Showing posts with label Darkroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darkroom. Show all posts

Monday, November 06, 2023

Last Post

OK folks - don't spill yer coffee. 
It very nearly was The Last Post too, due to some very strange error messages on my Mac. 
It's pretty old, and have you seen the price of a new one these days? 
Anyway two days down the line and a reinstallation of the operating system, everything seems fine . . phew.

Anyway, I'll preface this post with a wise old saw from my old mate Ian 'Unter, of Mott The Hoople.

"Contrary to what various people say, this is the best possible form of music that there ever was, just this . . "


© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,


Regular readers of FB will know that I've struggled with formats over the years and this year has been the craziest courtesy of a couple of people - a certain Mr. Robbins of this parish who loaned me (amongst other things) a long-time lustable (the Mamiya Press [6x9]) and a friend at the forum who asked me whether I could reseal his Mamiya RZ (6x7) - a complete 3 lens, 3 back, AE finder etc etc kit! It is still here. I also did his OM4Ti (35mm) for him too . . . .

Sheephouse Turrets has been awash with cameras, from a Rollei Old Standard (6x6) the above two, various lenses, a new (old) Canon L2 (35mm) and a new (old) Mamiya C330F (6x6). 
It's quite bonkers - there's around 20 useable film cameras in the house and I find myself ever drawn to the old faves - my Hasseblads (6x6 and 645) and Nikons (35mm). 
Don't ask about the LF stuff (5x4") - I've enough film to last my lifetime and zero enthusiasm for lugging two and a half tons of gear anywhere at the moment.

The funny thing is, I would say it has probably been the most photographically active year of my life too, which has been great.
That has come courtesy of two things - the DCA Forum which forces me to produce something every month; it's not like they have me in a straightjacket or anything, but being nearly the ONLY ambassador for the DARK (room) ARTS, I feel I have to keep the side up. 
The other thing is The Thursday Occasional Club, where Mr. Robbins and I head out into the wilds of this 'ere neck of the woods.
It's a day of talk, laughter, great company, cameras, film, and (to me) a feeling that we're almost like the last two Neanderthals in a world of Homo Sapiens.
 
Despite the 'analog revolution' how many people do you know that use film? 
My answer to that is very very few.
Even in Brussels on holiday - a city that isn't exactly quiet - I spotted ONE Pentax ME. 
And that is it. 
Maybe we all come out at night . . I dunno, but it does feel to me that the world is getting smaller.

To this end (game) I've been thinking:

"What the fuck is going to happen to all this stuff when I pop my clogs?"

And it's not just the ever increasing 'burden' of camera stuff, it is (to my mind) THE WHOLE POINT OF DOING THIS
To wit:

THE PRINT

Y'see I find myself thinking a lot about how in another 20 years, I really could either be pushing up the daisies or can't be arsed to go through the lengthy and increasingly punishingly expensive process of (ahem) "traditional photographic practice".
To wit (yet again) so what happens to my 'legacy' (as it were) of decades of printing . . will I be bothered to care about it, or, on a darker note - how do the people that I leave behind, deal with it?
 
Bet you've never thought that before

But you will, and hopefully now you will be concerned, because you have put so much effort and skill into this whole creative effort, producing these smallish bits of time and paper which are a total reflection of your personality, that it really has to mean more in the great scheme of things than meeting an acrimonious end in a skip.


© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,
London Circa 1965.

Oh I know, photos survive - I was reminded of this recently when I uncovered a photograph of my recently departed sister with our family friend AJ. 
Maggie was about 14 and on her arm is the biggest fecking parrot you've ever seen. 
It's a family photograph and was a surprise to her daughters who had never seen it before. 
Family stuff tends to survive, albeit in an incredibly truncated version - and that is fine, because something will hopefully sail onwards. 
But creative stuff - that's a whole different kettle of fish - who wants it? More to the point, who is interested? 
Well, if you're a well-known photographer, someone somewhere is probably prepared to store it in perpetuity (and even more so if they can monetise it!)
But if you're a smalltown, Joe Soap (like me) who produces interesting (to my eyes) work that no one knows about . . . well . . the future is quite bleak. 
It's a fact, that despite all these well-meaning bits of nostalgia (like the 'return' to film and indeed LPs) the world is ever-increasingly becoming less grounded in physical stuff.

At the start of the year I thought:

I know, I'll print at 9.5 x 12" and store them in archival sleeves and that way someone at some point will think they have some worth rather than just chucking them.

But then, you're casting forward a huge burden of responsibilty on future generations, and, again, who's to say they'll be interested, or even have the space?

It's hard isn't it.

Please excuse me whilst I grab a cup of tea.

Certainly, printing at that larger size suits Medium Format.
There's no two ways about it, an 8x8" image on that size of paper screams gravitas (and also looks beautiful if you have been careful).
But the 35mm stuff . . yeah. 
Well . . . 

And so with much chin-scratching did I realise that the vast quantity of 35mm stuff I have, was destined to remain forever just a tiny, squinty thing on a contact print, which is ridiculous when you think about it!
I've got a daft number of 35mm cameras and lenses and I don't even consider myself a 35mm photographer! 
I've got thousands of 35mm images, which, whilst pretty stupid looking on a contact, surely must have meant something to me, in that I actually took a photograph of them.

The Medium and Large Format stuff is easy to deal with. The worthwhile, printable images are all too easily visible (though of course you can revisit at a later point and something might catch your eye that you didn't consider in the beginning) but 35mm stuff?
Well if you were to print everything you fancied printing, at sizes like 8x10" or even 5x7" you're still creating a VAST amount of burdeny-stuff. 
That's a new phrase btw - B-S.

It's a prickly pear isn't it man-cub?

Let me rewind a bit to a recent trip Brussels.

WTF Sheepy are you off on one again?

Well yes, y'see I discovered (well actually he's been there a few years) a most wonderful shop. 
It is called Avec Plaizier. 
You can find their Instagram here

We've been in his shop before, but this time (on a chucking wet morning) with a Canon L2/35mm LTM Nikkor around my neck and a subcutaneous feeling that there was little point in me carrying it, all of a sudden I had a revelation.
And it literally did land with a massive CLONK in my head.

Postcards


© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,


My goodness it was so obvious. 
All those years of weird pictures - print postcards
They're small (ostensibly 6x4" but in these metric days 10x15cm) but they're handleable in a way that even the smallest arty print isn't.
There's no bull with a postcard. 
You're not handling it with kid gloves; it's there to serve a purpose. 
Yes it will get damaged, written on and (if fulfilling its destiny) will travel somewhere and end up as a skidder under a posties shoe, or (hopefully) ultimately be pinned to a noticeboard or attached to a fridge, or even end up framed. But the thing is, it is out there, like some subversive entity, disseminating your mad view of the world and passing through the hands of others.

I was in such as fever as to be nearly breathless.


© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,


OK, back to reality and an order to place - I was determined. 
Not many places stock that size of paper, and indeed as far as I can see, my only choices are Ilford MGRC and FB and Ilford Portfolio. 
Harman don't even produce it as Kentmere; see what I mean about the world getting smaller?
Years back every manufacturer produced it. 

Biting the (expensive) bullet I ordered some Portfolio from Process Supplies (who I love by the way - a proper old-school, knowledgable company [who else would tell you that Ilfospeed is now discontinued and they're running down stocks?]). 
Incredibly with Portfolio, you're nearly 70 pence a sheet for this size. 
I will say though, never having tried it before, gosh it is good. 
It's pretty stiff and will dry relatively flat though that is dependent on relative humidity - mine developed a temporary bow on a very very wet weekend, but it returned to nearly normal after. 
The emulsion is the same as Ilford MG, this meant I could produce ad-hoc test strips with my Kentmere paper as there was no way I was cutting a sheet of this stuff up.
I also decided, seeing as I really want these small worlds to last, that I'd double fix and selenium tone them. 
Quite a lot of work for something so small, but you know what, I feel it is worth it.

Gosh, you can even get Secol postcard sleeves (and acid free rummage boxes) to protect your masterworks too.

Of course, being postcards you can print as many as you like - once you've nailed the original print, make notes on the back, and that is your reference. Store it safely if you want, but if you want to bang out 10 copies of the same thing you can easily do so. Traditional photography, is, after all, a semi-industrial process!
As a size, 10x15 is a cinch to handle. 
5x7" trays and you're laughing. 
What could be easier?

Anyway, here's a selection of some of my more, how shall we say, esoteric photographs. 
I trimmed the borders off for the scans, but for all of the actual cards, I am using a border of 5mm Left and Right, and 4.5mm Top and Bottom. 
My lovely old (gifted) Leitz easel is wonderful for this.


© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,



© Phil Rogers, Dundee, Ilford Portfolio, Postcards,Analog Photography,Black And White Printing,Darkroom,


As this is a work in progress (and seeing as Ilford stopped printing the Postcard stuff on the back of them) I still haven't physically trialled one in the postal system yet, but I intend to. 
You get proper 'PostCard' rubber stamps and a wealth of archival inks to rub them up with - I've got one on my Christmas list.

Maybe Portfolio is too much?
It would probably be cheaper producing them with an inkjet, but I don't own one, so for the moment . . . anyway, I just like printing, so I'm not going to let a squirter spoil my fun.
I'll maybe get some Ilford MGRC and try that too and see what happens.

Anyway, I can report that to me they are a success and have a lovely uniformity to them which I've always felt was lacking in any 35mm prints I've ever made. 
It is a new way forward and I do believe I will adhere to it.

Give it a go if you can - they look (AND FEEL) really good . . honest.

Until the next time, TTFN and remember to be kind to that old man stuck up your chimney.
H xx



















Saturday, January 14, 2023

Afternoon Delight

Q: Got a ton of old negatives that you have not a clue what to do with and you're worried about the Cost Of Living Crisis and energy coasts?

A: Get yourself a darkroom - simple as that. 


Morning folks - you know it says something when the darkroom is the warmest room in the house, but this Winter this is proving to be the case - jings, even Olive Oil solidified in our kitchen!
  
But it is very different in the darkroom - I can snuggle up tight in there, heating myself with nothing more than a constant temperature (it used to be a wine cellar); the intermittent use of a 250W bulb; one 15W safelight and the white heat of creativity 😎.

It works a treat

Grey days drift away in a flurry of activity lit red. 
Ice on the windows? 
No problem, hunker down in the darkroom and learn.
Sun not risen at all today?
Take up thy fixer and walk (or kneel in my case).


© Phil Rogers Dundee, Monochrome Printing, Darkroom, Ilford, Foma,Black And White Printing,Craft,Kodak Selenium Toner,Secol Archival Sleeves
5x4" Negative,
Fomabrom Variant 111, Kodak Selenium,
Adox Neutol NE Developer


Regular readers will know that when I was a young man, pretty much what I wanted to do with life was print. 
Regular readers will also know that what happened was not what I expected and economic circumstance led to an entirely different path. 
Well, with a change in life circumstances, that has now changed. 
I can print . . and not only that, but I can print what I want and when I want to. 
It's marvellous.


© Phil Rogers Dundee, Monochrome Printing, Darkroom, Ilford, Foma,Black And White Printing,Craft,Kodak Selenium Toner,Secol Archival Sleeves
Various 9.5 x 12" prints in Secol sleeves


To that end, and as mentioned recently, I have tried to standardise an archive, and it wasn't the easiest matter.
The problem hit me when I (after much faffing and measuring) printed an 8x8" image from my Hasselblad on 9.5x12" paper. 
I was, to coin a phrase, knocked out
It wasn't so much the sheer image size, but more the print now gave real presence to the Zeiss lens. 
I hadn't been expecting this, after all I had printed on 9.5 x 12" paper before, but this was something else.
I repeated the exercise with the Rollei T's Tessar, and the Minoltor Autocord's Rokkor, and whilst they were good (really good at times) neither had the sheer grit, micro-detail and subtle greys of the Distagons and Sonnars, and Biogon.
I then repeated the exercise with images from my Large Format lenses. 
To say this was a revelation is a bit of an understatement
A 5x4" negative printed on bigger paper with a decent border is a thing to behold.

I have to precursor that though, with the following: 
Up till now, my LF enlarging lens has been a nice 80's-ish 150mm Rodenstock Rodagon. 
It's been fine (despite the obvious scuffs on the front and the back - the latter I believe robbing me of a decent amount of quality) but always left me with an itch I really wanted to scratch. 
To my eyes, every print I have ever made from a 5x4" with the Rodagon has just not had the chutzpah you're supposed to get with Large Format photography. 
The lens was effectively free with my DeVere (God Bless Mr. MXV, wherever you are) and I always just accepted that (as has been written many times) MF and even 35mm lenses produce 'sharper' results than LF. 

Hmmm, well . . . he said stroking his chin. 
I was having a butchers at enlarging lenses on Ebay one day, and, because I believe a lowly 100mm Vivitar is the best enlarging lens I have ever owned (yes, over Leitz and Rodenstock, Durst and Nikon) I came across a 135mm one . . for £32. 
That's not even a brainstorming, sick-on-the-pavement night in the pub these days, so I thought why not. 
And indeed the thing was a complete revelation. 
All the micro-detail, subtle grey nuances and "overall bollocks" (that's a technical term - look it up - it's in "The Negative" . . page 134) that I'd always thought were there on the negatives, were indeed there, but now writ large on big paper. 
Oh boy was I a happy bunny.

And what, you might well be asking yourself, is the big paper?
Well for 'economical' purposes I decided to get 50 sheets of Ilford MGFB and a 10 sheet sample box of Foma 111. 
Why Ilford? 
Well, the colour head mixing settings for different grades are the same as Kentmere RC (and I had a box of that) so I am not having to slice up expensive fibre paper to make test strips and overall, I would say things match up very well
As for Foma, I have never used it before and I have to say I shall be using it again, which is weird because I am not really a fan of their films. 
The paper though has a different look to Ilford. 
Its surface reminds me more of the sheen on Forte's Polywarmtone which I always loved. AND it looks like Fomabrom and Fomaspeed (the RC version) use the same emulsion, so I can use RC for test strips.

OK Sheepy, wtf about dry-down etc, how can you possibly judge things?
 
Well, it is a complex matter, that, dare I say might well have been over-egged over the years. 
If you read around, dry down is a relatively strange thing, running from shifts in the darkest tones (Ansel's "thud") of a print due to: wet prints vs dry prints; heat drying; malevolent forces; changes in emulsion; alien interference etc etc - told you it was complex. 
I always air-dry my prints and have to say I have never noticed any really significant darkening of images and that is over decades of printing. Sure there is a small (as in tiny) amount, but to say this impacts on the quality of the print, is hair-splittingly hairiness of the hairy kind.
A lot of people have said it is commensurate with heat drying and I can see how that might affect things, but I don't heat dry.


Air Drying -secondhand caravan clothes line and plastic pegs!
Left and Right, Ilford Pinned Back To Back method.
Centre, Sheephouse "'Ang It From The Corner Missus" Method


It's also probably anathema to all the cloak-wearing darkroom wizards out there about using RC paper to make a printing judgement for FB paper, but it can be done. 

The greatest printer I ever knew was Joseph McKenzie, and he could make an exposure/grade judgment call just by looking at a negative. That ability came from thousands of hours spent printing; in other words experience
I'm sure the likes of Robin Bell and all the Master Printers out there, doing this for a living can work in the same way too.
For me, I don't have their eyes, so I will decide on my Grade (which as a starting point is nearly always Grade 3 these days) hack up a bit of RC, whack it on the weasel, expose in 4 second increments, whack it in the developer, develop for most of the proper time, give it a wiggle in the stop, whack it in the fix, and slap the lights on after about 15 seconds. 
I can generally make a decent judgement call from this.

You see, although printing is a relatively easy process defined by care, as in:

You have all the ingredients (assuming you have a decent negative) to make an impressive print.

You have all the ingredients (assuming you have a decent negative) to make a dog's dinner.

The darkroom is the GREAT LEVELLER.
That sounds like the name of the horned bloke from 'Legend' or, more to my taste, the name of the horned bloke from Tenacious D's "The Greatest Song In The World".
Why the Great Leveller? 
Because everyone is using pretty much exactly the same stuff, from exhibitions hanging in MOMA, to a couple of prints stuck up in a local cafe.
The difference between famine and feast is your care as a printer. 
You have to be precise and consistent
You have to take care with each stage (yeah I know what I wrote above about my test strips, but I can say that because I have been doing this for a long time).
But the thing is, printing ISN'T rocket science. 
It's a craft skill, like crochet or knitting and anyone can learn a craft skill.
It truly is an egalitarian process.
And whilst these days it is considered to be a luxury craft skill, and boy can it be frustrating when you make mistakes with a sheet of paper costing a couple of quid, on the whole, it is FUN
And educational. 
And, I believe, life-enhancing.
It improves you as a human being, because the care you take in the darkroom, can lend itself to run and rummel of every day life too. 
The precision, order and concentration rub off. 
They really do!
But that is me heading on another of my Sheephousian metaphysical borrocks convos, and we don't want to go there.

So, to round out, here's some straight scans of recent stuff, printed whilst ice formed on the inside of my house's windows, grey skies cemented themselves onto the general milieu of the British psyche and people started another year in a great state of flux and doubt.
If that phrase applies to you, I am sorry - things will get better, just trust that.


5x4" Negative, 
Fomabrom Variant 111, Kodak Selenium, 
Adox Neutol NE Developer

 
5x4" Negative, 
Fomabrom Variant 111, Kodak Selenium, 
Adox Neutol NE Developer


5x4" Negative, 
Fomabrom Variant 111, Kodak Selenium, 
Adox Neutol NE Developer


35mm Negative, 
Ilford MGRC, Heavily toned in Selenium, Then Bleached in Ferri.
Firstcall MG Developer


TTFN old fruitcakes and thank you, once again, from the bottom of my heart, for reading.
Be good and if you can't be good, be careful.
Everything is going to be alright.
H xx

Sunday, August 07, 2022

Consistency

Morning folks - it has been a while, I know, but Summer is a time for hanging about in the garden, reading, eating raspberries, y'know, that sort of languidity, but as the mornings are getting darker, I am getting back to a certain swing . . . so, without further ado - onwards!

Now, this may or may not prove interesting/dull however, if you're like me, and have a darkroom, you'll print a fair bit and probably (also like me) have boxes of:

a. Prints

b. Scraps

c. 'Work' prints

d. I'll do a better one next time

However fortunately (unlike dust bunnies, bags of documents to be shredded, receipts, bus tickets, etc etc) they don't breed when you're not looking at them; no, they sit, patiently, waiting to be admired, adored, framed, scanned or, most likely, tossed out in a fit of pique!
And whilst they're not exactly a problem, they become a problem of sorts.


Pigs, Piglets And Runts



I was brought up short by this recently when I had reason to find some prints to take to a Saturday morning 'portfolio' session at Dundee's DCA.
"Hmmmmmm" is what I said to myself as I waded through paper sizes ranging from 6 x 4" to 9.5 x 12" . . ."just where does one start?"

The majority of stuff was printed on 8 x 10" and a mix at that, of Resin and Fibre all from different manufacturers; however the finer looking prints were, to my eye, on the smaller paper sizes. 
I particularly liked a set printed on some really old Agfa MCC FB. It had a semi-warm look to the paper base and the gloss was JUST RIGHT
The only problem though, was that the paper size was 5 x 7" meaning that the images (all squares) were 11 x 11 CM, or approximately 4½" square. 
That is pretty tiny really, and all the more so when you consider that they were taken on one of the world's great optics - the Zeiss 38mm Biogon. 
They were also all shot on a tripod, with the film (Ilford FP4+) being carefully developed in Pyrocat-HD. 
There's no two ways about it, to my eyes this set-up produced a top class negative, with nothing being washed out, really good mids and shadow detail. 
The negatives printed dead simply at Grade 3, with little hand-wafting. 
Ideal is what I would normally say.
But then I printed them small.
Did I say small?
I meant to say dead small.

It seems a bit incongruous to me, that I take all that optical and image quality and condense it to sit proudly on a print not much bigger than yer oldy holiday snaps of yore, but with much less image space being taken up!
Bonkers actually.
These should be BIG prints and hung somewhere in my study, and yet . . . . 

There's something about small prints that I like.
Apart from being considerably cheaper to produce, a 5x7" has a nice tactile quality. Even nicer is the old whole plate size of 6.5 x 8.5".
Where 5x7" feels small in the hand, whole plate feels small but substantial, and in fact in a strange way and to my faculties, actually bigger than 8x10". I've no idea why that is, but it is a lovely format, though very short on choices of paper.

Anyway, all this tomfoolery highlighted something to me - I need to get my arse in gear and print a portfolio of decent images I am happy with on consistently sized paper.
It's no good having some 9.5 x 12s' some 8x10s', some 5x7s'. some 6x4s' all dotted about the place with images taken on 35mm, 645, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9 and 5x4 - it all looks too bitty, and, inconsistent.
So, self soundly admonished, that's a project for The Winter. 
I have a reasonable stock of fibre paper too, including a box of unopened Grade 2 Galerie and a box of Kentmere Matt (lovely stuff) from when Kentmere was still based in Cumbria.
So I could use that up, or, nail my trousers to the Fibre Only Mast, sell my kidneys and go all the same manufacturer - though my choices there are pretty much only Ilford MG, Grade 3 Galerie, Art 300, Bergger, Foma and possibly Adox - and that is it.
The old Agfa MCC fibre is wonderful stuff but I only have it in 5x7 - I would have happily printed everything on that. Adox's version isn't quite the same, but it IS a good paper.
In a world of choice, ye olde darkroom enthusiast is being painted further and further into a distant corner.

Of course, with the way energy is going over here, I might not even be able to turn the enlarger on . . . that takes me back to pre-enlarger days when I tried contact printing Rollei negatives using a sheet of glass and a snooded torch . . . yes, well, enuff said . . . .

Wish me luck.
Till next time, stop skipping and try hopping and jumping instead.
H xx









Tuesday, November 09, 2021

Split

(Started in August 2021, and please beware, because it is probably controversial, daft, thick, thought-provoking [?], polemic, opinionated, wrong, true, interesting and dull all at once. It is also a long read, so be prepared with provisions and a rescue team just in case)

Morning folks - hope you are all a rootin' and a tootin'!
This post is an interesting one, because as I start typing I have no idea where I am going, and no idea what (if any) conclusion or usefulness will come out of it; however as is often the case, I find the keyboard to be as valuable as a psychiatrist's couch, so please bear with me whilst I set the slurry lorry on flick and get spattering all that lovely watery cowy goodness out the back whilst pootering along this particular field.

Putt, Putt Putt . . .
Splat, Splat, Splat . . .


© Phil Rogers Dundee,Leica M2,35mm f3.5 Summaron
Battling Glare, Darkness, Spotlights, 
Full Aperture And A Handheld One Second Exposure, 
The M2/Summaron  Combo Delivers The Goods . . . 
Weirdly.
Proudly Unchimped.


Me and t'missus settled down to watch something we'd recorded off BBC 4 a while back:
Rankine's Photography Challenge. 
I was excited; it isn't often photography is featured on TV, so this was somewhat of an event. 
I munched my Lidl's Digestive and sipped my cup of really rather strong coffee and was genuinely waiting to be wowed. 
Cooo!
Here were the candidates, all fresh faced and toting really not inconsiderably expensive cameras. 
There was a young lad describing how he'd sleep in carparks in order to catch a sunrise; an older bloke with PTSD who said that wildlife photography had saved his life.
I noticed there were others; a healthy mix of all genders, very woke and PC, but to be honest by this stage I'd mentally switched off. 
Why?
Well amongst the pontificating of:

"That's The ONE!" 

"I'd be proud of that!!"

"Get down on the ground and shoot it from there!!!"
 
"Coo, you don't get many of those to the pound!"

(Made that last one up actually) something in me had begun to feel really rather sick. 

There were about a billion shutter activations in the first fifteen minutes. 
Studio flashes like miniature atomic space battles
People 'chimping' left right and centre.
Kids putting themselves in shutterly inappropriate positions - the way people mishandle handguns in films (you know, loose wrist, pointed sideways) - camera as an extension of forearm.
It was snappy, overloaded and packed to the gunwhales with jaunty camera angles and semi-shouty presentation to make it look interesting, and sadly, like two Cokes plus a kilo of candy-floss plus several spins on The Sickener, this fairground ride made me feel the way I always feel at fairs:

Queasy with a capital Q.

So I turned to the missus and said:

'Can we watch something else?'

And that was a shame, it really was, because these people were buzzing with photography
They were truly enthused.
To coin a certain Mancunian phrase from decades ago, they were:

Mad For It.

I wished them well, bade them good luck and with a heavy heart and a sick bucket, switched to something else.

The "something else" was a program which is still in my head.
It was a BBC documentary about Lee Miller
What an extraordinary life, however it was her contact prints from the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald which left a mark. Though not shown closely, what she said in the frames taken with her Rolleiflex said oceans more than a million digital spray jobs. 
And then, the fact that said experience made her pack away all her negatives and prints and not talk about it for years, speaks volumes about how much of herself she put into taking those photographs.
And also how much those photographs took out of her.
You can find out more about her here.

The following night, just because, we watched a documentary about Ansel
To say the guy was driven, would be a slight. 
These days you'd probably say he had OCD.
It came as no surprise that the huge channeling of human spirit, energy and sheer effort that went into the taking of every negative and the making of every print, came about as a result of methodical obsession
I believe this could only ever have been achieved with film and paper. 
He would never have been able to internally and externally transition the piece from "score to orchestra"' (negative to print) with some photoshop moves and an inkjet printer. 
Absolutely no way José.
To watch him dodging and burning was like watching the poetry of great dance or, dare I say it, football. 
It was transfixing, assured and magical all at once. 
A master class in craft skills and second nature.
It was definitely not the nurdling around of a mouse and cursor and ordering some 1's and 0's to: 
"Do THAT!"
It was not some old geezer checking his screen after every shot.

I thought about it and was so stunned by the apparent dissolve between these masters and what passes for photography in this digital age that I had to investigate further.

It will come as no surprise that You Tube is a tremendous source of old photographic documentaries.
Name the crafts-person (gotta be PC y'know) from a bygone age and you'll probably find something about them on there in some form.
From the classic Parkie-style interview, to decent overviews. 
And it is weird because you'll see the overlaps too - great photographers who have gone over to the Light (room) side like it means little to them.
Yet I truly feel something has been lost, and in that loss lies a blackhole that is at the centre of current photography:

The photographer as printmaker.

Bill Brandt (BBC Master Photographers) was a revelation to me. 
I only really knew Bill from a handful of photographs, but in this programme there were countless great images - so stylistic and austere, yet better than anything I have seen produced in 'modern' times.
To paraphrase a conversation in the programme:

Interviewer: "Mr. Brandt, you always do your own printing don't you?"
BB: "Oh yes."
Interviewer: "It is very important to do one's own printing?"
BB: "Yes, definitely, very important, yes . . . because I change pictures completely in the darkroom . . . most of the work is done in the darkroom . . . "


© Bill Brandt Estate


André Kertész? The poet who wasn't technical enough for the American Photography Scene (apparently).
Whilst enamoured with polaroids (technically geeky I suppose) at the end of his life, he produced numerous beautiful images which were all the more perfect for their imperfections. 
I couldn't imagine him chimping at his Canon's screen - he knew exactly what the photograph he had taken would look like. How's that for confidence and skill? 
The post-digital world of perfect, everything in focus from 3" to infinity and then HDR'd to the hilt, would I think have left him cold.
Look at this.


© André Kertész Estate



It truly is exquisite in colour, composition and form. 
A simple sculpture and mirror in his apartment and a piece of Polaroid film.
OK, the smelly wet stage of printmaking was taken away (although remember the 'orrible caustic stuff you use to get with Polaroids . . hmmm) but it is still a print and besides, he'd earned his stripes for decades.
The colours on the Polaroid are ageing in a way like the patina on a piece of Bronze Age metalwork - it is beautiful.

Delving deeper and randomly, I came across a documentary about the British photojournalist Tim Page.
A young man, leaves home at 17; travelling he picks up a camera and gets somehow caught up in Vietnam! 
It is an old BBC Arena called "Tim Page - Mentioned In Despatches"
Unlike other war photographers I have seen, who have dealt with the aftermath in more stoic ways, Tim (in the documentary) seemed to be that same young man fresh from combat, frozen in time, back in civi-street, recovering from debilitating war injuries, trying hard to find something to hold onto to keep him from drowning in the downright ordinariness of 'normal' life. 
He finds some solace in photographing an RAF camp filled with Vietnamese Boat People - there he truly looks at home. 
In his local Charrington pub, quaffing a pint of Charrington's Best Bitter (or so it looked) and smoking a fag, he looked pensive, evaluative; to be frank, out of sorts as they say.
In the documentary he replies to a question (in a Q&A session) about carrying a gun, and explains, that he never really did because guns are heavy, especially when you are carrying 4 cameras, 6 lenses and 50 rolls of film.
50 rolls - 12 or 1800 images as if your life depended on it. 
Finite. 
They had better count.


© Tim Page
© Tim Page


And man did they count. 
Look at the above - one image that sums up the human cost of war. No corpses, but the young man's demenour says more than anything I have ever seen.
If it were digital, there'd be screeds of images, the scene would have been sprayed, broadcast live to a news feed, looked at once and probably forgotten.
And yet here, Tim's skill and eye have rendered the cost, visible on one perfect frame of film; one perfect print.
That's photography. 
He took pictures like he was never sure whether he'd be coming back; fearless. 
Negatives, slides.
I found his images incredibly hard to look at, and yet, to paraphrase him:

". . . there is a lot of Asian softness in them."

You should watch it.
His website is here.

I could go on about the documentaries, but I won't - you owe it to yourself to find them.
It isn't hard.
The above is the merest skirting of the subject though - get looking and thinking.

Dipping on further and looking at my small collection of books, I came to the conclusion that it is the finite quality of traditional photography which defines it

You take a picture, process it, print it, file it. 
It is a one-off artefact - even manipulated via multiple negatives (a la, say, Julius Shulman's astonishingly beautiful architectural photographs) and all the work done in a darkroom to bring it to completion.
If you have never encoutered Shulman and you love black and white (and buildings) you owe it to yourself to seek them out - they're really fantastic.


© Julius Shulman Estate


This was apparently a composite of three negatives, nevertheless it is wonderful. 
The skill involved at all stages to get to the final print is breathtakingly complex.
The printer's skill has not been outsourced to a computer.

The print becomes the full stop on the image. 

The image defines the moment.

Yet I don't think it's really like that anymore.
You might well disagree with me, but to my mind it really isn't.

Have a break - have a Kit Kat.


Aaah, that's better!

I understand there are many concerned and committed photographers out there taking important pictures and I have nothing but respect for them, but the digital rendering is to my mind just convenience. 
It is the 'norm'. 
Everybody else is doing it so why don't we?
You possibly even have little choice with editors and picture people on your back wanting something yesterday.
You can whizz that important image around the world in nano-seconds. 
There is no waiting whilst you send your films back to an ever-awake processing department.
There is no wait whilst you close the door on your darkroom and sweat.
The screen has become the pseudo-print, but rather than that print being put aside in a pile, or brandished in a breathless run to show someone, your image is now a collection of part-remembered photons in your mind's eye. 
Scrolled by contemporaries . . .
In the words of Alex Harvey:

"N. E. X. T. . . Neeeeexxxt!"

And it isn't just to do with how your precious image is stored and presented either; film and digital, obviously they are both utterly different, but to tie things in with my original ride on The Sickener from the top of this 'ere page, it's the sheer ease with which everything can be done.

There used to be an expression 'kicking against the pricks' - whilst the usual interpretation is about authority, I have always thought of it as something that ties in with art. 
Art is struggle.
Photography used to be a struggle.

To my mind though, in ALL creative pursuits, struggle can be beneficial

You strive to do better.

I remember once walking for miles, taking many (so I believed) fine photographs, only for said photographs to be rendered null and void by expired developer. 
It is a thing you only do once. 
It informed me. 
It made me a more careful craftsman.

With digital, you no longer have that. 
You check every single bloody image
Make sure it is perfect on the spot. Just watch the news!
You delete those that you don't like and yet, to quote Tim Page:

"Every day is an assignment. Every picture you shoot, even be it an idle snap; I'm using the word snap, in a sorta very loose context.       
The snap is gonna be valuable."

Snaps are gone with digital - eradicated by the monkey-move and the editorial thumb.

You could argue that the plethora of idle phone pointing that goes on, is the snap.
Well yes, I can see how you come to that, except they're not really, simply because they only exist on a screen. 
They will never  be gripped and looked at again; beery, smoky, greasy fingers will no longer leave their mark. Spitty crumbs of laughter will not mar their perfection.
(As an aside I'll draw your attention to The Anonymous Project - a laudable collection of old slides - their like will never be seen again.)
In my family, we still sometimes drag out prints and snaps from decades ago and laugh and talk and reminisce - it is a wonderful, unexpected and oft overlooked aspect of being a (semi-modern) human.
Who would have thought, when photography was first being developed and people had prints made for relatives, as keep-sakes, records of their lives, that those simple (yet vastly complex) pieces of time would come to define their lives?
Identity was established; some kind of social grace was incurred - all dolled up in your Sunday Best, and thence on to the snap, the wonderful delineation of humankind in all its incredible variety.





Look at at the above - a chance physical find whilst doing some tidying. 
That's me in a photo-booth 40 years ago! 
A close relative to Kertész' polaroids, technology wise. 
It exists in the world. 
It isn't a collection of data lost on some hard-drive, or more likely, deleted as no longer relevant.


Can you see where I am going?
Far from furthering an art-form I love; far from moving it forward, I feel that creatively and archaeologically, digital has pretty much killed 'photography' (as I know it) stone dead.
Cuddle up with that phone and scroll through all those pictures - oh can I see that one with the rubber chicken? 
Oh shit, where the heck is it? 
Och God I can't be arsed . . . . 

But then maybe that is just me. 
A rank amateur living on the East coast of a very small country - what do I know? 
I'll bet most people disagree with me. 
But I look around (a lot); I trust my eyes and my observation of quality and bog-standard snappery from ages past, and I see little now that surprises or impresses or pleases me.
What a feckin' B.O.F. eh!

And then there was a pause during which yer author rubbed his chin and thunked.

Re-reading the above a month or two later, I decided I was being too polemical, too pontificating and too downright opionionated, so I decided to put some distance between me and 'it' and see how I felt a while later.

So, a month or so later:

I feel that what I wrote makes me sound like an arse.
What right have I to pass judgement on one of the world's most popular hobbies?
How can I stand here and say that truth is no longer what it used to be? 
You could argue that photographically truth was never what it was.
I can totally see where you are coming from. 
And yet, I can't quite put the way I am feeling about the current state of photography into words. 
Maybe it has always been thus. 
Millions of images, with maybe one in hundreds of thousands that makes you go:

'OH!'

There currently seems to be no end to the massed ranks of clamour; of images made for pleasure, purpose, or mostly, so it seems, just because you can
The digital image knows no boundaries, and I don't mean in the creative sense, I mean it in the sense that it is an ever-expanding frontier of data assembled into pictures. 
There is no physical limit simply because you don't really need to think like that anymore. 
You are not going into a combat situation with 50 rolls of film. 
You are not limited by the physical length of a roll.
The sky is the limit, and even then  . . .

Even the most careful digi-photographers I know complain endlessly about the sheer amount of stuff they have. 
It is archived and filed and amassed on hard drives or clouds, and it sits there by the myriad, consuming energy in a pointless waste of storage, because nothing will ever happen to photo #15 of the 300 you took of your children playing ball. 
You really won't make that nice picture of a daisy (in macro-mode) into a nice picture for your partner. 
IT IS FACT - YOU SIMPLY WON'T.

They say that traditional photography was environmentally unfriendly in its use of chemicals and resources, but I conject that digital photography is far more unfriendly simply in its power usage. 
Not only that but the traditional photograph impacts environment relatively quickly: a release of noxious chemicals, the results filed away and delved into occasionally; but that is it, the results are yours. Of course you have to factor in the silver mining and plastic production, but counter that with rare earth metals in every camera battery, the plastics in every SD card. 
And you've got to think about the trillions of digital images stored on servers; all drawing energy for their storage whether viewed or not, usually not. 
Some are printed, but they're still stored on physically ultimately fragile devices like hard drives or flash media or SD cards - future landfill.
Of course on the other hand they could also (unwisely) only be stored on cloud storage, where they are entirely at the behest (unpaid, or peppercorn-rent guests as it were) of digital flop-houses. 
An uncertain future! For should owners of said digital flop-houses maybe start charging considerably more, because of power costs, because of hunger for more dosh, for whatever reason, what then happens to a visual history of the latter half of the twentieth, early part of the twenty-first century? 

Yep: 

"Oh that old picture, nah, not going to pay for that." 

"I've got another 30 of the kids, forget about that one." 

Look how truly fragile this digital world really is.

I know we could sit and argue this till the cows come home - maybe you should come around sometime and we could head to the pub.
All of the above reads like it was written by someone who at a certain time of life has become thoroughly entrenched in their thinking and has no wish to look over the parapet. 
Strangely, I wouldn't blame you for thinking so, but also, I wouldn't count myself as one of those.
I am open to argument, but I also know what I like and what I think, and if you are from 'the other side' as it were, my salutations to you - I am not taking a pop, just providing a different slant on what you'll see elsewhere. Hopefully it will make you think about the physical/un-physical fragility of the modern world.

To be honest, my bias towards so-called 'traditional' photography is as firmly entrenched as an old wellie in a huge pool of cow shit. 

You might be able to extract me, but it would be incredibly messy for both of us

Best let entrenched boots lie, eh?





To round things off, the above is a perfect example of why, like Tim Page says, the snap matters.
This was a 'snap' with a Hasselblad SWC/M.
The light was sort of like that - heavy cloud cover and a brief bit of liquid sunshine hitting the path making the stones really stand out. 
I did print the sides down slightly (in a poor fashion) but on the whole it was pretty much like that.
It has sat as a scrap in my darkroom for a year or so. I never ditched it, just used it for setting print borders.
Now I come to look at it properly, I like it.
Had it been digital I would probably have deleted it at the time.
Not saying, just saying . . . .

As I finish, I'd like to say that really, I know none of you, however if you are a printmaker, I tip my tifter to you - you're keeping something vital alive, and if you don't run a darkroom but get other people to make prints from your negatives, I tip my hat to you too, because you're producing something physical.

If you're a squirter (sorry - that's my own nomenclature) well at least you are printing, but as far as I am concerned, it really isn't the same. The skill set is vastly different. 
This being said it doesn't NOT make you a photographer, it's just a shame that the world of modern photography has been skewed away from something that was always its beating heart - THE DARKROOM.

If all you ever view is screens, think again - it is worth the effort to try and change that. Buy a modern Polaroid camera and go and have fun - it will transform the way you feel about making images, and the Polaroids will probably outlast you as well - something for future times. A present from the past.

That's it - thank you for reading once again.
Take care, be safe and watch out for the normal people.