Couple

While I’ve no particular talent for judging ‘the decisive moment’ in spontaneous photography, sometimes luck is all one needs. And, like almost any other hamfisted idiot with a camera, I have got lucky sometimes. The picture above is one such shot that I think came out well. Sitting inside The Old Success Inn at Sennen Cove, near Land’s End in Cornwall one August afternoon I spotted a couple looking out to sea neatly framed in a windowpane and reached for my Nikon F80.

As well as the framing, I like that their poses jointly combine tenderness and awkwardness; placidity and tension. And I like the contrast in colours between their shirts and the summer blues of the sea and sky.

Shadow

The unassuming photograph above: the shadow of a tree cast on to a yellow-painted structure (along with part of the tree itself) was five or six years in the making. The structure in question is Amiralitetsklockstapeln, that is, the Admiralty Clocktower, in Karlskrona, Sweden.

For several years I lived nearby and at least twice a day, almost every day, I’d pass it on my daily walks with the dog around Admiralty Park. In the spring of 2002 or ‘03 I would have first noticed a scene like the one in the picture and thought I should take a snap of it. At the time I didn’t have a good camera. Moreover, when I remembered to return with the available camera some days later, the angle of light was no longer quite right, and the effect wasn’t the same.

Only in the March or early April of 2008 did everything fall into place: it was the right time of day at the right time of year; the weather was bright and sunny; I had a good camera with a suitably wide-angled lens allowing me to capture maximum shadow and minimum tree. I used my Nikon F80 with plain old Fuji Superia 200 film. I suspect I must have had a polarising filter on the lens to get the sky looking quite so blue. I don’t recall which lens I used - most likely it would have been a 24mm auto-focus Nikkor of some description.

Photogram

Photograms or lumen prints are photographs achieved without cameras; shadow-pictures made by placing objects upon or in front of photo-sensitive surfaces, and then exposing them to light. The first permanent photograms were made by the pioneers of photography in the early 19th Century: Niépce and his “photoengravings”; Fox Talbot’s “photogenic drawings”, etc.

In the summer of 2010 I tried my hand at making a few. The one above was one of my more successful efforts. I arranged four lilac leaves on a sheet of Fomaspeed Variant paper placed outdoors in bright sunlight, with a square of glass holding the leaves in place (it was breezy). I didn’t record how long the exposure time was - I’m guessing it would have been 45-60 minutes. Afterwards I fixed and washed the paper.

Like the other prints I made in this way the resultant image was fairly low in contrast, so I made some enhancements using Photoshop after scanning it. The print captured some fine detail of the leaves' structure in places, but the condensation trapped under the hot glass blurred other parts of the image.

Robot/Alien

I’ve a soft spot for this photo of a piece of grafitti seen on a wall somewhere in the Manor Farm estate, north Bristol, in the summer of 2013. I took it with a Mamiya C330s Professional TLR camera, fitted with its standard 80mm lens-pair, and loaded with Fuji Provia 100 slide film. It was the one striking frame out of an otherwise lacklustre dozen on the roll, with the remainder split between depictions of a deserted playground, and mediocre shots of my dog.

It’s an unsophisticated artwork, but I love the depth of the red background and its contrast with the blue of the figure, whatever it might be: robot? alien? other? I love that the texture of the underlying concrete shows through. And I love how the artist succeeded in giving the robot/alien such an ambiguous expression. Is it a happy smile? A grimace of fear or anxiety? For me, the paint drips in the whites of its eyes are suggestive of something other than straightforward good cheer, but then what do I know of alien/robot ways?

SM5

On the tabletop in the picture above is an Olympia SM5 typewriter resting on a thick felt pad intended to slightly deaden the noise and vibration it produces. Also identifiable (moving clockwise around the typewriter), are a roll of tape; a fountain pen; a couple of letters in need of reply; a sheet of Air Mail / Par Avion stickers; the base of a lamp; a notebook lying on top of something else (loose paper, perhaps); two bottles of Rohrer & Klingner fountain pen ink with a roll of kraft paper behind them; a box of envelopes and some special-issue postage stamps; a dip-pen; a single folded napkin; another fountain pen and a pair of scissors.

The table is ostensibly a dining table but is seldom used for eating and most often employed instead for writing, hence the profusion of stationery.

It was an SM5 that got me properly started with typewriters. I’d first owned an ugly early ’60s Underwood that I’d fought a losing struggle to keep working, but the Olympia, acquired at a junkshop in 2015 - for all of £17 - was a real a joy to use. Within a few more years I’d accumulated a small typewriter collection. Not long after I’d given that SM5 away to a relative, I bought another (the one in the picture), this time from ebay. It doesn’t look as good in colour as in monochrome, which disguises its blotchy nicotine patina and the spots of paint-loss: for all that, the machine still works like a charm.

TLR

Seeing Rolleiflex cameras used in movies made it look like TLR photography would be great fun - Fred Astaire photographing Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, for example. When I properly took to using film in 2008, I wondered if might try it for myself. Not quite willing to invest in a Rollei, I nevertheless very much wanted a camera with a crank to advance the film, so looked instead at the various Japanese-made TLRs, and settled for a late-’50s Yashica Mat. This I obtained via ebay from a lady whose partner had apparently used it when illustrating the motorcycle repair manuals he wrote in the ’60s.

My Mat is shown above, dressed up somewhat with a lens hood, and with a corrective optic of some sort (intended to help with taking close-up shots, as I recall) placed in front of the upper lens (which otherwise would be less protuberant). I used the camera a good deal for about a year, and it was exactly as much fun as it thought it would be: I always loved using the crank. Then, however, the shutter started to stick sometimes at slower speeds. Learning that there was a repairman still active who had worked in the Yashica factory, I sent it off to him for a CLA: quite a costly exercise with the transatlantic shipping factored in. It worked very well again after that, but only for another three or four years, whereupon the shutter began sticking anew. Subsequently the camera was relegated to a drawer, one from which it has yet to re-emerge.

Sadly, I think my TLR days are now behind me. I shoot film so seldom these days that using a single SLR seems quite sufficient. Plus the costs of film and processing seem higher than ever. Still, I’ll miss the thrill of looking down on to the focussing screen and seeing a bright image on it (such as the slightly out-of-focus one below), and of clicking the shutter and turning that crank.

Wedding

I took numerous old-school analogue photographs at my older niece’s wedding last year. They came out pretty well overall, which encouraged me to do the same for my younger niece, who got married last weekend.

I knew I’d be using my trusty Nikon FM3a. I knew part of the proceedings would take place in a relatively poorly-lit hall: not having a fast lens I obtained a Nikkor 50mm f1.4 AI-S for it, and also dusted off my old speedlight, in case a flash might be needed. In my experience, Kodak 400-TX film has been the most flexible and forgiving that I’ve used, so I ordered some rolls of that, despite it now costing the better part of £15 per roll.

I was disconcerted to find, when the time came to send the exposed rolls of film off for processing, that Peak Imaging in Sheffield, who had been my lab of choice over the last twelve years or so, had permanently closed their doors. This time, I used Ag Photolab in Birmingham, whose service on first acquaintance seemed similarly excellent.

Despite all my advance planning, alas, the end results were something of a disappointment. I was unaware that the FM3a, now about twenty years old, had sprung a light leak since last summer: it didn’t affect every frame, but it spoiled a couple of dozen of them. And just my being out-of-practice (I’d not taken any pictures on film over the rest of the year) meant that the proportion of shots that were out-of-focus, poorly-framed or badly-timed was regrettably high.

There were still some frames that came out OK; and of course I was only one among many guests taking pictures, not to mention the professional photographer, who gave every indication of doing a thorough job of documenting the happy event.

Up Against the Wall

My erstwhile enthusiasm for photgraphy came about, in part, because I’d seen the writing on the wall.

Easily the coldest and longest of the nine winters I spent in Sweden was that of 2005/06. Through the frigid misery of that January and February, a spray-painted piece of graffiti repeatedly caught my eye. Almost every day from the bus to work I’d see the words Up against the wall, motherfucker! on the side of a building. “I should take a photo of that”, I thought.

The same thought had occurred to me a couple of dozen times without my having done anything about it, when I further thought “I should take a photo of that with myself up against the wall!”. The problem was that my camera at the time was a basic point-and-shoot model that wasn’t working too well. “I’ll need a better camera,” I thought “and a tripod”. Another dozen more trips to work and back ensued, with my plan still only vague and ill-formed.

Then came the decisive thought: “I should take a photo of that with myself up against the wall, with my head positioned in front of the letter m!” The prospect amused me enough that the next Saturday I went to the local electronics store and bought a slightly better fixed-lens digital camera (a Sony DSC-V3), and a tripod. Having done so, the onset of a migraine disinclined me from trudging through the snow to the wall in question, and a few more weeks passed before the opportunity to go there finally arose.

On a Sunday morning in late March, the temperature still a bracing -5C, in overcoat, hat, scarf & gloves, I set up the tripod in the snow, positioned the camera so the full sentence was in shot, set the self-timer, and ran to stand in front of the m in motherfucker. After checking the result, I repeated the process another six or seven times until the camera’s battery fell victim to the chill and died. On reviving it back home and transferring the shots there was disappointment. The framing didn’t look so good and the colours were drab. Only after experimenting with cropping and desaturating the images in Photoshop did I end up with a satisfactory result.

I imagined I might try again when the weather and the light were better, but, no sooner had the snow begun to melt than a load more graffiti was added to the same wall, rendering it rather less photogenic. Having a slightly better camera meant I was more inclined to use it, and over the rest of that year and the next one I took something like a thousand more shots, both enjoying the experience, but also increasingly cognizant of the camera’s limitations. By late 2007, I had my heart set on acquiring a DSLR…

Life Work

In a 2009 issue of the Boston Review, a piece by John Crowley about Nicholson Baker’s novel The Anthologist begins beneath a black-and-white photograph of spent matches lying on a page of text. The photograph is one of mine: I’m credited in tiny letters at its right-hand side. The page belonged to an outsized copy of Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold that I was never in any danger of finishing. The matches were my wife’s: by then I had smoked my last cigar.

Technically, I am a published photographer, essayist and poet, though none of those publications amounted to much. The photo above is one one of a dozen or so that others found via Flickr & asked if they could reproduce. Most of the requests were for on-line use, but a couple found their way into print. No money ever changed hands, but at least in the case of the Boston Review, they were kind enough to send me a copy of the magazine in which they used the shot.

‘Essayist’ is an over-generous descriptor to cover the pair of blog posts of mine that were reworked into a article published in a magazine (whose name I’ve long forgotten) that only ever ran for a few issues. A very brief book review of mine also ended up in a print publication at some point. None of the above had I actively sought out, whereas with the poetry there had been a deliberate action on my part - in ‘94 I sent three or four poems off to a local Cardiff free-sheet who had invited submissions, and they chose to print two of them. The sheet may have been free, but I was sent a nominal payment: the one and only time I’ve gained any financial recompense for my ‘creative’ endeavours.

Going back to John Crowley, I recently acquired a copy of the epically-delayed twenty-fifth fortieth anniversary edition of his novel Little, Big. It’s a beautiful thing, almost too big a Little, Big for my needs, whereas the mass-market paperback edition I’d once owned had been too little. I loved the book when I was nineteen yet have not gone back to it since: what might I make of it now?

Blood Oranges

Living at a latitude inhospitable to the cultivation of citrus fruit means I’ve only been exposed to a limited proportion of what the genus has to offer. Of the citrusses I have tried, my favourite sub-variety must be the blood orange.

Although I can recall first getting a taste for them in my teens, it was during my ’90s sojourn in Italy that my preference became fully-formed. Sicilian sanguinello fruit were abundant from the end of January into early or mid March, with many cafes setting up juice dispensers on their counters full of their sharp red-orange juice for the duration.

Nowadays, as with so much other produce, the window of availabilty has been extended, and as well as enlivening the drab month of February, so-called “sweet reds” can now be found until late April: I bought some this morning.

Shelf Portrait #2

It took a few false starts before I developed an enthusiasm for photography, but once I did, things escalated quickly. A few months after getting my first DSLR (a Nikon D80), I’d supplemented it with a second-hand film SLR (a Nikon F80). Having rediscoverd the joys of shooting on 35mm film it wasn’t much longer before I got my hands on an old TLR (a Yashica-Mat) to dabble with medium format. I took up home development of black-&-white film, and daydreamed about having my own darkroom, and of experimenting with a large-format camera.

At length I coaxed both those daydreams into reality, but in each case I bit off more than I could chew. My circumstances never permitted any kind of permanent darkroom, and the makeshift one I was able to set up was in no way satisfactory: the enlarger I’d acquired only got used on a handful of occasions. There was marginally better success with an entry-level 5x4 camera - a Crown Graphic - but after seeing for myself just how much bigger a step up it was in terms of inconvenience and expense from medium to large format, I felt discouraged after taking and developing only a few dozen shots. At around the same time, money and free time came to be in all too short supply, with photography in general having to take a back seat to other priorities.

One of the 5x4 shots I did manage to take was of the disorganised and neglected state of my bookshelves at that time (Autumn 2011). A detail from it is shown above. I find it interesting to look at in retrospect, given just how many of those volumes I’ve since let go. I no longer own the half-dozen copies of FMR magazine, for eaxmple, or the art-books about Adam Elsheimer, A.G. Rizzoli or Jacques Callot. And I sold my first-edition two-volume copy of the Codex Seraphinianus no more than a year after this picture was taken. I hated to part with it, but the four-figure sum from the sale proved very useful at the time. A decade later I bought a copy of the 2013 Rizzoli edition of the Codex by way of a belated replacement.

Kodachrome

I came to Kodachrome during its declining days, when there was only one lab in the world that could process it. Each roll of the film came with a small, folded-up, postage-paid envelope bearing a Swiss address. Having exposed the film, one put it in the envelope and mailed it to the Kodak office in Vevey, from where it would be forwarded with a batch of others to Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. The film was quite expensive to buy, as the cost of development and postage was factored into the unit price.

Dwayne’s would process the film, and, if the requisite box had been ticked, they would mount it in cardboard slides. Batches of processed slides from European photographers would be returned to Switzerland; and from there back to their points of origin. The whole tortuous process worked surprisingly well, and would typically take no more than a few weeks. I shot ten rolls of the stuff between the summer of 2008 and the autumn of 2010. Production of the film had ceased in 2009, and Dwayne’s shut down their K-14 development machine in January 2011.

By whatever photochemical sorcery, its beautifully vivid colours somehow seemed truer to memory than reality. Even though my acquaintance with it was brief, I’m glad I had the opportunity to try it for myself.

St. Murphy's Day

It’s my blue-eyed cat’s fifteenth birthday. His name is Murphy. Falling as it does the day after St. Patrick’s Day, I think of today as St. Murphy’s Day, even if, in his capacity as a cat, he’s as ill-suited for canonization as he is ineligible for it. I gather from this doubtless impeccable source that fifteen for a cat is equivalent to a human age of seventy-six, so he’s getting on a bit. Happy Birthday Murph!