Obsolete, time wasting, money wasting, oh he was far more forthright than that. I argued feebly, and the result was his much loved Mamiya C330 arriving tightly packed and in perfect condition, through the post.

Click through any of the photographs above to see Steve’s story, told in his own words, and the words of Rosie, his daughter. I defy you not to be deeply moved. You’ll need tissues.

Steve’s C330 got me into MF and my own black & white printing, got me into college to start my photography degree, and for that and so many other more esoteric, more tenuous and altogether more important things, I will be eternally grateful.

The camera now has a new owner. Lauren Healey is making work that I’m sure would make Steve look again and again, would make him mutter words of encouragement and very probably, of praise. It’s definitely in one of the genres he likes: quirky domesticity.

So, apart from the photographs I took with it, which are refusing to be found, for now, that’s the story. RIP Steve Harrison, we loved you, and we love your work.

Goodbye.Similar Posts:

Albury Street

TPP — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:58:36 PDT

There’s a beautiful house where this big hole used to be, built now, not unbuilt. Why there was a gap there before in what was once and is now again a prime location is a bit of a mystery.

As much as these things matter (so, not at all), the film is the last of the Agfa Vista, lovely contrasty winter’s day, and the camera’s a nifty little GR1S with a 28mm lens, perfect wide angle, and pocketable for climbing the ladders. Thoroughly recommended for any aspirant architectural progress.

These were taken more than a year ago, and of course the builders are still here. There are gorgeous hardwood floors, three good bedrooms, a couple of luxury bathrooms, all matt limestone tiling and gleaming chrome. You didn’t think it was actually finished, did you? Some way to go yet, but if you want to buy a gorgeous house in one of the London’s most exciting locations, get in touch.

Travelling back to the sacred north this afternoon, taxi booked via @tweetalondoncab, ticket sent by text to my phone. We’re in the future already.Similar Posts: