Reclamation

While the shot above isn’t an ideal composition, I’m fond of it anyway. It depicts the way leading off the Gloucester Road in Horfield, Bristol, toward the entrance of Reclaimers Reclamation who “specialize in bespoke handmade kitchens and furniture created from reclaimed timber and glass”. It was (and probably still is) an intriguing place to look around, though I never bought anything there. I recall being tempted by a pre-WWII Continental portable typewriter they had at one time, but the price was too steep for my liking.

The main problem with the photo, to my eye, is the poster on the right-hand side being partly out of frame. A wider-angle lens would have helped with that, but the camera I had with me that day was my Yashica Mat, with no option to change the focal length. Taking in more of the poster would have made the two statues further off-centre – having them roughly symmetrical seemed more desirable. Had I taken a step or two further back, it would have introduced more unwanted elements into the frame and I’d have probably ended up cropping the image.

The Yashica was loaded with Kodax Tri-X 400. I can’t remember if I developed it myself or not. If so, I would have used Kodak’s XTOL developer.

In the Fog

It’s the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” again so here we have a couple of autumnal photographs taken in the fog, both captured in Karlskrona, Sweden, on the same October day in 2008. Above is a view of some houses at the tip of a small island barely visible throgh the murk. It’s a digital shot, taken using a Nikon D80, with a 24mm lens attached. The vantage point was Gamla Långöbron (‘The Old Long Island Bridge’) and the subject was the islet of Lilla Pantarholmen.

The fog was a little less dense when I took the shot below in Hoglands Park. This one was taken with my Yashica Mat loaded with Kodak Portra 400 VC film.

Instruction Manual

I’ve mentioned in passing my unwise purchase of a photographic enlarger. Specifically it is an LPL C6700, capable of enlarging from colour negatives as well as black and white ones; and able to handle 35mm and 120 film (up to 6x7) alike. It was far from cheap, setting me back something in the region of £700-800 in 2008 money. It was supplied without an enlarging lens – I afterwards bought not one but two of those as well. And I’ve used the thing three times.

Not only has it stood idle, but it’s an ungainly, bulky white elephant for which I don’t even have a suitable storage space. So it perches awkwardly on top of a chest of drawers, draped in its dust-cover (the one part of it that has served its purpose) as an on-going reminder of my occasional tendency to over-reach and get a bit carried away acquiring things I don’t end up using. The cover of the enlarger’s instruction manual, which I have dutifully retained, is shown above.

Stairs

By 2014 my enthusiasm for film photography had begun to wane. Among the last rolls of 120 film that I developed myself at home were a few that I took on an outing to Raglan Castle in the spring of that year. The shot above is one of the better ones from those rolls. We see steps leading up from a gloomy cellar room, lit by sunlight coming through an open doorway. I’d taken a couple of exposures of the same composition with different shutter speeds – this is the darker of the two. I used my Mamiya C330S loaded with Ilford HP5+ film, and developed it using Kodak D76.

Balloons

Every year about this time is the Bristol Balloon Fiesta. If you’re in the city and the breeze is blowing the right way you might be lucky enough to see a sky filled with colourful hot-air balloons. With the usual prevailing winds being more or less south-westerly, those north-east of the Fiesta’s base at Ashton Court would be most likely to see such a sight. One day in August 2011 it happened that the light breeze was just the right amount more southerly than westerly to bring many balloons over the suburb in the north of the city where I then lived.

Both of these photos were taken from a second-floor window with my Nikon D80 using a zoom lens (probably the one that came with the camera). For the first one the focal length was at its maximum of 300mm; while for the second it was at 145mm. Both images are cropped, the second a little more so. A couple of the balloons ended up floating low and nearby enough that I could quite clearly see the aeronauts in their baskets.

Valley

Another of the types of photographic film I’ve dabbled with is Ilford SFX 200, a black-&-white film with ‘extended red sensitivity’ edging into the near infra-red. Used in conjunction with the right kind of deep red or near-black filter one can get, in theory, a proper infra-red photograph. The image above is from one of the few rolls of SFX 200 I ever bought in 120 format. It’s a shot of the Cynon Valley in South Wales taken from a hillside above Abercynon.

I was shooting that day with a Mamiya C330S medium-format camera. The only suitable filter I had (a B+W 092) was intended for use with 35mm Nikon lenses, so I’d had to obtain a speficic adaptor for mounting the ⌀ 52mm filter on the smaller Mamiya lens. I developed the film at home using Tanol, which may well have been the only time I attempted that particular combination. I was pleased with the way this high-contrast shot came out, even if it fell a little way short of the dramatic effect I’d hoped for.

Games of Chess

Two re-enacters play chess in front of some tents around which are pieces of military uniform and other items of clothing. I don’t know anything like enough about historical garb to say whether the pair’s outfits are properly authentic, or even consistent with each other. Still, to my inexpert eye, the overall impression allows at least for a suspension of disbelief. Looking more closely at the full-sized image one can see a couple of anachronisms, with the woman’s doubly-pierced ear and what looks like a tattoo at the back of her neck. And then there are the pair of jokers out of focus in the backround who look as though they’ve wandered in from a different movie.

The shot was taken with a Yashica Mat camera loaded with Kodak Portra 160 NC film at the ‘Sail’ festival in Karlskrona, Sweden in 2008. I must somehow look like I have a knack for chess – no few people have supposed it – but I’ve no aptitude for the game at all. The one other chess-related photo I’ve taken that comes to mind is the one below, a black-&-white shot of an outsize, outdoor chessboard in Wämöparken, also in Karlskrona. This one was captured the following summer, using my other TLR, a Mamiya C330S on Rollei Retro 100 film that I developed myself using Rodinal.

Goats

The year before last I attended a wedding at a French château, specifically Château de la Malmaison. Not, that is, the similarly-named and rather more famous Château de Malmaison, but this one in Champagne, between Épernay and Reims. An early 19th-Century house, it was built on the site of an older, fortified dwelling, of which there remained only the dried-out moat that had once surrounded it. In the moat, one might find a goat.

The house’s owners keep a small herd of goats which help maintain the grounds. Enticed by the appetising foliage in the fenced-off garden within the moat, the goats often approached the fence as if sizing it up in the hope of finding a weak spot to break through. I took the pictures with my Nikon FM3a on Kodax Tri-X 400 film. The five rolls of film I used over that long weekend were the last ones I sent off to be developed by the excellent Peak Imaging in Sheffield before their closure.

Thistles

Along the eastern side of the Taff valley north of Quaker’s Yard and Treharris is a ridge, part of which is known as Mynydd-y-Capel (‘Chapel Mountain’). On this hilltop, Ordnance Survey maps indicate the presence of “Forest Chapel (Remains Of)”. Intrigued by this point on the map, and living nearby at the time, I decided to walk up there and take a look, ascending the hill through Treharris on a road that became a track that became a path that then petered out to nothing as I continued north.

It proved more of a real hike than the leisurely walk I’d anticipated. Atop Mynydd-y-Capel there were wonderful views, but the remains of the chapel – if indeed I was even looking in the right place – were desultory: some scattered bits of grey stone. There was one spot, a natural hollow near what seemed to be the summit, which afforded a surprising degree of shelter from the buffetting breeze, and where there was an eerie silence. I could imagine that being an appropriate locale for spritual reflection.

I stopped to take a few photos along the way. While there was still a track to follow, my eye was caught by some skeletal thistles which foregrounded a radio or TV transmission tower. I used a Mamiya C330 loaded with Adox CHS 25 film to take the picture, and developed the film at home using Tanol, with very pleasing results. I slightly cropped the square frame for the image above. My over-ambitious walk left me dehydrated, footsore, and with the beginnings of a migraine, but at least I had something to show for it.

All the Fun of the Fair

A few times each year a travelling ‘family funfair’ sets up in playing fields a few minutes' walk from my home. They were there over the Bank Holiday weekend, packing back up and driving away today. I wonder how the funfair business is holding up in the age of the smartphone. Something that catches my eye in funfairs is the frequently garish decorative art painted on the rides.

The three pictures here were all taken at Axel’s funfair on one of its stops in Southern Sweden back in ‘08, but I’ve seen similar here in the UK. They were taken with a Nikon F80 camera using Kodachrome film, which gave a further boost to the already bright colours.

Ceiling

The picture above shows part of the decorated ceiling in the drawing room at Castell Coch. I’d often caught sight of the mock castle – nestled in its woodland setting – from the A470, or from the Taff Valley railway line, but I only ever visited it once, in the autumn of 2010. I took along my Yashica Mat TLR camera, loaded with Kodak Ektar 100 film.

The present frame was something of an afterthought after I’d first tried taking a picture by positioning the camera on the floor directly underneath the chandelier in the centre of the room. Unfortunately the alignment was off, so it didn’t come out as I’d hoped. In any case, I ended up preferring the deliberately off-centre image to that one.

Pegs

Of the various kinds of photographic film I tried out, one I didn’t have much luck with was Rollei Ortho 25. My attempts to develop it at home were bedevilled by blemishes in the finished negatives. Most likely this was due to something amiss in my process, although I suppose it could just have been a bad batch of the film. In any case, most of the frames I shot on the stuff were uninspired efforts, so little of value was spoiled.

The sole exception was the photo above. Early one autumn morning I caught sight of a low slant of sunlight illuminating the bedewed clothesline in the garden and the plastic pegs hanging from it. What at other times would have been a poor choice of subject had momentarily become a fascinating one. There are still small blotchy marks in this frame too (much more apparent when viewing a larger version of the image), but they are less prominent than on most of the others from the same roll. I took the photo with my Mamiya C330S, and developed the Ortho 25 in Rodinal.

Big Hand

Here’s a photo of a disembodied hand, a surviving fragment of an ancient statue, to be found (at least as of August ‘97) in the courtyard of the Musei Capitolini at Piazza di Campdoglio in Rome. There must be many, many thousands of similar images out there similarly snapped by a significant proportion of the Museums’ very numerous visitors.

Ninety-seven was the year I finally got my hands on some of the desirable gadgets of the day. A JVC ‘Micro Component’ CD player (and speakers) and a Canon IXUS compact ‘APS’ camera. The IXUS was a great-looking little thing – all brushed metal and black plastic – with a nifty retracting zoom lens. It wasn’t the sturdiest device, however, and after four years' light use it conked out.

The ‘Advanced Photographic System’ must have been one of the last hurrahs of film photography, before the digital imaging juggernaut rolled in. I held on to about a dozen of the exposed APS films I’d shot, which, a decade or so later, I sent off to be digitally scanned. The ‘big hand’ was one of the frames in the first roll I ran through the IXUS. APS frames had a rather elongated 7:4 aspect ratio, which I’ve slightly cropped here.

Daffodils

As it’s the time of year when the daffodils are proliferating hereabouts in gardens and along roadsides, here is a photograph of some daffs in a vase. I took it back in 2010 with my Mamiya C330 Pro S camera, most likely with the standard 80mm lens-pair attached. The film was Adox CHS 50 (now discontinued) which I developed at home using Tanol. I was very pleased with the way this shot turned out.

Fridge Poem

With Valentine’s Day just over, here’s a photo of a ‘fridge-poem’ I made for my wife. The fridge poetry “romance kit” may well have been a Valentine’s gift – I can’t recall. I do remember it lay unused for a year or two before I tried conjuring something appropriately romantic from its limited vocabulary; an undertaking that proved more difficult and time-consuming than I’d anticipated. Those thirty-two words were the result.

The ‘poem’ had been on the fridge for a few more years when I took the picture, hence its sub-optimal cleanliness. The photo was an aide-memoire so I’d more readily know how to replace the words on a new fridge in a different house after a move.

‘Endless’ and ‘forever’ are utterances – however sincerely expressed or deeply felt – that the passage of time will make a brusque mockery of. Within ten years of choosing those words, within five years of taking the picture, I was a widower.

The Long Room

Something else from my time in Sweden, a picture of an extraordinary indoor space, the Repslagarbanan, that is the ‘rope-walk’, in Karlskrona. It’s a 300m-long 17th-century wooden shed formerly used for rope-making by the Swedish Navy. The building is located within the grounds of the current navy base, and is normally off-limits to the public, apart from on their annual open-days.

I took it with my Nikon F80 using Ilford Delta 400 film. There wasn’t a great deal of available light and I had to try resting the camera on some kind of surface to get a long-enough exposure, as illustrated by the general lack of sharpness and more particularly by the blurred figures in the distance (more readily visible in the full-size image). I’d hoped to get a shot without anyone in view, but that wasn’t to be.

Swans

We’re nearing the end of a spell of chilly weather. With no new photos to illustrate it, I rifled through some older cold-weather snaps, turning up the one above. It was taken during the winter of 2010/11 in a landscaped part of the business park where my workplace was (and still is) located.

We see a pair of swans on frost-coated grass by a part-frozen pond. There is an icy haze in the air. If you look at a larger version of the image you might better see an eerie figure standing at the far side of the pond. The swans, alas, hadn’t long to live. Within weeks of my taking this photo, both birds were hit and killed by cars – in separate incidents.

I took this one with my ’50s Yashica Mat camera, using Kodak Tri-X 400 film. This was from a roll I didn’t develop at home, but rather sent off to Peak Imaging (sadly now defunct) to process.

He Sees You When You're Sleeping

The figure in the image above isn’t Santa Claus gone wrong and hell-bent on brutal revenge, but rather a Swedish jultomte. It’s a twenty-year-old photo I’ve posted on-line before.

Re-hashing what I wrote back then: Sweden has only partly embraced and assimilated the standardized North American version of a North-Pole-based Santa Claus. A near-equivalent figure there is jultomten, the christmas gnome. A Tomte was, traditionally, a little fellow who dwelt under the floorboards in a homestead’s barn; a guardian spirit who looked after the farm’s people and their livestock. All he asked in return was that a bowl of porridge be left out for him at Yuletide. In the latter part of the 19th century, tomte began to take on, in the popular imagination, some of the attributes of St. Nicholas, coming to be associated with the bringing of Christmas gifts…

The one seen here graced the festive window display of a shop on Borgmästaregatan in Karlskrona, which sold horse-riding tack and pet-related paraphernalia. He didn’t re-appear the December after I’d first written about him: I hope I wasn’t in any way responsible for his retirement.

TMAX 3200

Looking back at the heyday of my experimentation with film photography (ca. 2008-13), it’s disconcerting to see how many of the types of film I tried have since gone out of production. One which bucked that trend, becoming unavailable, only later to be brought back on to the market, was Kodak T-MAX P3200. This is an ideal film to use in lower-light conditions, and hence a good option (in the Northern Hemisphere) at this time of year.

The present images are from a roll I shot in Karlskrona, Sweden (where I then lived), one drab December afternoon. I used my Nikon FM3a - quite likely with the 45mm f/2.8 P lens. I didn’t in this case attempt to develop the film myself at home, sending it off instead to a company called Crimson (evidently still in business). A couple more shots from the same roll: 1, 2.

Nikon D70s

In late 2007 I acquired my first DSLR - a Nikon D80. Some five years and 8,000 shots later I sold it quite cheaply, having made the rash decision to confine myself solely to film photography. In subsequent years I came to regret this fit of purism - while phones are OK for taking pictures, I do prefer handling a proper camera, and there were several occasions when having a DSLR would have been very handy. Meanwhile, film and processing prices kept rising.

Taking pictures to illustrate this blog heightened my dissatisfaction with phone photography. I have a lower-end Nokia-branded Android device which, while it has provided mostly adequate results, isn’t any kind of pleasure to use. While starting to put aside some pennies for a new digital camera, I wondered if something second-hand might provide an interim solution. Fortune favoured me when I found a Nikon D70s with its original kit lens, in its original box, for £30 at the local charity shop.

What wasn’t included was a mains cable for the charger, so I needed to order one of those before I could even confirm the camera was working: luckily it was. Meanwhile there was the disagreeable issue of the camera being sticky. An adhesive-like residue had leached out of the vinyl/rubber coating on the body: attacking that with some alcohol-based hand-sanitizer improved the situation considerably. A 4GB memory card was in place, containing a couple of dozen shots by the camera’s previous owner. There were several motion-blurred snaps of birds in some unidentifiable tropical locale; and a handful of other pictures clearly taken in this part of the world.

So it is that, eleven years after parting with my D80, I now have its less capable predecessor as a belated replacement. It boasts a mere six megapixels, half what an iPhone 14 can provide. And its low-light performance will be nothing like as good as a modern camera’s. On the upside, I still have four compatible prime lenses that work with the D70s, such as the Nikkor 35mm f2 AF-D one shown above - not to mention the kit zoom lens that came with it. The quality of the (new) photography here ought, I hope, to show signs of improvement.

Superbitch!

Yesterday brought another birthday, my fifty-fifth. From an earlier such occasion (no. 42), the self-portrait above. My Nikon F80 was loaded with one last roll of Kodachrome that I needed to finish off and get processed while the service was still available. I elected to use the remaining twenty-odd exposures for some selfies, taking them the old fashioned way using a self-timer.

The results were regrettably poor–an ignominious end to my Kodachrome journey. Sensing, even as I was taking the shots, that I was failing to put my subject at his ease, I took a last couple with my face obscured with a child’s football that had found its way into our garden: those weren’t quite so bad. The Superbitch! shirt, by the way, was one that my wife had bought for herself from a market stall in Sweden, but that I ended up wearing more than her.

Tintern Abbey

One Saturday ten years ago I drove up to the ruins of Tintern Abbey. It was a glorious sunny Autumn morning. It had rained heavily the day before, and from the waterlogged ground a thick mist had coalesced in the early chill along the river, with only dissipating hints of it remaining as the sun rose higher. In such conditions, the ruins were just about optimally picturesque.

I’d brought a couple of cameras along - these shots were taken using a Nikon F80 loaded with Fuji Superia 200 film. I don’t recall what lens was on the camera - whichever one I had, I do recall wishing I’d thought to pack something with a wider angle.

Case de Lux

There are images that look good when framed in the camera’s viewfinder, only to disappoint us when we see what has actually been captured. And there are photographs that disappoint us at first sight, only to intrigue us on subsequent re-acquaintance. The picture above is an example of both of these phenomena.

In the glass frontage of the Showcase Cinema de Lux in central Bristol, a reflection of a building opposite which almost appears as though floating, untethered from terra firma. It’s a frame of Adox CMS 20 document film/microfilm, taken with my Nikon F80 camera in late 2011. It was on a roll that I developed myself at home, using dilute (1+200) Rodinal.

Movement

When I still had my Nikon D80 camera, a favourite lens I often used with it was the 60mm f/2.8 Micro-Nikkor AF-D: a relatively inexpensive but excellent macro lens. Among the close-up shots I took with it is the one above of a Peseux calibre 320 Swiss watch movement that powered the timepiece I inherited from my father-in-law in 2007. It’s a cropped image including about 60% of the original frame.

He’d bought the watch in London in the late ’50s when he was still in the merchant marine. It was his prize possession: the one thing of value he retained through long spells of adversity, much of which was of the self-inflicted kind. When he died, his effects amounted to little more than a wallet, a Zippo lighter and the watch. I kept it for seven years or so, wearing it for about half that time, before passing it along to his grand-daughter.

Eau de Parfum

Of all the stupid ideas for pastimes and hobbies I’ve come up with, the notion that I might dabble in perfumery must be up there with the most ridiculous of them. I had read a few fascinating books on the subject and didn’t see why I couldn’t try it for myself. Never mind letting a total lack of experience & ability stand in my way. Nor did I pause to reflect that, if anything, my olfactory acuity has tended to be below average.

I must have spent several hundred pounds stocking up on dozens of essential oils and essences, plus assorted bases & accessories; then going on to measure, mix, blend and sniff away for a month or two until an onslaught of migraines and the onset of new allergy symptoms pushed home the point that perhaps it wasn’t going to work out. Before giving up the ghost, I had managed to come up with a few concoctions I felt were worthwhile, the best of them an eau de perfum I made for my wife. Poured into a handmade bottle (ordered from a glassblower called Malcolm Sutcliffe, now seemingly retired), it formed part of a birthday present.

She was delighted with the gift, and, even if the fragrance might not have been something she’d otherwise have chosen for herself, she did enjoy wearing it from time to time. The bottle, with a small amount of the perfume left inside, ultimately became more of an ornament. Taking brightly backlit photographs of it brought out the beautiful detail within the glass that was less evident under normal illumination. The image above is a digital one taken with a Nikon D80, where the original frame was cropped and then subjected to a little more light photoshoppery.

Double Exposures

Digitally-manipulated photography has meant that composite images have for some time been practically ubiquitous. One kind of composite image less in evidence than in years past, however, is the double-exposure (or multiple-exposure) native to film photography. Skilled professionals could exploit such re-exposures to striking effect, but these photos were much oftener the accidental results of error or malfunction. An example is the shot above, which I call Sleeping Dogs Lie, where I ended up with a pair of part-overlapping frames of my late Labrador.

Another more abstract-looking example is the one below, where, forgetting I had a 24-frame roll loaded rather than a 36-frame one, I repeatedly exposed and tried to advance the tail end of the film. I have dabbled a few times with superimposing images digitally - for example: this self-portrait) - but the results haven’t have quite the same flavour. And indeed, why even try to ape the look of film double-exposures when there are so many other was to play with images digitally?

Mask

From my second visit to Venice I brought home a couple of carnival masks as souvenirs: a Pulcinella-type mask in green and gold for myself; and a full-face Columbina one, profusely decorated with feathers, as a gift for my wife. I’d set out on an aimless walk one morning while she lolled abed at the hotel and it caught my eye from the window of a workshop somewhere in the Dorsoduro district of the city.

For years the latter was part of our decor, displayed hanging on a wall in each of our various abodes. Of the several photos I took of it over that time, the one above is my favourite. Converting the original image to monochrome in Photoshop using a blue filter effect emphasised the faux-craquelure effect on the face and darkened the gold-painted visor and lips to satisfying effect. I still have the mask now, its feathers, alas, all full of dust, adorning a mannequin that stands in my study.

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!