Despite rumours, I am not dead. For the last few months I’ve been quietly loosing my marbles in the darkroom. Its been a battle of willpower, like trying to maintain going the gym after work. Like many skills that need mastering, eventually it falls into place and starts working leaving you wondering why it never worked…
As my house slowly fills with metal tintype photographic plates leant against any surface available, the time had come to start to store them properly. Rather than make little storage boxes I decided to produce an album. Collating all my photographs into one place has given the chance to spend some time with the images, assessing…
Just when you’ve finally made your first beautiful wetplate images, its time to face up to the fact your going to have to varnish them if you want them to last any length of time. Varnishing is a daunting task and very capable of screwing everything up. Out of all the Wetplate workshops I’ve participated…
Throughout Ansel Adams series of Books, The Camera, Negative, Print; he mentions the use of a Wratten #90 dark amber filter for pre-visualising the scene into the tones of a print. This isn’t to be used on the camera lens but as an actual viewing aid held up to the eye. With the advent of digital cameras…
I find Moleskin notebooks have become a necessity in my photography. I use them like many would use pinterest but they have many advantages. The act of printing and cutting out images to stick into them takes time. The book itself is expensive and you want to keep it like a neat careful piece of…
Ive had many workshop tutors for wetplate, all have been fantastic. It would be almost impossible for myself to be doing wetplate without a network of people either teaching, giving advice or supplying the necessary things needed to do this art. However recently with all my issues with wet plates, one person has inspired me…
There are times when I just want to scream, I think its part and parcel of alternative photography. Recently I seem to be having a whole year of problems with alternative photography. This recent disaster is interesting. For wetplates you need a bath of silver nitrate and distilled water. Thats all there is to it,…
After hours of messing about in the darkness of my laboratory, I am still stuck with some wet plate issues. The over active collodion issue is not fully resolved yet, but I suspect its was mainly new collodion combined with hot weather thats made image making very difficult. For the last couple of months my wetplates have been…
Recently my tintypes have been plagued with relentless image fog. For the last month I’ve not had many useable plates. I have stopped shooting with models and my photography is at a standstill. Incase anybody reading doesn’t know the tintype process, basically its this. Coat a black aluminium plate in photographic collodion by pouring it neatly on top and…
Last year I bought a dozen books on Portrait photography, this was perhaps the best: The Photographic Portrait by Robin Gillanders. It is a book that deserves to be read from cover to cover. The Photographic Portrait is an interesting book, it covers basic techniques as well as the authors thoughts on portraiture and his working method….
I think sometimes it is easy to start going too deep into the ideas behind your work, loosing touch with the basic elements particular to the medium you work in. Recently I have been at a bit of a dead end, Ive started to work with the concept of mindscapes, initially having some success. I wanted to go into…
Finding a unique voice with photography is a hard task to achieve. It takes a lot of soul searching and creativity. At the forefront of this struggle is identifying your message, what is it you are trying to say? I am coming to believe that the act of discovering this message is part of the journey my art takes….