Thursday 29 July 2010

A strange view!



I've been doing a lot of sun based photos lately and I thought I would leave two pots for some solargraphs down at my parents in the hope of capturing a different view, so I placed them way back, April 5th to be exact, one at the front of the house and the other at the back. The back was a familiar view as it had once been my bedroom and was now the guest room so I new where the arc of the sun would go over the gardens.

Now my idea of capturing a sun arc should have been relatively easy but of course I didn't count on having parents around that fiddle, clean and of course open windows! It's the opening of the window with the pot attached that has thrown me and to some degree the image I was hoping for. So hear they are anyway and despite a lot of movement they have captured something!

The pot at the front of the house overlooks the road and I can only think that it is busy enough to have created the light trails as well as the suns arc, it's not what I expected tho and I think I need to work out the image more but its certainly interesting and quite a different colour!

Monday 26 July 2010

Instants with Fuji



During my week at HESFES I did many different types of photography from solargraphs, pinholes to medium format and Instants using a Holgaback which now takes Fuji film. I tend to carry a small Muji notebook with me now so that I can do transfers instantly and also have somewhere to store my prints as I carry on with what I'm doing.
These are a few of the images I made and the transfers, I was having a lot of problems with my back falling off and of course light leaks and instant film don't always go but I do happen to like the ones I got by accident, lots more tape is obviously needed for this now as the crappy Holga springs have had their day!

Friday 23 July 2010

Messing with Lumen prints






While you all wait an inordinate lentgh of time for me to post again, I have been busy or not busy at festivals, while at the last one images from which I will post one day (being realisitc here) I was mulling over what my next workshop at the reserve would be as it was booked for the first morning after returning from HESFES.

So I decided upon something easier on the organisation and got the kit ready for some Lumen prints which would hopefully give results that all would enjoy and with not a great deal of effort. So the tiny little toilet on the reserve was blacked out in preparation for the fixing of the images once they were thoroughly cooked by the sun that morning. The first batch the paper was wet to help pull out some of the colour from petals and then they were sandwiched between glass like a contact print. The results were great and the children and adults loved the images. The usual organic matter was placed on the BW Ilford photo paper for varying times but all at least 50 mins to one hour, when I say usual I meant flowers but one did include a partially desicated frog which came up with a nice result.



The only fix I had was the Ilford rapid fix which unfortunately did not do the prints much justice and in some of them I cold see the colour being leeched out, a shame a some of the flowers had bled and the colour was picked up by the BW paper. I did think at the time that there needed to be another solution. After finishing the pieces that had been made by the children and showing them the prcess in the darkroom. I decided to lay out more for myself these I would take home and leave for as long as possible, they did in the end get exposed for aprox. eight and a half hours before fixing I thought I would try scanning them as I do the solargraphs, the colour is always retained on them when I do it so I figured it would work the same way, luckily it did and these were much better but I still needed to fix. Ammonium Thiosulphate was in the Rapid fix and having done a bit of research I discovered that Hypo was what I needed, Sodium Thiosulphate by it's chemical name and I should then use hypo check to make sure it's still doing it's job!

Mr Cads saved the day and I got both for my next workshop. The images here are some of those done with the children and also some are my later experiments on dry paper for 8+ hours.
For further info and really beautiful images visit the late Jerry Burchfield's site, stunning images and such a loss to the alternative print processing world.

Saturday 10 July 2010

Hop Farm Music Festival










Well, I have been experimenting with my last aqcuisition and decided to take it along to the Hop Farm Music festival in Paddock Wood Kent last weekend. I have some of the results back and I thought I'd share. I think the intersting thing here is the fact that my 360Spinner is obviously capable of doing at least 37o+ degrees in one spin, now wether that will stress the rubber band is another thing but I like the overlap!

I also like the fact that you can manually spin the thing and that provides for a lot more experimentation, (Something I have yet to scan) so the best thing was the fact that I could put my hane up in the air and be sure that I would capture everything and there was a lot of 'everything' around me. I have no idea what the capacity of the space was but the crowd was a lot bigger than i had expected for this fest.

The line up was described as the best of the summer so far... no doubt true, the Highlights were certainly Mumford and Sons: Seasick Steve: Laura Marling: Magic Numbers and Johnny Flynn with Ray Davies and of course the legendery Bob Dylan, sadly I feel his performance was pushing the limits of his abilities now and the crowd were certainly good at singing, thank goodness as the songs were difficult to distinguish when they were not. Unfortunately i missed the whole of Pete Doherty's set as I was queueing for a beer! for over an hour!! Foy Vance who opened the fest was good, I hadn't heard of him but he got everyone warmed up ok.

So I have some 360 Spinner images here for you, more pics on the way with my Diana and the LCAinstax but first I am heading back down to a field adjacent to the Hop Farm to go to another week long festival, HESFES, this is going to be rammed with music, workshops and conferences so I shall be busy making images all week and hopefully putting my feet up and listening to some good music.