MorseBlog

I am now on my third iteration as an exercise of looking at a single negative and finding new ways to express the image. This one like the previous is based on some serendipity during the first image making effort. I found the underexposed images had a different quality. My first take is to make a smaller image placed in the center of a large white area. Since the image is essentially surrounded by white then the whole scene might look like it is imbedded in a snowstorm with a greater feeling of isolation.  Mistaken print I used as a departure from something new. (f32 #5 8 seconds 15x9" on 12x16 Ilford MGFB Classic) For the exposure I want to keep with the hard filter (#5) as I don't want a hint of gray tones in the sky or snow. Bringing the exposure down renders the silhouettes in a grayscale which is what gives the feeling of snow or fog.  My earlier mistaken print indicates #5 at 8 seconds at f32 is about right. However, I want to reduce the image size and place it in a...

In my previous two posts I set about printing a negative I took recently. I call it Mathematical Trees as there is a kind of geometric balance to the image. It has become for me an exciting image. I think in part because it seems to be a milepost in my evolution as a photographer (and also perhaps because I have not felt creatively motivated this past month).  It is a milestone of sorts because I was not out looking for a specific image but it was immediately apparent when I saw the scene that it was a worth capturing. This does not often happen to me but it does happen with increasing frequency. I could capture the photo and composition and then realize it as a print in the darkroom. In the last post a few printing mistakes led me to consider alternative interpretations and so I will explore one of those visions here. The earlier version was a stark almost graphic take on the image. In this one I want to impart some atmosphere by darkening the sky. ...

The Theme The theme of this post is how you can learn from your mistakes and not in the usual sense that you won't repeat them. Rather that there may be some creative serendipity if you contemplate the result rather than condemn it. It is also instructive in how one image may contain multiple versions that may be distinct in terms of the emotion conveyed.  Some of this was born out of some prints I made from a Marloes Sands photo where I played with contrast to get a different feel from the same image.   How it all started... In my previous post about getting back into the darkroom I printed one of the first images I took this year. I it call Mathematical Trees. I printed this on my 6x6 enlarger even though it is a 6x9 negative from my Fuji GSW690iii camera. I found a workable square crop (below) but it didn't do the image justice The copse on the right gets cut off and it is contained completely on the negative and was a vital part of the composition.  The ...

Apparently I haven't been in the darkroom since September last year! This is of course when I began to prepare for the fall season of photography. During the fall I probably took in excess of 100 photos most of which were on my large format camera. This has been an incredibly productive in terms of number and quality of my work. It has been helped by having a focus on a subject (woodland photography).  Unfortunately my darkroom work has taken a back seat to fall photographs that went through a long productive period over the summer. I took to making smaller prints with wide margins and even went so far as to fashion simple frames to display them.  Expired Developer and Concentrate This week I returned (slowly at first) to the darkroom and reacquainted myself with that aspect of my work. I had a modest backlog of black and white images from this past summer I had not printed yet. I had the inevitable problems of assessing equipment and chemicals. While I had just mixed a ...

This past summer I wrote twice about making notecards Making Notecards in the Darkroom Paper Scraps: More Notecards! In both cases I used scrap photopaper and made them in the darkroom. They have proved popular by recipients. I was contemplating making more and wanted to look at a less labor-intensive method using Giclee or ink-jet printing. The photopaper versions have been made on Ilford Art 300 paper which is a heavy 300 GSM 100% cotton rag paper from Hahnemuhle the German art paper maker. It has a pleasant coarse texture like water color paper. In the past I have made C-prints on Fuji papers but never ink-jet. Peak Imaging my go-to film developer and print maker does make ink-jet prints and exclusively on Hahnemuhle ink-jet papers. So I decided to dip my toe into this world. I ended up selecting 4 different papers to see what they were like.  Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm Hahnemuhle William Turner 310gsm Hahnemuhle Bam...

I just got back my second roll of film from my Fuji GSW 690III since I broke it last February. Right before lockdown I was on holiday near Machynlleth in North Wales and on some wet rocks I slipped and all 6'3" of me was laid out flat on the ground before I knew what happened. The camera whipped over my head and slammed on one of the rocks.  Fuji GSW 690III Fortunately, I was uninjured but the shutter was knackered. With lockdown shortly afterwards, I wasn't in a hurry to find out if it could be fixed or how much it cost. Finally a few months ago I got around to  it and sent it into Camera Repair Workshop in Milton Keynes (UK). After a few weeks Dave sent an estimate for about £150 which seemed more than fair. I did speak with him on the phone and he said it might take time due to restrictions around Covid. After a couple of weeks I got the camera back in great shape and ready to go. I would recommend his work and plan to use him again. He said over the phone that when Fu...