Work took me to Palma in Mallorca recently and I decided to tag on a few days holiday to the trip. It seems I will never learn with regard to travelling with film. With the hassel of taking film through airports these days and the risk of complete destruction before you even arrive at your destination thanks to the increasingly common CAT scanners at security, I take only a small amount with me....then never have enough!
There is a plus. With only three rolls of Ilford Delta 100, I'd shot the lot within two days, so spent the rest of the time relaxing and not worrying about taking photos.
Anyway,...
I've been using Ansco 130 print developer as my standard for a while now. It's famous because a variant of this developer was a favourite of Ansel Adams. It's not something you can buy off the shelf, but it's relatively easy to make....and well worth it.
There's a lot of commentary out there about its magical properties in bringing out highlight detail and producing beautiful prints. But, for me, there is one unique characteristic of this developer that makes it well worth the effort of sourcing the ingredients and making it: it lasts for months at working dilution, even with repeated use....
I've been wanting to visit Dungeness for years. It's not the easiest place to reach without a car, but I finally made the journey by train and taxi this year. It's every bit as desolote and odd as I had hoped. Home to an ancient nuclear power station well past its decommision date; a Victorian light house; a pebble beach classified as the UK's only desert; a passenger-carrying minature steam railway and a variety of crumbling fishing boats and other detritus of a working coastal area. There's also a couple of pretty decent pubs right on the beach...one at each end which is handy after a day's...
Some years ago on a work trip to Poland I managed to fit in a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi concentration camps. It was a chilly winter afternoon and there were only a handful of other visitors. I didn't have a great deal of film with me, but managed to get off two rolls of 35mm.
When I got home and examined the contact sheets, I decided I wanted to print the images on a cold tone paper. Hardly anyone makes coldtone anymore. The only available cold tone paper I know of today is made by Ilford and comes in gloss only, which is not the look I wanted. So I decided to experiment with...
Note: If you are offended by images of people who may hold political views different to your own, please go elsewhere.
What a tumultuous few years it's been. Before the drama of COVID-19, the UK was already in political and social turmoil. Brexit, Boris Johnson's attempted pro-roguing of parliament and Health Secretary Matt Hancock's drastic cuts to the National Health Service led to waves of protests througout 2019 (at one point almost on a weekly basis).
Photographing protests and demos takes me back to an important point in my photographic journey...and actually the reason I learned...
If you have a darkroom and are not making 'proper' proof contact sheets, you really should be. I've shot film for more than 40 years but I've only consistently made proper proofs for the past few. These days I make one for every film I shoot.
A proper proof not only helps you choose which images you want to use, but also tells you how good your negatives are and how easy they will be to print in the darkroom. After a one time test, proper proofs are super quick to make (much faster than scanning); I can proper proof ten films in about 25 minutes in the darkroom, far quicker than I could scan.
A...