As photographers we are primarily concerned with light, but often the most interesting shapes come from the absence of light – the shadows.?We are usually instructed as photographers, that our exposures should be worked out accurately to ensure that we have plenty of shadow detail, but I often find that having a deep shadow, or [...]
I had a visit from a friend the other day while I was doing some contact printing. He was asking me how a real Lith print looked, as he had only ever seen them in books. I told him that there wasn’t much to Lith printing, it’s pretty straightforward if you are just playing around [...]
Different photographers have different expectations from a film. They may buy a particular brand because they have seen that someone they admire has used it. Some are looking for good latitude, others for speed, acutance or fine grain. Others may be expecting contrasty, gritty results.
Buying a film and exposing/developing at the manufacturers recommended settings will [...]
I have been using resin coated paper in an old kodak Specialist 7×5 camera this weekend. I wrote recently that using it had distracted me from actually looking for pictures, but I keep being drawn back to it.
I have had a student of mine staying over for two days, he is from the university where [...]
I have just returned from a weeks break in Brittany, France. I couldn’t resist doing lots of landscapes and portraits there, so I now have a much bigger backlog of films to process! I shot Ilford HP5 120 rated 200 ISO and Ilford FP4 120 rated 50 ISO. I only took medium format on this [...]
At the University where I teach part time I have a number of students who stand out from the crowd because of the talent, dedication or ingenuity they display.
One such student, Chris Finch has recently been working with 5×4 and processing in two bath.
A couple of weeks ago, we were discussing the various ways sheet [...]
I suddenly got the idea today?that I could put Ortho film in one of the cameras, shoot some graphic contrasty snow scenes, over process the film and get a really high contrast result. This I hoped, would print as black and white with no mid tones.
I went out with an old Nikkormat and a 20mm [...]