Author Archives: sandy

Reciprocity failure

Recently I have been doing a lot of pinhole photography, and due to that I have had to explain to a number of people (unfamiliar with the more technical parts of photography) what reciprocity failure is.
Reciprocity is the relationship between shutter speeds and apertures, which means that as you reduce exposure with a change in, [...]

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Magazine articles

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a post on a series of articles that I’ve had published in Amateur Photographer. Ollie Atwell from the magazine contacted me some time ago and asked me if I’d be interested in describing how and why I had taken some of my pictures. The articles are [...]

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Kirk Toft

It’s not very often that I do a post on another photographer, but recently I had a visit from an old friend who I don’t see often enough, and who’s work I think deserves more attention. Kirk is a photographer who has devoted himself to one process and knows it inside out, he also has a [...]

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Making large copy negatives for alt processes.

When I need to produce a Gum print or a Cyanotype, I sometimes use large format original negatives. More often than not I use copynegs made from an RC print as this gives me much more control and flexibility.
The first thing I do is make an RC print to the size that I need my [...]

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A nice discovery.

I was looking through a box of old lenses and collected junk earlier this year, with an idea to sell off some bits on Ebay. I had sold some unused brass lenses, enlarging lenses and old cameras, and was about to list a little lens I had found languishing in the bottom of the box. [...]

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Winter light.

I love the low sun and long shadows that are a feature of winter days. Shadows have been a fascination of mine for many years and will continue to be I expect. Every sunny (winter) morning the light shines directly into our kitchen and on this occasion I placed a piece of driftwood on the [...]

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Walker Titan Pinhole 5×4

Using the Walker Titan pinhole 5×4
I have been using the Walker pinhole camera for a few months now, though not exclusively because I’ve been busy with a lot of paper negative stuff. Having shot with it in a few different locations, I have really grown to love it.
When I’ve shot pinhole stuff before, I’ve always [...]

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Process, enlarging and simple lenses

I have been using large format cameras alongside other smaller formats for many years. Large format cameras have traditionally been associated with the master photographers, or with high end commercial work, so when I began, I worried about getting ‘perfect’ negatives like the experts. It took me many years to understand that they could be [...]

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Paper negatives in Kent

Last month I visited an artist friend in Deal, Kent and took along the Kodak Specialist 5×7, shooting paper negatives on some of my remaining stock of Kentona paper. I had a really nice time. We went to see a painter called Jo Aylward and stayed in the house of another artist called Ruby.

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Print exposure using a metronome.

I recently gave a printing masterclass at Warwick College here in the UK. I do these quite regularly on behalf of Ilford / Harman technology, and one of the things that I talked about gave me the idea for this blog post. I was explaining how I prefer my students not to set their darkroom [...]

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