Tagged: film
Look closer
While I’ve been taking more photos on film for various projects, I have continued to capture digital images for my stock photo portfolio. The differences in making and processing these photos has been striking.
Film photography has proved to be slow and considered, with the expense of film making me think out each frame. The bigger the format, the more time I’ve taken over imaging, processing and printing. Digital photography has shown itself to be fast, full of chance taking, repeated takes of the same image – leading to a huge amount of images to edit and a near-debilitating surplus of choice when deciding which image to take forward to completion.
I’m happy to continue with both. I love the practical, hand-on experience of analogue printing as well as the speed of digital processing. And, of course, the digital images are made for stock image portfolios. I do wonder how long I will keep up with both.
I mainly take photos of my own locality. I’ve found in my walks to shops, to work, to friends, that I see places and views that I’ve missed for years. I think of neighbourhoods that I’ve lived in but haven’t fully known: I’ve missed so much. Also, my neighbourhood is rapidly changing. Housing developments are on the rise. Parks have been redeveloped. Pavements have been widened and landscaped. I want to document it all.
I have used my film photography to document this, with a humble beginning in the form of a photo zine, a format I hope to return to and refine. I want my digital photography to look closer, to document the surfaces, speed and tone of the area. I experiment with blur, grain and colour in these photos. I hope that they can resonate with buyers.
8x10s
On finishing the 5×7 test prints from my first folder of 35mm black and white negative film, I have started making larger 8×10 prints of the most striking tests. I have been making these on 8×10 inch sized paper.
The images are mainly from my locality, with which I hope to make a more ambitious photo zine than before, maybe A6 or A5 sized, but I won’t make any decisions until I’ve properly gathered all the images I want around a particular theme or sequence.
There are differences in method: after testing, I’m pretty certain of which filter grade I want to print with, which cuts time; but with a larger print I can do more dodging and burning to get what I want.
Now that I’ve learned to be less profligate when making test prints, I am making more large prints than before, especially in my second folder. Beyond the next photo zine, I’m not entirely sure of where these prints will end up, but it has been fun making them and watching the results develop.
“Fail again. Fail better.”
I’ve just had a bad day in the dark room.
Trials and tribulations with three 35mm canisters of black and white film. Two turned out not to have wound on in my camera. One wound on badly to the developing reel. As a result, all three rolls of film are lost: images, ideas, moments; gone. I took a deep breath, cleaned up and went home.
My 35mm camera is new (to me) and I’m still getting used to it. I’ve lost rolls in it before, in much the same way as when I was getting used to my large format camera: I’ve lost a lot of 4×5 film sheets too. But with practise I’ve made less mistakes.
I remember taking a holiday in Japan some years ago. I found to my joy and amazement, that film was extremely cheap. My camera, a Chinon SLR that I had used regularly for some years, had never had so much film put through it in a short amount of time. I photographed everything: buildings, people, nature, transport, even drains at one point. Photo after photo. I learned so much and had so much fun. I’d learned to handle that camera as well as a pen.
Film nowadays is expensive. Mistakes made in exposure and development are felt so much more as a result, but I won’t stop taking chances, just as much as I won’t stop making mistakes and learning from them. To get to use a camera as an extension of my arm is the goal: pure expression.
On witnessing and representation
Last week, I read an article by photographer Markéta Luskačová about photographing London’s east end markets over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. I was struck by a quotation at the end of her article by her fellow photographer Roger Mayne:
“The intention in mind must be to make a record and then an accident of having made the right record at the right time may produce ART”
I thought about this quotation when I considered my photography in the past. Without exception, it’s a representation of my life and surroundings, friends, family, work colleagues; a disorganised recording, in which I have found very little to describe as “art”. Sometimes, I’ve referred back to the odd image to show the passage of time, but I’ve found, much like my TikTok running videos, that I’ve often shot away from where change occurs.
Recently I have been more deliberate in my photography. I’ve been trying to shoot slower exposures to get deeper focus, even with a little motion blurring. Indeed, I’ve been (self) consciously trying to make “artistic” images; something beautiful out of my surroundings. But Mayne’s quotation made me reconsider this: what about recording the world around me as straightforwardly as possible?
I often think of Don McCullin advising nascent conflict photographers to shoot their surroundings rather than aim for far-off conflict zones.
“Young people often write me letters and ring me up, saying they want to do this or that, and the thing that most annoys me is when they say they want to be a war photographer. I say, OK, if you want to be a war photographer, go to the inner cities in England. You don’t have to get on a plane to the Middle East or wherever. There are social wars in our cities: homeless people, poor people, people begging outside of banks. You will find the most incredible poverty and that is a war as big as any other.”
I wonder if such observation would have seen Brexit coming, and how it would currently show the current flag-hanging in various neighbourhoods. I wonder if, like Ms. Luskačová, I should just wander up and down my neighbourhood with my camera and record anything that interests me.
The songwriter, performer and activist Nina Simone said that as an artist:
“I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty.”
In this world, this city, these streets, there’s a lot to reflect on. Back to work.
Photo-zine number one
Since returning to the darkroom, I’ve been trying different methods to sharing my photography with others. I have used social media, home display, independent sales and art fairs, but I was wondering about a small, tangible way of sharing images. It was a social media post that introduced me to art zines and I was hooked.
The art zine examples in this post displayed prose, poetry and illustration. I’d seen zines from years before concerning football teams and music. More recently, I’d seen photography zines in small publications, which inspired me to do my own.
The simplest method I had seen showed the folding and cutting of a single A4 sheet of paper to make an eight page document.
Once made, I numbered the pages and set about collecting images.
I had wanted to feature the black and white 35mm images I had been printing and had been considering themes, when I realised that the majority of my photos had been of family or my local area, so I went with the theme and title, “Round My Way”: images of my locality.
I took the first eight images I liked, scanned them and sequenced them on an A4 document in Photopea. On first printing, I realised that I’d have to do some move-arounds, then reprinted. I did some titling and there it was.
Out of order…
In order…
…and complete!
At the moment I’m working through cutting them to size, folding and cutting. I’m definitely going to make more. There’ll be different techniques in themes, editing, formatting and printing, and even media, but this is a process that I am excited to continue.
Start to finish.
Welcome (back) to the dark room
After years away, I rejoined a dark room late last summer. It’s been a very happy return, and full of learning moments. In my few visits so far, I’ve been keeping a notebook on my work: here is a list of what I’ve learned so far.
Get a move on. I enter the dark room, take a deep breath, think about what I’m going to do today, peruse the library of photography books and – no. There’s a lot to do, like mixing processing or developing chemistry, setting up the equipment I’m aiming to use, getting the right negatives to make prints out of. And time always seems limited, so it’s best to get on with it.
Take your time. This may seem like a contradiction, but when developing and printing, it’s best to work methodically and not to cut corners. The things that may take time, like checking the exact aperture on the enlarger, making contact sheets for every negative and having a good look at your results save time in the long run. Taking breaks keeps your energy up; use the time to take progress notes on your work.
Think about paper. I have large matt sheets for making contact sheets. I may not use them again. My fingertips, especially when using the latex gloves for the dark room’s wet area, could barely tell which side was the one for printing on. Most frustrating. Pearl finish is the way to go – for me, anyway.
Music is necessary. (Or maybe not.) Well, this depends. My first regular dark room practise saw my working with headphones connected to my iPod. One dark room I used had BBC6Music on throughout the day, which was very welcome. Here, we have a high end stereo system and a plethora of CDs. Pink Floyd’s Animals works brilliantly. Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life bursts with energy. Other albums had me wondering which track I was on, breaking my concentration on developing. Silence is sometimes welcome. So, swings and roundabouts.
I’m loving this. Being back in the dark room is a delight. It’s been fun to remember techniques I built up and great to be making new prints. It’s also exciting to be thinking about what print making is going to come on 35mm, medium format and large format film, along with which paper and what developing techniques I am going to use in future. Each day spent in the dark room is an extraordinary learning experience. It’s great to be back.
Medium cool
I was given a twin lens reflex (TLR) camera by a friend in my camera club some years ago. She’d had it repaired, but no longer used it: I was flattered to receive it and used it alongside my 35mm and digital cameras.
Since unearthing eight rolls of undeveloped 120mm medium format film, I’ve been getting them developed at various printing shops. The resulting photographs depict travels, friends, architecture and the odd sculpture: I’ve been scanning the results and posting them on various platforms. It feels like the first time that I’ve really considered the images this camera can take.
In about half the images so far, mottling has appeared, maybe because of the amount of time between exposing and developing, or printing techniques, or mistakes on exposure. The single roll of transparency film contains none of this, which may point to more use if this in future, but the compositions and detail have been fascinating.
This image from downtown Austin, Texas during the South by South-West festival in 2015 shows such mottling. I love the detail nonetheless.
This is from the same festival (and I have no idea how I found myself on this rather exclusive-looking part of the stage). I’m not sure about the quality of this composition, but the focus on faces and stage architecture are appealing.
Kitsch? Cliched? Naff? Maybe, but I like this juxtaposition of a mocked-up Checkpoint Charlie and the McDonald’s restaurant from a trip to Berlin in 2015.
More mottling, sadly affecting this print of Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin on the same trip. I’ll return someday and take this again, probably on transparency film.
Other images I’ve yet to scan in show at times hurried shots, blurred focus and skewed compositions. The TLR is not a snapping camera, at least not without practice: consideration and time must be given to exposure, focus and composition, which can result in some glorious images.
While I continue to develop medium format films and add their images to my website, I see myself using this camera more often in future.
Eight rolls of film
Amid the sorting through boxes, files and notebooks, I have just come across a box of exposed film rolls. Six are 120mm medium format, two are 35mm, all are filled with images from holidays and projects from… when? 2015? Good Lord! Exposed, wrapped up, boxed up and hidden away for over two years. I wonder if they can still be processed. I also wonder what the images are; it’s been so long since I took them.
Meet our heroes
These are the most recent rolls of film I’ve exposed. Since then, I’ve used digital cameras exclusively, but this situation may change soon. Previously, I worked with both media: while getting used to the digital workflow, I enjoyed taking film photos and sending the films to developers, for colour images; for black and white film, I loved spending the day in the darkroom, either at the now-closed Stables Gallery and more recently at the Photofusion centre.
Other projects, day jobs and life in general got in the way of regular film use. I’d also got deep into digital imaging: my Fujifilm X-Pro1 was being put to regular use on holidays, at gigs and in street photography. But developing these rolls of film may see my using film photography again.
I love the detail in my twin lens reflex viewfinder and on a medium format image. I love the flare of light across the exposed roll of 35mm images. I haven’t experienced this in over two years. These eight rolls of film may bring that experience back, maybe strongly enough to continue shooting on film in future. We shall see.
On music
The finished article
I was travelling in my friend’s car. We were listening to my CD of Bryan Ferry’s Boys and Girls. As he drove, he pointed out the note contrast between the end of opener “Sensation “and the beginning of the next track, “Slave to Love”. “Listen,” he said, “I just love how that chord answers the other.”
I’d never noticed what he pointed out and yet, I had always noticed how the one track following on from the other just felt right. Sound affects.
I’ve always loved music. I remember having my first go playing a record on my own for the first time (David and Ansell Collins “Double Barrel) as a child. I remember being mesmerised by the bass line loop of Bob Marley’s “Exodus” at a house party a few years later. I remember throwing my head around in a darkened sitting room to The Police’s “One World (Not Three)” as a teenager. I remember waking up to certain tracks playing because I slept with the radio on in my 20s. I remember being so shocked by a bereavement that I couldn’t listen to music for months. I remember being so upset by a break up that I could only listen to a particular genre for weeks afterward.
This love of music came back to me with the belated discovery of a new track on an old album: “Happy Cycling” by Boards of Canada from their Music Has a Right to Children long player. I only noticed this track recently, because for years I’d not listened to albums in their complete sequence on my MP3 player. Since hearing it, I’ve listened to it while psyching up at the beginning of my commute, relaxing during lunchtimes and winding down at the end of the day.
Over the past few years my MP3 listening radically changed my appreciation of music. I’d always skipped one or two less favoured tracks while listening on vinyl, but with my belated discovery of the shuffle button, I began to listen to my favourite tracks in a never-ending, constantly-surprising, context-free jukebox stream.
I think it was my friend’s enthusiasm over two less favoured tracks from Boys and Girls, which I tended to skip and leave out of the shuffle stream, that turned me back to whole album listening, along with Julia Cameron‘s exercise in The Artist’s Way, in which she encouraged people to sit and listen to one whole album’s side in order to fully appreciate it. Listening to Boys and Girls in full later, I realised how one track on its own may not be so appealing, but in relation to other sequenced tracks would make perfect sense: it was part of a whole.
My appreciation of music always used to be like this. I remember leaving school and walking to Our Price, buying a record on occasion and taking it home; looking at the sleeve as I played it through the first time. There was nothing “collector-ish” about this; this was just how it was. One would buy an album and listen to the whole thing. Now, I find myself doing that again on MP3; really listening to a whole album, it’s opening tracks, its peaks and troughs, its closing tracks. Good, bad or indifferent, a whole album has its own sense. With this deeper listening, I’ve been discovering that every track would be there for a reason: all killer no filler, so to speak.
This respect for musicians’ work dovetails with a respect for creativity. As a young record buyer, film goer or book reader, I thought that these works just appeared fully formed; not imagined, written, worked on, reworked on and sometimes abandoned before the best work was released.
Also, I learned through listening to back catalogues that all these artists started somewhere: they learned, practised, wrote, rehearsed, made demos and made more demos before their first releases; before they hoped to release an album…
This really struck a chord with my own creativity, be it in writing, photography, drawing or filmmaking: one doesn’t produce fully formed works. They are planned, worked on and refined before they’re shown to others. Many mistakes are made, which one aims to learn from. Creators in any field have had to work and work to get to the point of making something good. And when they fail, they keep working.
The stories that circulate on creativity highlight inspiration and overnight success, but each of the fields I love depend on hard work: showing up each day and working towards completion. See you at work.
On writing
Some writing. Not mine. But one day…
Since finishing and screening the film last year, I have spent quite a bit of time levelling out in the wilderness before settling onto a new path. For the past few months, I’ve been writing regularly again.
In the past, I’ve found writing difficult, frustrating and unsatisfying. When writing, I’ve been impatient with progress, unmethodical in my approach and sporadic in writing bursts: it really has been my own problem. After much meandering, I am in a much more satisfying groove.
The meandering after the film took in writing all that came to me: radio plays, short stories, television pilots, even the odd poem. I’d follow each project to a certain point before losing interest and starting on the next big thing, wasting more paper and time.
Three factors got me back into gear:
- Writing morning pages. I got back into Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way again, most particularly the practise of writing three pages of free prose each morning. I wake up a little earlier than normal, make a mug of coffee and write. I have done this for long, but inconsistent periods over the last few years, but this felt like the first time I actually got the process. After the third page is completed, I feel cleared out and able to get working. I find writing the morning pages as refreshing as a good night’s sleep.
- Lucy Hay’s Bang2Write blog. “5 Reasons Why Haven’t I Made It in Film (Yet)” answers various writers’ complaints and enquiries about why they haven’t reached the top of, or even stepped onto the career ladder. One thing Ms. Hay advises is the writing of feature screenplays as a way in. This sparked an interest in me: my love of feature films got me into film making and the idea that talent spotters were looking for this work gave me a renewed aim.
- The film itself. Making Fluid was difficult, lonely and fascinating. The process of writing, producing and directing the film was the steepest learning curve I’d ever faced and as I settled down from the experience, I realised that I wanted to do it again. I wanted to see how I could write different stories, set up new shots and sequences and work with more actors and crew members.
Amid all this, the excitement started again: I wanted to make more films. Then the ideas started coming and I began to write them down each day, whenever I could. This is where I am now: regularly writing, printing, reading and rewriting. Again and again. And for the first time, I’m enjoying it.
Burning Details 
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