Autumn - No. 3

The third in this series. 

Some lovely red berries taken against autumn colours of the leaves. 

I used a magnifying glass as a closeup lens.

Autumn - No. 2

For number two of my Autumn series,  I've chosen a Holga photo full of Autumn colour.

Autumn - No. 1

This is the first in a short series of autumnal photos taken on my Holga 120 GN.

I do enjoy this time of year. It has everything: cool but not cold days, beautiful colours in nature and cosy evenings.

For this photo I used a magnifying glass as a close-up lens.

It’s another example of the fun you can have with a Holga. You don't necessarily need the right equipment. Sometimes you just need to look at what you've got and think, I wonder what happens if I try that?

More Interesting photo

When a Polaroid camera nails the focus and exposure, the results can be compelling.

This exposure shows that the camera is capable of getting genuinely sharp focus. More importantly, it shows what the film can do.

It’s still not an accurate record of the scene in the way that shooting with a digital camera might be. 

But perhaps that’s precisely the point.

It’s more interesting than that.

Remember what's there

There is something quite extraordinary about the way Polaroid i-Type film renders a scene.

It isn't an absolutely faithful recreation of a moment.

It's more like a half-remembered dream.

The colours are exaggerated. The whole thing has the feeling that an artist must have painted it rather than a camera captured it.

It's a unique recollection of a place that you can't quite put your finger on. You know you've been there, but you can't quite remember where it was.

It reminds me of Roger Waters lyrics:

When I was a child 

I had a fleeting glimpse,

Out of the corner of my eye.

I turned to look but it was gone.

I cannot put my finger on it now.

The child is grown, the dream is gone.

Perhaps that's what I like about instant film.

It doesn't necessarily show you what was there.

Sometimes it shows you what you remember.

Polaroid Magic.

There is something rather exciting about instant film.

You take a photograph and, within moments, you have a unique print in your hand.

No messy developers and tanks. No scanning negatives. No messing around in various software tools trying to turn a negative RAW scan into a positive image.

It was Edwin Land, the designer of instant film, who made the promise:

You press the button and out comes a picture.

I first experienced instant film when my maternal grandmother bought a Land Swinger camera that used peel-apart film. From the get-go, I was mesmerised by the camera, but even more so by the instant print it produced.

More than 50 years later, I now own a Polaroid I-2, a £500 flagship of the Polaroid range.

And the excitement of instant photography hasn't lost any of its edge.

I took this image on Friday afternoon, and I love the unpredictable nature of i-Type film. Every print is slightly different. You don't quite know what you're going to get until the picture develops in front of you.

That's part of the Polaroid magic.

You press the button, and out comes a picture.

Half Remembered

This photo was taken by me in Bristol on my Holga 120 GN.

I used Kentmere Pan 400.

It has all the elements of a classic Holga frame. The weird out-of-focus areas and the inexplicably sharp centre of the photograph where the old cargo ship is moored, contrasting with the ultra-modern building behind it.

The picture looks less like a photograph of Bristol and more like somewhere you’ve half remembered.

It’s really satisfying.

Looking and Seeing

When you're out in the rain, you have no option but to look for scenes that show how the weather is affecting people.

In this photo, a group of people huddle under their umbrellas while the street is slick with rainwater.

If you look you'll see this everywhere.

  

Embrace the Weather

Rain, when you're out in it, can add something to a photograph.

The wet sheen on the pavement, people sheltering under a brolly, all of it helps tell a tale.

This photograph was taken as a snapshot on a vintage 1980s camera, the Ricoh FF3-AF.

Perhaps there is something to be said for embracing the weather, whatever nature happens to throw at you.

A New Camera, and a Very Long Way to Collect It

A friend of mine, Dave Whenham, read my blog post extolling the virtues of a P&S camera, and especially the one I used to have in the 1990s.

I was waxing lyrical about the camera and how much I missed it.

Dave had a Ricoh FF3-AF from the same era and said that he was happy to give the camera to me as a gift.

It took a bit of jiggery pokery, but needless to say I drove 250 miles round trip to have a cup of coffee and a natter with Dave, as well as collect the camera.

Some might say the economics of such a trip don't stack up.

But time spent with a friend is never wasted.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to try the camera out. Dave had loaded a roll of FP4 Plus into it before handing it over, so I had a new camera and a new roll of film to try.

Saturday was a bright morning, and I was hopeful of a good day out.

By the time the train arrived in Bristol, it was lashing it down.

What is it with these train trips and poor weather?

Anyway, I was out. This time wearing my winter wax jacket and waterproof shoes, so onwards to shoot the film.

I chose Bristol because I know it really well, and that meant I could target different areas, all within easy walking distance.

I'd say the camera did a great job. This is my pick of the roll

The Ricoh is a Point & Shoot and, as such, it doesn't have all the dials and controls of an SLR.

But that's OK.

Sometimes you just want to shoot the camera and make pictures.

I relied on the fact that by the 1980s and 1990s, film cameras, especially point-and-shoot cameras, had become remarkably reliable when it came to metering and focusing.

Shooting the first frame, I was surprised to see a red light appear in the viewfinder.

Upon closer inspection, the red light turned out to be an icon showing a mountain.

That'll be infinity then.

The viewfinder is large enough for this type of camera and really usable.

The shutter button allows a half press to lock focus and exposure, but over 36 frames I didn't manage to half press it once.

I simply ended up with an exposure.

A bit of a hair trigger then.

I'd dialled in 200 on the ISO setting. Unusually for a camera of this era, the Ricoh doesn't rely on DX encoding on the film cartridge.

That's good news, as it means I don't have to worry about the camera choosing the film speed for me or having to calculate exposure compensation around it.

The lens cover is easy to slide open when you want to take a photograph, and there are no false-open positions where it looks open but the camera won't actually take a picture, like the LC-A.

The camera also has a tripod mount and a self-timer, so tripod-mounted excursions in, say, a church could be accommodated, although I didn't try that on this occasion.

Auto wind is another feature of this camera.

I know this because there is no wind-on lever or knob, and because the high-pitched scream that ensues when a frame has been exposed is a little alarming when you first hear it.

The mechanism also takes an inordinate amount of time, considering the thing is winding on a single 35mm frame.

Never mind.

No films were harmed in this experiment.

When you reach the final frame, a light appears on top of the camera to tell you so. The camera, however, appears to operate normally until you notice the light.

Some cameras can get 37 or 38 frames out of a 36-exposure film, so I wondered if that might be the case here.

It wasn't.

Rewinding the exposed film back into the cartridge is achieved using a slider on the bottom of the camera.

The motor screams in protest and takes considerably longer than it should to rewind the film.

Once the camera has completed the rewind, another high-pitched noise is emitted over the already screaming motor to tell you.

Nice.

Simply stopping the rewind motor wasn't a design choice then?

There is a flash onboard, but I didn't use it.

So there we are.

A new-to-me Ricoh FF3-AF, courtesy of a good friend and 250 miles of driving for a cup of coffee, a natter and a camera.

I'd say that's a pretty good deal.

 

Bristol and Constantinople

If you walk around Bristol docks, especially Bathurst Basin, you may spot something odd.

Byzantium.

Clearly, this building was built more recently, certainly younger than when Constantinople existed.

I spotted it, raised the Holga to my eye and captured it.

Then I started seeing the architectural motif on other buildings. In fact, it’s everywhere.

I'm no architectural photographer. I'm just a bloke with a Holga.

So just grabbing the shot and moving on is OK.

And that's really all this photograph is. I saw something interesting, pointed the camera at it and pressed the shutter

What Happened Next?

When I look at this photograph I am reminded of the "What Happened Next?" round of Question of Sport. 

I'd stepped out of Illy Coffee in Kensington, London and raised the LC-A to my eye and captured the scene.

So what did happen next? 

No idea, I'm afraid.

Always another day.

Photographed on a Pinhole Camera

One of the things about photography that I have been commenting on in recent posts is the fact that there is always another day. We can always return and try again.

But there is an extension to that. More to the discussion than just there is always another day.

There is always another camera.

There is always another film.

There is always another view.

There is always another time of day.

There is always another chemistry and time combination to try for development.

What all this is doing is giving us permission to experiment in an environment where we don't need to view photography as getting the picture right the first time in the camera.

In fact, I don't think that is a desirable endpoint at all for any photographer.

To pick up on an earlier post, it gives us permission to fail and I think that is liberating.

It seems obvious to me that commercial photographers haven't got time to be messing about and, mostly, they have been given a short time to get the "photo" for the client.

Harry Borden, a portrait photographer who has shot the rich and famous, says that he's typically given an hour for the shoot, of which the subject often messes about, burning valuable time.

So for him, getting it right first time in camera might be important.

OK, so maybe not right first time in camera because an hour is a decent chunk of time, but if the subject burns 30 minutes by being a little uncooperative, the pressure must really be on to nail the brief.

Harry Borden also speaks about the moment that he knows he's got the frame, nailed the brief, and then he starts trying other things. He experiments.

But the constraints of a commercial photographer are miles away from the freedom with which the hobbyist operates.

As a hobbyist there is no client waiting for the photo, no stressed art director screaming for the cover picture for a Sunday supplement.

You have all the time in the world.

You can come back another day, you can try another camera, you can pick a different film, you can choose the golden hour in the morning instead of midday, you can choose Rodinal over HC-110.

There isn't a scenario that I can think of where that isn't true.

Well, perhaps there is.

If you go on an expensive holiday, say to Peru, and you are able to shoot at Machu Picchu, you probably aren't going to go back a year later simply because you weren't completely happy with the photographs.

Preparation becomes more important when the opportunity is difficult or expensive to repeat.

But then again, that's not really unique to the hobbyist photographer. Harry Borden talks about the preparation he does for his client-led shoots. He knows what he is there to do before the subject walks through the door.

Research, in its most basic form, can mean looking at Instagram and Pinterest which might show you the typical photographs taken of where you are going. It might also provide travel information to tell you about the best time of day. Visiting a library might show you a book that provides a completely different perspective for that destination.  You can think about what you want to photograph before you get there.

When I went to Chichen Itza in Mexico, I had an hour to wander around and take photographs.

I found that plenty of time.

The pictures weren't all portfolio standard and they weren't the best work that I've ever done, but enough of the two rolls I shot there were good enough that I didn't feel the need to return to Mexico.

And perhaps that's another important part of this.

The point isn't that we should keep going back until we get the perfect photograph.

The point is that we can.

Perhaps this is where I question the whole idea of needing a camera that gets it right first time.

Obviously, such a camera is desirable. Who wouldn't want a camera that nails the exposure, gets the focus exactly where it needs to be and produces a technically perfect file every time?

But I'm not sure I want the camera making all of those decisions for me.

Maybe that is why I enjoy film photography, when all is said and done.

Perhaps the imperfections are part of the point.

If I use a camera that doesn't always get things right, I have to make more decisions myself. I have to think about the light. I have to think about the exposure. I have to decide where to stand. I have to decide when to press the shutter.

And sometimes I'll get it wrong.

That's OK.

There is always another day.

Another camera.

Another film.

Another view.

Another time of day.

Another developer.

The photograph doesn't have to be right first time, but it will be mine.

Be a Human.

We live in a world where AI is integrated into the tools that we all use. To some people, this is problematic, while others see the trend as nothing but good. Wherever you sit on the discussion, one thing is clear: we are all human beings and we all have a choice.

In photography, we have an idea that the camera doesn't lie and, while that notion has repeatedly been debunked, there is something in that concept that we hang onto.

Modern digital cameras are no more than computers purporting to be a camera. Computers run software and therefore the ability to integrate AI into a digital camera isn't beyond the realms of reality. In some cases, that is exactly what happens.

AI tools are already able to "fix" photographs in camera without being asked to. They can overcome a lack of skill and the physical shortcomings of smartphone lenses by using Generative Image Manipulation. You can handhold a smartphone at 600x magnification and end up with a perfectly sharp picture.

Try doing that with an SLR camera and a roll of FP4 Plus.

For clarity, I don't believe that everything AI produces is worthless and neither do I believe that everything humans do is too valuable to be changed, questioned or interfered with. Humans have been churning out the equivalent of pigswill forever.

I'm sure when the printing press was invented, the Church wanted to use it to benefit humankind by mass producing exact copies of the Bible. They must have been disappointed to learn that pamphlets were also being produced with dirty stories in them.

AI is a tool and we, as humans, must learn to use that tool to our advantage, just like early farmers became skilled ploughmen or we all learned how to drive a car.

There is something in the AI debate that people are overlooking, and that is the belief that the future will be either AI or human, but not both.

But the reality will be somewhere in the middle, like it always is.

Humans can choose to act as humans.

In recent times there has been a move in education away from the Humanities towards those skills that might get you a better job.

So what about those people who aren't interested in money but are interested in writing or painting?

Didn't the great painters and writers of the past rely on patrons and commissions to pay the rent? Weren't paintings by great painters found on the wall in Parisian cafes because the artist had needed a meal?

What happens to creativity when a machine can produce something technically perfect in seconds?

Perhaps the answer isn't to compete with the machine.

Perhaps it's to do something the machine can't do.

Perhaps it's to be human.

Maybe the question that we should all be asking is not whether AI is good or bad, but how much of the decision-making process, in photography at least, do we want to abdicate to a machine?

And that, in the most roundabout way possible, brings me back to photography.

The bit of photography that I enjoy is the bit that I do. All those little decisions and changes to the settings of the camera that bring me closer to producing a photograph, as a negative and then positive, that I have imagined and pre-visualised when I was looking at a scene.

Now, if I fail, the failure is mine.

That's being human, isn't it?

In the film A Good Year, the character Uncle Henry says, "Failure often elicits great wisdom."

Isn't that a human trait?

How do we know what we are trying to find until we fail to find it?

So I implore you all to grab a camera and be a human.

Make your decisions, but once you've done that, live with the results.

Stop believing that if only you'd had a different lens, or the light was better, or you'd dialled in f8, you'd have produced a masterpiece.

Perhaps you would have, but it is by no means certain.

Make the work as a human.

Failure isn't to fail. It is an opportunity to learn.

If the results aren't quite up to your imagined photograph, well, you can always try again.

To Keep Trying

I've photographed this scene on Polaroid film, Fujifilm Instax Wide, 35mm film, 120 film and 4×5.

And none of them have quite been right.

Or, at least, none of them have looked quite how I wanted them to look.

I've changed the film. I've changed the format. I've changed the camera. I've tried different ways of approaching the same scene, but I'm still not quite there.

Perhaps that's the point of photography.

Perhaps we're never quite satisfied with the first attempt.

There's always another film to try, another camera, another way of seeing it. Another opportunity to make the photograph that's in your head.

And maybe that's what keeps us coming back.

To keep trying.

I just want to make photographs

I watched a YouTube video recently in which the presenter set out to give us the hard truth about the state of photography.

Apparently, digital is better than film. Not just a bit better, but better by pretty much any measurement you care to apply.

He also suggested that film technology had effectively reached a plateau by around 1990.

It got me thinking.

I'm not going to argue that my Nikon F75 loaded with FP4 Plus is technically superior to a modern digital camera. It plainly isn't. Give me a modern digital camera and a few minutes with a spreadsheet and I suspect digital will win most of the contests.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I've always found the digital versus film argument slightly odd. You don't hear painters arguing that another artist's work is somehow inferior because they painted on wood rather than canvas.

Nobody looks at a painting and says, "That's very nice, but imagine how much better it would have been if he'd used the latest canvas technology."

Different mediums have different characteristics. That's the whole point.

And photography should be allowed the same freedom.

There's a good example within film itself.

Kodak introduced T-Max. Ilford developed the Delta Professional range. Both represented newer film technology than the traditional emulsions that had gone before them.

But nobody points at someone shooting Tri-X or HP5 Plus and laughs.

Nobody says, "You're still using that old film? T-Max exists, you know."

Because we understand that the films are different.

Tri-X has its character. HP5 Plus has its character. Delta has its character. T-Max has its character. You choose the film because of what it gives you, not simply because it happens to contain the newest technology.

So why does the argument suddenly change when we put a digital sensor into the camera?

There is another part of the "film plateaued in 1990" argument that interests me, too.

Did film actually reach the limits of what was possible?

Or did we simply stop looking?

From the 1990s onwards, enormous amounts of money were poured into developing digital imaging. Sensors, processors, storage, noise reduction, autofocus, image processing — generation after generation of engineers were given huge budgets to make digital photography better.

Film didn't get anything like that.

The market was moving away from it. The investment followed the market.

So perhaps film really had reached its technological limits.

But perhaps it hadn't.

Perhaps if the photographic industry had spent the next forty years putting the same sort of money and research into silver-halide technology, we'd have seen films that were dramatically different from those available in 1980.

Finer grain. Faster films. Better reciprocity. Greater latitude. Better colour. Who knows?

We'll never know.

And that's the important bit.

We can't point to the lack of progress in film after 1990 and conclude that film had reached the limits of what was technologically possible.

All we can say is that the incentive to find out largely disappeared.

But even that isn't really my main argument.

I'm not particularly interested in declaring a winner.

Digital is an extraordinary technology. It is more convenient, more flexible and, by almost any technical measurement, considerably more capable than the film cameras I use.

So what?

Photography isn't a competition to see which medium can produce the highest number on a specification sheet.

I shoot film because I like what film gives me.

Someone else shoots digital because they like what digital gives them.

Someone else might shoot wet plate, Polaroid or something I've never even heard of.

They're all valid.

A painter doesn't need to use the "best" medium.

Neither does a photographer.

Perhaps photography is one of the few art forms where we're expected to choose our medium by reading the specification sheet.

I'm quite happy to ignore it.

I just want to make photographs I like..

Gimme Shelter

Recently I found myself in Bath in a rainstorm. And it wasn't the sort of rain you could work with. It was the kind of heavy downpour that required people to find shelter.

I took this frame while sheltering myself.

I found myself in an arch underneath the railway, looking towards the other end, where a group of people were waiting for the rain to stop.

I knew the picture would need to be quite graphic, with deep blacks and very little detail in the shadows.

So I metered for the light at the end of the tunnel and took the shot.

Sometimes the weather makes the picture for you.

The First Frame

This was the first frame of a 36-exposure roll of Ilford FP4 Plus, shot on a trip that eventually took me to Bath.

I always worry about getting that first frame in the bag. It’s like the photographic day hasn’t really started until I’ve taken it.

It was pouring with rain and the light was awful. I took the shot at f/4 and 1/20th, not really knowing what I was going to get.

The train arriving at the platform near my home turned out to be a pretty good way to start.

The detail is impressive, but it’s the atmosphere I like most. Rain, low light and a train appearing from the gloom.

Not a bad first frame.

Hard Times

When photographers mention frugality or a budget approach to their craft, the conversation inevitably revolves around low-cost cameras, the Lomography Sprocket Rocket springs to mind here, or budget, low-cost film stock. Even when it comes to low-cost cameras, there are those who will search out a charity shop bargain and make use of that.

All of these things are valid. Reducing the cost of photography, especially during the current cost-of-living crisis in the UK, is becoming more and more important to photographers.

I understand the mindset of buying the best camera you can for the little amount of money you have available and taking your photographs with that. A nice SLR, even with a so-called "kit" lens, will take some lovely photographs. Sometimes, using what you have to hand is better than not getting out at all.

One of the things that hardly ever gets discussed when talking about budget film photography is how to save money on developing chemicals. I understand that photographers want to get good results and that they believe this is an area where saving money is a false economy.

However, I have a different point of view.

I have mentioned before that I am a user of Ilford PQ Universal developer. I think the clue is in the name. It's a universal developer.

The chemistry behind PQ Universal has a history that goes back to a company called May & Baker, who sold a related developer under the trade name of Suprol.

Suprol was marketed by May & Baker primarily as a paper developer, but the story doesn't end there. May & Baker were a major photographic-chemical manufacturer, and their technical literature covered considerably more than simply developing prints. Suprol was used in technical photography and, according to recollections from photographers who worked with the product, in commercial black-and-white film processing as well.

There is an interesting historical point here. Suprol wasn't simply something that photographers experimented with in their darkrooms. May & Baker supplied photographic chemistry to the professional processing industry, where developers needed to be capable of dealing with a range of films and processing conditions. There was no practical option of saying, 'Sorry, we only develop sheet film in this.'

Ilford's modern documentation takes a much more cautious position with PQ Universal, specifically recommending it for technical and sheet films while saying not to use it for general-purpose 35mm and roll film. That's their recommendation and it's perfectly legitimate. But 'not recommended' isn't the same thing as 'doesn't work'. So the absence of the 1+29 and 1+39 dilutions from Ilford's current recommendations simply suggests, to me at least, that Ilford's documentation is not incorrect as much as incomplete.

My own experience would suggest that the distinction matters. At 1+29, PQ Universal produces perfectly good negatives from 35mm film, and I've got the negatives to prove it.

If May & Baker's own technical literature was prepared for different forms of photographic processing, and Suprol could be used at different dilutions for different applications, then the modern idea that using a paper developer for film is somehow photographic sacrilege starts to look rather silly.

There is the further dilution of 1+39. This dilution wasn't simply an internet-era experiment. There are recollections from photographers familiar with the original May & Baker documentation that Suprol was used at 1+39 for fine-grain film processing.

I use PQ Universal at a dilution of 1+29. My negatives are lovely, fine grain examples.

At a dilution of 1+29, one litre of PQ Universal makes 30 litres of working solution. I use 350ml for a 35mm film, which means I can get around 85 films from a litre of concentrate. That works out at about 18p per film at £15 a litre. And because I use it as a one-shot developer, every film gets fresh developer and is processed in exactly the same way.

And here is the real cost saving: I don't buy Ilford PQ Universal. There is a company called Fotospeed who produce a product called PD 5. I phoned them and asked if I could use PD 5 in the same way as PQ Universal, and they confirmed that it was a suitable alternative to Ilford PQ Universal.

It's a fiver cheaper than Ilford's product, hence my £15 a litre cost. The Ilford product costs nearer £20 per litre. In fairness to Ilford, that still only makes the cost per film around 23p when developing at 1+29.

To contrast with the standard developer from Ilford, their ID-11 product will develop 10 films per litre when the stock solution is reused. At a tenner a pack, that's a quid a roll! And to get the full 10 rolls you have to increase the development time after each successive film.

I don't keep the PD 5 as one large litre bottle once I've opened it, either. I decant each litre into four 250ml bottles. Before capping them, I give each bottle a small puff of butane into the top. Butane is heavier than air, so it sits above the developer and helps prevent oxygen getting to the concentrate and oxidising it. That way, I'm only exposing 250ml of developer to the air each time I open a bottle.

Fotospeed are worth checking out because their FX30 fixer is cheaper than premium-badged alternatives and lasts well. I make up a fresh litre of diluted FX30 at 1+4 and check the time it takes to clear the film. This is usually around 30 seconds. When this changes to 2.5 minutes, I change the fixer, given that the typical MDC fixer time is 5 minutes, and my rule is that fixing time should be double the clearing time.

Reusing fixer like this also saves money and, in my experience, doesn't compromise quality.

Frugal photography doesn't have to mean cutting corners. Sometimes it simply means understanding your materials well enough not to throw perfectly usable chemistry down the sink.

*Note, the photographs shown in this blog post were taken by me and developed in PD 5 at 1+29.

2 Person Icon and some fruit

When you venture out with your Holga, set to 645, you definitely have to accept a lack of control and lean into the unpredictable nature of the camera and lens.

However, every now and again, the universe aligns just so and the unpredictable and inconsistent Holga produces a decent negative amongst the rest.

I like this photograph because the light is hitting the fruit and veg on the stand outside the greengrocer's shop just right. The shadows surrounding the produce have some detail, but also serve as a frame for the subject.

The focus is spot on and was set using the two-person icon.

A decent photo from a walk roll.

Four More Chances

When I got my first Holga all those years ago, the camera was a Holga 120S. It was supplied with a 645 mask, and the door on the back that lets you choose between using 12 exposures for 6x6 and 16 exposures for 645 had been glued to 645.

The rumour goes that the designer wasn't happy with the performance at 6x6, due to the heavy vignette, and so demanded that the factory leave out the 6x6 mask and glue the number door at 645. I don't know if this is true, but if it is, it was a sensible move for general photography.

Today, most people will want the Holga look: the heavy vignette, the weird out-of-focus areas of the photograph and the less-than-sharp focus. So they all use the 6x6 format, and there aren't many people who use 645.

Recently, I've given it a go.

Aside from the fact that the 645 mode makes the normal photograph portrait orientation, and for landscape you have to turn the camera through 90 degrees, the 645 mode works really well.

I rather like it.

You get four more exposures per roll, which allows for a better choice of negatives when the film is finally developed. And with a Holga, those extra frames can really make a difference.

The photograph below was taken in 645 mode, and I think it has worked brilliantly.

It also occurred to me that the 645 format actually suits some subjects rather well. The portrait orientation gives a photograph somewhere to lead the eye, and that seems to work naturally with this sort of close-up subject.

I set the camera's zone focus to the one-person icon, which is 3 feet or 1 metre, and didn't bother framing too carefully because, at such a short distance, it's not that critical.

The A on the sign is out of focus, while the S and E are correctly focused — or at least as correctly focused as anything ever is with a Holga.

But isn't that the idea?

To embrace uncertainty, lean into the unpredictable and maybe, just maybe, have a photograph that works despite its humble origins?

 

A Gift to my Future Self.

Sometimes the only thing to do is grab a Holga and go for a walk.

I needed to get out of the house. I'd been working on the laptop all blooming day and just needed to be outside. When this happens, the likelihood of returning with a roll of portfolio-standard pictures is pretty remote, but that's OK.

You can go out and just snap the things you notice. The things that catch your eye. There doesn't have to be a plan, a project or even a particularly good reason for taking the photograph.

I loaded my Holga with a roll of Kentmere Pan 100 and headed out.

I'd configured the Holga for 645 mode, which meant I had 16 frames available to me. My Holga has been modified to have a genuine f/10 aperture. I'd also taped a yellow filter to the lens and screwed a lens hood into the filter.

My meter was suggesting 1/40th of a second at f/10. Add in the filter factor and the ISO 100 film really needed to be treated as though it were around ISO 200.

More accurately, given the very limited parameters you're stuck with on a Holga, the film needed a little more development than normal.

So I was out for nearly two hours and eventually returned home with a roll of film on which every frame had been exposed.

All 16 of them.

That's a small victory in itself.

This frame, in my opinion, was the best of the 16. It was the final frame on the roll and was little more than a grab shot.

Technically, it isn't perfect. But it has something else.

It has atmosphere.

I returned home looking forward to processing the film, and that's one of the great benefits of shooting film. You're gifting your future self a surprise.

You don't know exactly what you've got until you develop it.

Sometimes, that surprise is a technically imperfect photograph that somehow says more than you'd have imagined. 

And that is a win in my book.

Film photography, a new approach.

I use a hybrid approach to film photography. I shoot film in a camera, develop the film myself and then, when the negatives are dry, I scan the negatives using a DSLR, an led light pad and a Pixl-ator. 

That work flow allows an accurate copy of the physical negative to be made in the digital environment. 

Further processing can take place in a photo editing suite to convert the negative to a positive and make it look like a photo.

Up to now I've been happy with the workflow and if a negative isn't what I'd hoped then, that's the unpredictability of film photography isn't it?

Turns out that this isn't the case.

So I've sought some help in improving my technique.

Last weekend I went on a day trip and so I took my Nikon F75 loaded with a roll of FP4 Plus.

Given the dreadful conditions, the incessant rain that was falling with no sign of stopping, I dialed in -1 exposure compensation to shoot the film at an effective ISO 250. 

The camera sets the film ISO using DX encoding on the film cartridge. So the only way to change the effective ISO is to dial in exposure compensation.

Anyway I shot the film on my day out, returned home and developed the film, ensuring the development time was adjusted to take into account the reduced time that the film was exposed at.

After the film was hung to dry and then sleeved, I left the "scanning" for a day when I could give the job my full attention.

That day was Bank Holiday Monday.

So I started on with the scanning work. I set my DSLR on to a tripod and setup the Pixl-ator.

So the new process.

The Camera will need to be configured to capture RAW files and the shutter needs to be set to delay by 2 seconds. That way everything has two seconds to settle before the shutter is fired. On my camera there are beeps during the countdown.

When you have the negative in the holder, configure the camera for manual exposure, an ISO of 100 and set the aperture to f5.6. To configure the exposure, you need to switch to "live view" and then bring up the histogram for the live view. Adjust the shutter speed until the histogram is just shy of the right hand side. It's best for the histogram to be just short of the right hand side rather than up against it, which could cause clipping.

Now roughly frame the negative so that it fills as much of the DSLR frame as possible but leave a small border.

Now to focus. Switch the lens, I use a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens, to manual focus on the lens itself. Now on the live view on the camera zoom in to 10x so that you can see the grain of the film. Now adjust the focus so that the grain is sharp. Thats the focus locked in. Zoom out again so you can see the whole negative.

Frame the negative making final adjustments. 

Take a photo of the negative.

Review the photo on the camera and review it's histogram.

Before continuing to scan the rest of the roll, it's worth transferring the photo to the laptop to review it on a bigger screen and preferably in a RAW converter.

Thats the basics of the improvements to my scanning technique, And I'm really please with the results.

Fire, Fire!

I had the opportunity recently to go to a Music and Motorcycle Rally near Stonehenge in Wiltshire. I took lots of photographs of the wonderful array of bikes on display. The amount of time, skill and patience that people put into their machines is astonishing, although perhaps not surprising. These are skilled machinists, fabricators and welders, and their bikes are a reflection of their skills and their owners.

I'll be posting more photographs through the coming week.

But for this post I wanted to show a photograph of something that simply caught my eye.

I was sitting at a communal table with a group of other like-minded motorbike enthusiasts. The organisers turned out to be a motorcycle club from Wiltshire, and large canvas roofs had been erected to provide shelter, with tables underneath.

Bikers are an interesting bunch. They take danger and laugh in its face. Riding a motorbike leaves you remarkably vulnerable when things go wrong, and the SMIDSY (Sorry Mate, I Didn't See You) is always a possibility as is The Song of the Sausage Creature, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote.

Anyway, lots of bikers still smoke.

Given that the statistics would have you believing you're unlikely to reach forty if you ride a motorbike, a few cigarettes probably aren't going to make much difference.

So the organisers had put little fire buckets on each table, half-filled with sand, for cigarette butts.

And that's what caught my eye.

I had the LC-A with me. I set the zone focus to 0.8m, put the camera down on the table and took the photograph.

There was no careful framing or looking through the viewfinder. There was no guarantee that I had even got the focus right,  but it was worth a try.

And I rather like the resulting photograph.

 

Mad Max Vibes

There is something quite interesting about the amount of work, the skills and the creativity of bikers on the custom motorcycle scene.

This trike was ridden to the bike rally by someone who has clearly spent a fair amount of time watching Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior. 

It's the little details that caught my eye. 

The trike rear subframe had been fabricated from scratch buy someone who knew what they were doing, the welds were superb, suggesting a skilled welder and the whole affair looked like it had always been a trike. There was nothing about it that immediately suggested a motorcycle that had simply been converted. 

The Hannibal Lector mask on the handlebars and the skulls add to the vibe.

The army surplus ammo boxes on the back, give the whole bike an authenticity that shouts post apocalyptic in a way that simply bolting on a bunch of shiny parts could never achieve.

Finally the knobbly tyres set the whole bike off.

I took this at a bike and music rally using my LC-A, with the focus zone set to 1.5 meters. 

I'm always astonished that such a low tech camera can accomplish excellent results in difficult conditions.  It was a blisteringly hot sunny day with no shade and I think the little Soviet built camera did a fantastic job of capturing the moment in those conditions.

Most importantly, it captured what caught my eye in the first place.

I am very pleased with this one.

Searching for a Scene

Until last year I had lived in Wales for five years. There were reasons for the move, and I genuinely enjoyed living there. However, I was too far from my grown-up kids to make visiting easy for either them or me.

In Wales there seemed to be a photograph around every corner, and there were plenty of scenes to find a new perspective on the place. The area that I enjoyed the most was "The Mumbles". It was the place that I could simply wander with a camera and just photograph whatever caught my eye. Some scenes I photographed in a variety of ways, using a Holga, a Mamiya C330 and my Chroma Camera Snapshot Instant Edition. This is one of them, captured using my Mamiya C330. I've never felt that I quite got this photograph right. The wind has disturbed the reflection in the water, and that's not quite how I imagined it when I pressed the shutter. Of all the frames I made of this view, though, this one comes closest.

And that's OK, I think. It's not perfect but it does act as a reminder of that Sunday afternoon out wandering along the seafront.

 

Thought for the day

When you are out and about with a camera, it's important to find subjects to photograph. It would seem that this goes without saying, but it is worth reiterating. The thing is, looking at the world through a viewfinder really isn't the best way to experience a place.

Being present, or in the moment as the tropes would have you believe, is really just another way of saying: simply be there.

Don't look through the viewfinder looking for something to photograph. Look at the world. When something catches your eye, use the viewfinder to decide what to leave in the picture and what to leave out. The viewfinder isn't for finding views, but for framing them. There is a real difference between the two.

Go out somewhere, be there, and let the photographs find you. When something catches your eye, the camera becomes a useful tool for capturing it.

Perhaps that's what photography is really about? 

Not searching for photographs, but being sufficiently present to notice them when they appear.

 

The Halcyon Days of Summer

Summer is a funny time for photography, largely because of the increased activity that comes with family during the school holidays, particularly when you have school-age children or, as in my case, grandchildren. It means you have to get out when you can and make the most of whatever time you have with a camera.

This photograph is remarkably, well, unremarkable. But it was taken after a busy day, both at work and with the grandchildren. I dragged the motorbike out from its slumber and headed out with a Holga 120 GN loaded with a roll of Kentmere Pan 100 film. The Holga is permanently fitted with a yellow filter, and I simply meandered through the country lanes near my home in Somerset.

I ended up at St Mary the Virgin Church in the little village of Shapwick. By this time it was eight o'clock in the evening, but being high summer, lack of light wasn't a problem. I set the Holga to the portrait zone, which is approximately one metre, and took this photograph.

The photograph itself isn't really remarkable, but that doesn't particularly matter. Every time I look at it, I remember the motorbike ride, pottering around the quiet country lanes and a pleasant summer evening spent wandering around that churchyard with the Holga.

Perhaps that's enough reason for a photograph to exist.

Double Vision

There are times when you shoot a roll of film and things don't quite go to plan.

Film itself is an imperfect medium. It's an emulsion adhered to a length of plastic film, and cameras can require quite a bit of concentration to use properly. Even then, you can end up with an out-of-focus picture, a finger in front of the lens or too much light getting to the film.

It's all a bit of a worry.

My beloved Holga 120 GN is about as basic a camera as you could want. One aperture, one shutter speed, zone focusing and the ability to choose either instant shutter (N) or bulb mode (B). Bulb mode simply keeps the shutter open for as long as the shutter button is held down.

There is another "feature", though, that can either trip you up or give you a little serendipity, depending on your point of view.

The shutter isn't locked to the film advance. Unless you remember to advance the film after taking a picture, you can end up with a double exposure.

And that's exactly what happened here.

I'm firmly on the Lomo side of the argument. Accept the flaws. Don't look for perfection. Sometimes the things that go wrong are the things that make the photograph interesting.

So, is this picture the result of my own ineptitude?

Or is it the universe adding a little bit of its own magic to the mix?

 

Lomography Without the Camera - Why the real Lomography is about how you see, not what you shoot with

Lomography is more interesting as a photographic attitude than as a brand or a particular type of camera.

The commercial side is almost a distraction from the idea of shoot first and ask questions later. Lomography itself frames the philosophy around “Don’t Think, Just Shoot” and its 10 Golden Rules, which encourage spontaneity, experimentation, getting close, shooting from unusual perspectives, accepting uncertainty and, ultimately, not worrying too much about rules.

You don't need a Lomography camera to photograph like a Lomographer. You could go and buy a camera and film from Lomography and call yourself a Lomographer, but then what? You still have to go out and shoot it. And that's the interesting bit, because you don't actually need to buy anything at all to embrace the idea.

Photography is largely a set of rules for making the correct exposure, producing the best print and using the equipment in a certain way. Photography culture can encourage us to evaluate photographs against technical and aesthetic standards rather than simply experience making them.

Lomography is there to liberate photographers, not create another club with another set of rules or a membership test.

What happens when we stop trying to take the “right” photograph? The important thing is not to replace one set of photographic rules with another.

Take a camera with you and just shoot ordinary life. Let your gut feeling guide your shutter finger. Accept mistakes. Photography can be part of life's participation and not just a way of documenting it.

The Lomography 10 golden rules are not a rigid prescription but rather a set of permission slips.

Lomography may be a company, but it is also an idea.

The interesting part isn't the camera. It's what happens when you stop treating photography as a technical examination you have to pass.

Shoot any camera, whether that is a phone, DSLR, mirrorless, disposable or old film camera, and begin to participate. Make photographs because something catches your eye, because you have a feeling about a moment, or simply because you are there.

If you make a photograph this way, share it on BlueSky. Tag it #lomo or #lomography.

Not because it was made with a particular camera. Not because it is technically perfect. But because it represents a particular way of seeing: spontaneous, curious, imperfect, immediate and alive.

Photography has accumulated a lot of rules. Lomography asks what happens when you forget them.

Life by the Water

What is it about water that draws us as people? We have always lived beside rivers and seas, established harbours, built floating docks, travelled from them and returned to them.

Swansea harbour is a lovely place simply to spend time. This Holga 120 GN photograph of the harbour-side walkway, with shops on one side and the water on the other, is typical of the way harbours have been transformed in recent years. Once places of industry, trade and departure, many have become spaces to pause, wander and enjoy the water—while still retaining something of their connection with movement, travel and the wider world.

 

Inside photography.

In contrast to my last blog post, where things didn't exactly go to plan, this photo was the one on the roll that did go to plan. I shot two images, one at the metered settings and this one with the aperture closed down by a whole f stop.

The writing is on one of the faces of the pulpit and the decorative table was arranged just so. This one I am happy with. It has the dark shadows and detail in the highlights. The subject is in focus and the depth of field is suitably short.

 

Balance

Photography can be about the balance between light and dark, between maintaining highlight detail and shadow detail. It's also about getting sharpness through the photograph and ensuring that the bit's that you want in focus are actually in focus. Of course with film you have absolutely no way of know until you develop the film.  This photo I focused on the table but that has thrown the window behind the table out of focus as I was shooting at f5.6. Still you live and learn (hopefully).  At least I live to shoot another day, when I shall right the wrongs of this roll.

 

Canals and Holgas

I am drawn to canals. I think that is nothing better than a walk along a canal, especially in the Autumn. While the Autumn is a while off yet, I am yearning for cooler days and changing colours.  Canal walking, although all walking,  keeps you fit (ish) and your mental health good. The best bit is that there is usually a tea shop, where you can sit and enjoy a hot drink and a slice of cake. always something to look forward to.

I take a Holga, with a roll of film installed, with me. This photograph is a lucky frame from a roll that I deliberately exposed using the bulb mode of the Holga, but hand held.  Yes it's less than pin sharp but the ethereal feel of the photo works for me.  It is another toll in the tool box of the creative photographer, in using the camera in a way probably not intended by the manufacturer.

Colour - Reality or Construction

If the point of colour film is to more accurately represent reality (and who is saying that it is?), then putting colour film into a Holga is the last thing that you should do. Which is why from time to time that is exactly what I will do. This photo was taken in spring and the canal was coming to life. The lens is not sharp across the frame but has areas of out of focus image as your eye moves from the centre of the frame. The result feels less like a record of the day and more like a dream you once had. Dreams are what remain when memory start to be unreliable. Looking back on my life from 2026, it's hard to know what was real and what was a dream. I do know that some of my dreams became real and some of my realities were relegated to dreams.

When two lenses are better than one.

I have a Mamiya C330f Professional twin-lens reflex camera. It is a precision piece of kit. The shutter and aperture system are beautifully engineered and the viewfinder is accurate. When you take an image with the Mamiya you know what you are going to get. 

This photo I really like because it has a magical balance between shadow detail and highlight detail.  The light was just lovely, low in the late February sky as this was taken before the clocks sprang forward.

A pleasing photograph that makes the best of the square format, I think.

Ashton Windmill

Chapel Allerton Windmill

I do like Panoramic Photographs - Part 5

This blog post comprises 3 6x17 pinhole photos taken using the RSS 6x17 camera. I took these photos in Swansea of an old bridge that used to be over the road but was moved to the cycle path. 

Slip Bridge

I do like the RSS camera. It's a bit of a faff to load but does give great results.

Creative Photography Pt 2

Yesterday I discussed creativity in photography and showed some photos that I'd taken the day before using a Holga 120 S camera and a magnifying glass.  Obviously just using a Holga means that I'm not after perfection. The Holga has a plastic lens and these are not made using the best quality control in the world, so allowances have to be made for this by me. The viewer of the photograph isn't necessarily going to care what camera was used. They will look at the photographs and decide if they like them or not.

So the Holga is a plastic camera with a plastic lens and of variable, at best, quality.  My magnifying glass is also not the finest magnifying glass available, either. I bought a pack of 5 magnifying glasses of varying sizes from a discount shop called The Works. I think the entire set was £1.99. So we aren't dealing with the planets finest optics at all.

Holga 120 GN and Magnifying Glass 

But that's kind of the point of creativity.  You can use what is to hand and make what you can from it.  In my case the items to hand are a toy camera and a toy magnifying glass.

Before anyone wonders if this could be done with better optics, the answer is absolutely you can! I have done this myself. I have a 6x9 medium format camera that sports a Schneider Kreuznach Super Angulon 65mm lens. I also have a set of diopters, that were made for photographic use. And I have taken photographs of close up detail with that configuration. In fact I have lots of examples of work done with that configuration.

Taken using a medium format camera, a SK SA 65mm f8 lens and a diopter

This photograph was taken using a 4x5 sheet film camera. The lens mounted on the camera is a Schneider Kreuznach Super Angulon 90mm f8 lens. To this I added a stack of diopters to get the  subject in focus but nothing else. An f8 lens isn't going to give a shallow depth of field on its own.

Yes I know the background is distracting...

So I'm by no means saying that the only valid creative work can come from using Holgas and cheap magnifying glasses. What I am saying is that, no matter what camera you have, you can use what you have to hand to create a  photograph that you feel has exercised your "creative" abilities.

improvise->adapt->overcome

Back to the Holga 120S and magnifying glass. This is a fun way to make photos that are different and interesting. The Holga won't cost a fortune and as I've indicated you can pick up a cheap magnifying glass at a discount store.

If you are wondering how you use the magnifying glass, well hold it in front of a subject and determine the distance to the subject where you get things in focus.  Then hold the magnifying glass still and put the Holga lens against the magnifying glass, glass. Then click the shutter.

You may find you need a little practice and some experimentation to get things "dialed" in.  

Don't expect every finished frame to be

1. Correctly focused
1. There is an element of jeopardy and things can move no matter what you do
2. You could put the Holga onto a tripod so that it can't move.
2. Correctly exposed 
1. being close to the subject may cause you to block any source of light
2. Try using a flash if you notice this.
3. Centrally positioned within the frame.
1. Framing can be difficult as the Holga has a viewfinder that may not work correctly at close range.

Above all, have fun, enjoy the process and enjoy any photo that works!

I do like Panoramic Photographs - Part 4

 In this final in the series of panoramic photograph blog posts, I have some panoramic photographs made on the Reality So Subtle (RSS) 6x17 pinhole camera.

Reality So Subtle

The RSS 6x17 make 4 photographs on a single roll of 120 film. The negatives are big. The camera is a bit of a bugger to load though as it has a curved plane for the film.

Still while the struggle may be real, the results are great!

How can I be a creative photographer?

I'm sure that at some point most photographers have wondered how to be more creative in their photography. I suppose that it depends on your definition of creative and to a larger extent your photographic vision. If you are looking to take a photograph that is different from the blob of work that is out there, something that isn't the same record shot made by countless people on their 'phones, then creativity can help. But creativity comes from within the individual and is quite personal I think. It does come back to your personal vision of the finished photograph.  What is your intent?

A good way to be inspired in your creativity is to look at what others have done. Here are a few things that I have done lately, although I am by no means the most creative person around.

• Redscale film
• Magnifying Glass macro lens
• Pushing film

The photographs shown here were taken using black and white film, using the second technique, shown above.  I used a magnifying glass as a pseudo macro lens for a Holga. Now it's not Macro on the scale of taking a photo of a flys eye but it does allow you to get closer than any normal Holga lens will allow (normally 1 meter). Then you can find light, texture and delight in the most unexpected places. 

Here I have taken a photo of the carving on the top of a gravestone. The photo really brings out the texture of the carved stone without needing to be pin sharp.

Carving on gravestone

This photo I have taken a close up shot of a carved fairy that someone had left on a grave. This one uses the light on an interesting ( to me) way.

Fairy sat on a grave

If you are devoid of inspiration the everyday can sometimes be worth exploring. Here we have the bark of a tree in natural directional light. 

Tree bark

Finally a picture of a leaf. This was not intended to be an accurate record of the leaf but have enough detail to feel leafy. The back lighting allows the internal structure of the leaf to be visible.

A leaf

I may enlarge on this topic of "creativity" in future blogs.