Tag Archives: Photography

Pinhole?

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Yes, pinhole.

It looks like this:

It’s a tin can.  Mac and cheese.  Yes, I love the tinned stuff, and whilst I know its easy to make I prefer the tinned stuff okay?

So you clean it out and you find a top.  this is from the top of a poster-parcel, you know when you buy a print or a poster online and it comes in the tube, this is one of the two plastic end caps. then you get a sharp thing and you bust a hole in it, it doesn’t matter what size.  You can see the hole.  then you get some thin card and pin prick a tiny hole in it and stick it to the inside of the bigger hole.

Paint the inside of your tin can black by the way to stop light bouncing round and reflecting.  Then put a piece of black insulation tape over the hole.  That was easy, and free – so the next bit is the only difficult bit.  You need to buy light sensitive paper.  I found some amongst my step-dad’s things from the 70s.  Yes it was in the shed, damp, and had lost its label and protective box and was in a light safe bag but the end was open.

You need to buy fixer (if you know how to make cafenol which is basically coffee, vit-C tabs and cleaning soda) or fixer and developer if you don’t wanna make cafenol.  You’re supposed to buy stop as well but I think water suits fine, or maybe water with lemon juice in, but I never tried it.

Then you get three small sandwich boxes and pour the diluted chemicals in, developer in one (label it) stop, or water in the next and fixer in the next.  Then you do like 10 minutes research regarding your papers and chemicals to find out your time.  I guessed my dodgy damp paper was RC, resin coated, because I liked the sound of that.  I went to the website I’d bought the chemicals from (AG Photo in Birmingham UK) for £27 and I searched around a bit and found the info I needed on the Ilford website.  The times were pretty simple, 2 minutes in developer (but really you gauge it by eye) 30 seconds in the stop or water, then a minute in the fix, at room temp.

So I basically put the paper in the can (in the dark!) took the can outside with the top on and tape over the hole.  I sat it on a chair on my deck and took the tape away for 20 seconds (rough guess) it was pretty sunny.  I came back in.  Like I say it was pretty sunny so I went under my duvet because even with my curtains closed it wasn’t dark enough.  I lined up the 3 tubs and dipped the paper in, swishing it around with tweezers.  Then after the fix I washed it in the washing up bowl.  pretty low tech.

This happened:

Possibly the least amazing picture ever seen.

But I mean, I made it with a frickin mac and cheese can! it’s the trees at the bottom of my garden by the way.  And yes, practice will eventually make perfect.

Pinhole experts feel free to educate me on my mistakes.

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Shoot a Roll in a day

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All the cool kids are doing it. 

What do I mean?  35mm of course.  Remember that stuff we used before there were phones that could make toast, give you relationship advice and clean your car on a Sunday morning?  I love some stuff about the 2012-World.  The fact I can get out of bed at 3am, if I so choose, and go and buy authentic ingredients to make a lamb Tikka Biryani.   The fact I don’t have to read complicated small-print timetables anymore because Google tells me when the train is coming.  And that I can go to the pub for an evening without getting COPD.

But then I dislike some stuff too.

The fact nobody can spell anymore.  That I have about forty TV channels and there’s still nothing on, and that petrol costs more than saffron infused angel’s tears.

And the death of film.

Film photography is still cheap despite what Jessops tells you, I buy film for less than a pound and process it to CD for £2.  Film photography is a 150 year old tradition, making images the way our grandfathers did.  We can even use the cameras they used, got off eBay for £2 instead of the hundreds they spent.  It’s science happening in your hands, its magical stuff.  Light burning into chemical emulsion, a moment, an experience recorded.  Not for your computer screen or a low res Facebook album, but to slip into a book or bottom draw to discover in ten years time, so you can spend a Sunday afternoon remembering the fun you had.  So shoot a roll in a day.  Buy a film camera for a pound, get some film from the pound shop and go on a picnic with your family.  One of the nice things about photography is you can’t take any photos sitting watching TV, you have to get up and go out and do something relatively exciting.

Here are a few I took today.

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Quick Photo Update

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So this is efficiency – four photo shoots summarised in one blog post.

So there’s been another shoot with Megan (allowing a blog header change).  We visited Castlefield and Piccadilly Gardens and a few other places and got some lovely shots.

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Then I caught up with Louise, who if you scoot back about four months was the first person who was victim to my portrait project ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then my first shoot with a male model, working with Peter on some ideas he had given inspired by the artist Francesca Woodman, using blur and movement.  We met in Ancoats and used the doorways and walls of the buildings between dereliction and development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this weekend a friend on my Masters course asked me to shoot with her daughter.  It was different again and after viewing the pictures I felt they could lend themselves well to some lomo style processing, adding in some film flaws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for any comments and likes, let me know what you think below.  Also check out my regular photo blog at www.365project.org/chewyteeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Night Shoot

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The model website is starting to yield results, as several different ideas are being tossed around and March and April look like they might involve some interesting projects around the North West.  It is fun too.

I had bought a new flash, a new f1.8 50mm lens and a fancy new tripod over the last month or two, and I was dying to do some shooting this week, so me and Megan took advantage of the sun on Thursday, and we headed into town after dusk to use the flash.  I am really happy with the results.  Let me know what you think!

 

Thanks for viewing!

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Two thousand and twelve

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Does it sound weird when you say it to yourself? Two thousand and twelve.  It was the nineteen nineties for so long.  I learnt how to write putting the date carefully at the top of the page and practising my nines (and my eights) and now…suddenly its a new year, a new century and millennium.  Things really fly by.  So it’s January that means…

CUTAWAY MAGAZINE IS NOW OPEN!!

Yey, so it’s a project (if you’ve missed the posts) and we’re accepting submissions of poetry and prose but no art.  Payment is a copy of the beautiful finished article which you’ll recieve in May (ish) and if you’re local there’ll be a fun launch type thing in Manchester.

Also it’s a time for new projects.  I’ve become obsessed with cameras.  I’m not that fussed for fancy ones bought at fancy camera shops.  I’m interested in people’s unwanted film cameras – from a bygone era.  These mechanical works of art demand to be appreciated and cared for. I’ve spent most of December in fact on eBay trying to catch a few bargains.  This project doesn’t really go hand in hand with the taking photos side of things, I mean, how many cameras can I use in one go?  But they are so beautiful.  Freecycle has been fantastic too, getting some expired film which (hopefully) will work just as well.

I was going to start a Tumblr photo blog, but I’m having second thoughts.  It might just become a replica of my 365 project - which is into its second year.  Either way it is just a vehicle for my new project which has been in the pipeline really since November 2011 when I asked for volunteers on Facebook to be models for my photography.  I want to spend 2012 taking photos of people instead of buildings and landscapes.  Sure landscapes are pretty – but photographing people is hardcore – it’s tough.  It is reading poetry in the original French instead of the translation, it is doing Iron Man competitions rather than jogging in the park, it’s landscaping as opposed to gardening.  A tree will never get annoyed about standing in the cold, a flower will never ask to see the pictures you’ve taken and pass comment (not that my models have done either of these things!) but in theory people are a more interactive and unpredictable subject.  But they’re also more amazing – and the human condition is to all of us more important than how green a tree is.  To me anyway. 

So my 365 project – whilst no longer being one photo taken a day will become one photo uploaded a day from my most recent shoot.  If anyone out there is happy to model I will pay you in tea.  Well I’ll buy you one cup at least.  Or go halves maybe depending on where we are.  It’s addictive taking photos – as I found in 2011 – but the downside to taking photos of other people is you need other people!  So you have to be patient.  I have a few things in the pipeline though and my sister wants some pictures for her jewellery website.

So here’s my latest pics.  My second photo shoot - with a lot of time in between my first and second learning how to use my camera better and where I went wrong the first time.  Thanks to both my previous models who have tolerated my early fails.

So what are your new projects for the new year?  And please feel free to comment on the pictures (sorry they’re lo-res) I don’t mind feedback.

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Merry Christmas Guys!

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I was thinking this morning about what I love the most about photography and what I came up with was something I haven’t been able to do for years.

This week was the first week of the Christmas holidays from my main job at university, and at Christmas I tend to ease off on the writing (prose anyway, last Christmas I wrote about 250 poems) unlike last year I have assignments to do for my MA so the luxury of stopping writing altogether for a few weeks isn’t there – but it does become less of a priority.  i think it’s healthy to have a break from something that you’re very close to once in a while.  But, not content to sit and stare at Only Fools and Horses Christmas Specials for the umpteenth time I do replace writing with something else just as consuming.  This year photography.

Guilty confession:  This week I bought 3 cameras on Ebay, and would have bought another 2 if I hadn’t bid too low.

Yep, I’m hooked.  I’ll probably show pictures of the lomo beauties when they arrive and fill you in on the juicy features.  Hopefully I won’t lose my writer-followers, I’ll be back on that in the new year, and with cutaway opening on January 1st it’s going to be a busy period.  But for now, it’s me and my 3/soon to be 6 cameras.

And I was thinking back to what I loved when I first did photography proper at university and it was the darkroom.  I used to shoot a film in order to get in there.  If anyone hasn’t done it, basically you lock yourself in a tiny store cupboard, tun off all the lights, ALL of them and crack the cartridge that holds the film open. The film unrolls all over the place while you try to find the end in the pitch black.  Then you have a spool type thing which you feed the film onto – I remember this being quite tricky.  Then the spool – hopefully correctly filled – (don’t turn the light on to check) goes onto a dipper and is plunged into the first bath of chemicals whilst you watch the luminous hands of the clock.  You stand there for ten minutes in the silence and darkness waiting for the time to reach.  Then it is swapped into another bath to fix it, then a third bath to rinse it.  Each time you occasionally swish it around to make sure the fluid reaches each part of the film.  It was such an adventure to scientifically retrieve the art you had made – digital seems so cold in comparison.  I think once it’s in the fix bath you can turn the red light on, but I never used to use any, staying in darkness till the end.  Then you can view the negative images on the film – but you dry it first in a drying cabinet for a few hours.  After that – it’s to the enlarger, basically shining a bright light through the negative onto a piece of light-sensitive paper – again in the dark – and exposing it for long enough to get the true contrasts. 

I miss this process so much – I work at a university which has since abandoned its dark rooms because of digital photography.  I can’t help getting excited though when I go on the lomography website and see all the cool cameras and film (but never buy there, their prices are about 50%-100% higher than the cameras are worth).  Watch this space is all I’ll say.

Let me know if you remember/love film, or still shoot in film?  What is it about old photos that have a nostalgia about them, and when you see the lomography galleries everything seems so exciting and immediate.  Digital is too perfect sometimes.

Anyway – some news.  I’m off to post another blog on cutaway’s website after this to keep the fans hungry – we open soon, and whilst I think my co-editor will be happy to sit back and let the stories and poems trickle through the letterbox, I’m going to be tempted to read each one as they come.  It’s going to be like Christmas until March 1st!  Get over there and ‘like’ us if you haven’t already.  And check out Sammy Dee and Luby Lou’s blog posts to discover more information about us.

Also – if you’re a female (or even if you aren’t) another Creative Writing associate has started a fiction page over at  http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/ a flash lifestyle and gossip magazine for women.  Email lucy@femalefirst.co.uk - she requests: Submissions no more than 1,000 words on the subject of new beginnings to coincide with the new year. This can be whatever you interpret it to be. Times new roman, size 12. So get submitting, Lucy is looking for poems and prose and art and photos, so if you’d like to publish something with her send it across – this is the first issue of the fiction page on the Female First Website – and I think her dead line is the middle of January.

Thanks for reading, and to all my followers and passersby MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Snow!

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This morning was the first day of the Christmas holidays for me!  I woke up pretty early and opened the curtains and….SNOW! I ran round in circles, banging into furniture and knocking over vases until I was tired.  Then I had a sausage butty, jumped in the car and headed off into the woods.  See for me, and everyone below the age of eleven, snow doesn’t inspire hot chocolate in front of the fire, it inspires adventures!

Rivington for three hours was my adventure.  I walked up into the woods, and as I got higher the fog closed in.  It was snowing but the light, big pieces of snow that are very slow falling and don’t just make you wet.  The nicest thing was it was silent and there wasn’t a soul up there.  I walked for maybe an hour until I was totally surrounded by the wilder parts of the moors.  the trees were covered in frost, the ground was layered with untouched snow, the sky was white and all the plants were frozen.  I don’t think the lake was actually frozen over, but it was skinned with snow.  All I could hear were my own footsteps crunching through the snow, or sloshing through the mud.

Nature seemed to not expect to see me up there.  Pheasants, sheep, squirrels and robins seemed to do a double take before they slowly ambled away into the snow.  Maybe their reactions are a bit dulled in bad weather.  It didn’t mean I got any decent shots though, I have the habit of freezing when I see wildlife rather than getting a shot.  Which is what happened when I stumbled onto a path full of deer.  Three or four young deer were standing against a fence, obviously trying to stay out of the wind.  I stood still and even though they at first began to move away, they circled round and came back down towards me.  They were beautiful.  Stupid me clicked my camera on and fired off a couple of shots without checking the exposure, and yes the che-chink of the shutter frightened them all off and the pics were rubbish anyway.  Serves me right for not shooting on automatic.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the pictures (slideshow below) and wrap up warm if you hit the countryside this weekend.  Processing was done in photoshop and pixlr. Comments welcome. PS this is one of my 101 project challenges done – photograph snow.

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A Year in Pictures

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As I write this I’m just two or three pictures from completing my first years 365 project.  So I thought I might look back with nostalgia over the year which pretty much flew by.

December – My equipment consisted of a Panasonic FS4, as big as a medium-sized matchbox, my software included photoshop-7- but really I didn’t know how to use it.  The Robin picture sums up where I was at last December – except it doesn’t I cheekily cropped it and made it brighter this afternoon – he was lost in a patch of empty snow. 

January – I picked this one out of 1.5 gig of pictures because it has a naturally occurring light leak and I grew to love – much to my followers chagrin – such lomography-style flaws on my pictures – often destroying perfectly good pictures with flares and sickly colour tweeks.  This is a macro – using my FS4, on my way to work in the morning light.  Really a type of photo which dominated the first half of my project.

 February: Well over 2 gig of photos taken in February – practice makes perfect.  Still using my FS4, with a growing knowledge of photoshop and some lovely bright days – my photos develop.  Countryside still dominates, and ‘pretty’ scenes.

March - I picked this photo of the Bridgewater canal for March. 

It represents two things.  I began to gather followers on the 365 project website – most of them from the dominions, more recently known as Canada and Australia.  And I became interested in portraying my locality - and what was for me – its fascinating history.  Industrial architecture, cotton industry, mining, bad housing – to represent the North of England to the world.  I also began to understand photoshop.  At 3 gig of photos taken, March might represent my career high!

April

  April I discovered HDR, and a few other bits of software.  Looking back I think I began to lose interest a little in the project.  My FS4 was still going strong but 1.5 gig of photos and most of that heavy processing and duplicate images – The work was hotting up on my MA so I began spending more time writing.

 May

 May saw a miserable holiday in Marrakech.  If I needed any more proof that I loved where I lived, and in fact – that it is the best place to live, in the world – this was it.  Osama bin Laden ‘bought it’ as they used to say, much to America’s enjoyment – and I cowered in a Muslim country which smelt of wee, trying not to look American.

June:

 

 

 Oh to be in England…or Wales – where this was taken.  2.2 gig in my June file says that I got about a bit and took lots of pictures.  I really got to grips with Oleneo HDR software, which is why I picked this picture to show.  HDR does fancy things with the highlights and darks to make a really super picture (RSP) which is what it should be called.  I was still loving my local area and using the Panasonic FZ7, a step up to an SLR style superzoom.  My FS4 sadly had passed on to the scrap heap in the sky.

July:

July represents a change in my photography.  I began going into Manchester more and really discovering what a great city that was.  Armed with my FZ7 and various friends who’d agree to trawl around the place I snapped buildings, railway stations, busy squares and trams.  This panorama is a hugin-HDR picture of Piccadilly station.

August:

Who can forget August?  It seems hard now to believe the men of North London

were taking up arms and marching the streets during the night to make up for the sheer lack of enthusiasm the police initially showed as our cities were invaded…invaded!  If I hadn’t learnt to love Manchester this year then I would now.  Apart from my politics momentarily veering over to the right with shouts of ‘Hang them all!’ ringing around my house – I also made a habit of getting into town once a week to take some photos and have some lunch and a general mooch around.  Joining book clubs, writers groups, writers courses and a walkers organisation in Manchester this year also encouraged me to get in as much as possible.  This panorama and the one above were done on hugin software which stitches four or five pictures together to give this format.  August though only saw 500mb of pictures taken and marks a low point in pictures.

September:

 The music festival in the Northern Quarter – Like August not many pictures taken, but since I had a camera phone – new this month – I was able to snap whenever the desire took me.  The 600mbs I did take were processed through pixlr-o-matic and photoshop.

 

October:

 

 

In October I did two things, I asked for volunteers on my Facebook page – looking for people who’d let themselves be victim to my photography.  Basically I was tiring of buildings and streets.  Heritage has had its day, there is only so many mine shafts and terrace streets.  It even felt as though I was running out of Manchester scenes.  I wanted more journalistic pictures, more street scenes full of people, more portraits and exciting things.  At over 2 gig of pictures I was back on form - the reason:  Well I had a dream I owned a Canon DSLR, and when I woke up I was sad…so I went on ebay and bought one!  Yey.

November:

I know you only saw this picture last week, but it represents November.  The first of my facebook volunteers – and a change in tack for me.  It’s tough taking portraits and people shots, or I found at least – it requires a bit more bravery and quicker thinking.  I began shooting on manual this month (the success of the whole year really – going from a point and shoot compact to shooting manual on a DSLR)  I purchased 4 lenses this month and dug a couple more out of my own film camera collection and bought a Pentax ring adapter so that I could use them all on my Canon.  My camera bag became quite huge and I felt as though I finally knew what I was doing.  12 months have gone by and maybe you can’t see my progress from these 12 but if you could browse the sometimes huge - sometimes not - files on my hard drive you’d see that my output has changed.  I have learned to not overwhelm my pictures with post-processing, and I am looking for light effects and compositions which I know will make a good picture.  I’ve taken 2.5 gig of pictures this month with my Canon

Feel free to take a look at my other 350 odd pictures in what has become a diary of the year.  This is another challenge ticked off the old 101 project too.  Feel free to comment below if you have any feedback.  http://365project.org/chewyteeth/365

The Portrait Challenge!

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(A second attempt – WordPress you swines, I don’t ask you to publish a portion of what I wrote, but all of it!)

Well winter is here – how do I know?  Well my car breaks down (last week I turned the ignition key with forty-five minutes to go before I had to be at work – six miles away – and it sounded like an angry donkey remonstrating.  I subsequently ran back to the house, threw on more suitable gear and pelted it on my bicycle.  I got there in time but spent the rest of the day sweating and wheezing.)  Also I know winter is here because I get an awful cough, always.  Oh and the final indicator that the bad weather has arrived – our bathroom becomes mouldy.  So basically things work less well (car-me-bathroom ventilation).

If you’re looking for the upside, it’s here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also completed one of my challenges last weekend, number 18, portrait photography.  My model and I wandered Manchester in the quickly declining light and I tried my hand, feeling like a real beginner.  People photos always look more interesting than buildings and streets – and equally they require a bit more thought.  I shall get there, but I think this set of pics shows it was my first time.  Feel free to comment on the pics, and lovers of mince pies feel free to wax lyrical.  I would have posted some writing but I’m at a schism – I’m reading lots and learning lots and hopefully in the near future I’m going to apply it in some wonderful shiny and sparkly way and create something superb.  That’s the theory.  Thanks for reading.

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