Large Format....

I've always loved shooting film, and even though I've now been shooting digital for nearly 10 years, I still get that buzz from not knowing how an image will look once the film is developed.
 Over the past month I have been shooting a lot of 35mm colour slide and large format black & white, and whilst I currently enjoy just shooting film for the sake of it, as a break from digital which is prety much reserved for my landscape projects & any professional work I have, I have been taking steps to become more involved when it comes to the medium as a whole.

This move has been instigated by my aquiring a large format camera and its opening up of different styles and techniques as to how and what I can do photographically.

I decided to start off with something easy and set the camera up to take a photo of a couple of old chairs in my back garden. Easy enough, I just set everything up and shot a couple of frames of the chairs as they stood, on the edge of a pile of scrap wood destined to be chopped up and used as kindling. And surprise! it worked! Not that there was much to get wrong, but holding that 5x4 inch negative in my hand was fantastic!

This has given me the incentive to be a bit more adventurous and since then I have finished the box of 25 sheets of Ilford FP4 taking portraits of my lovely girlfriend Shalina and a photographer friend, Esther,  who lives locally.

Although I've had a few underexposed,probably more to do with my shooting in low
light, I'm very happy with the results and am looking forward to experimenting with
different films, the prospect of 5x4 inch slides is more than a little appealing, and combining the traditionally captured images with digital processing techniques like split toning and texturing.

The images posted here have only minimal editing applied, more or less retouching of marks on the negatives and cream toning, a style of toning that I'm very much into at the moment with my monochrome portraits.

Market town decay

Last night I paid a visit to the site of our local, now unused, cattle market. My plan was to scout about for shots that I would later retake using an analogue  large format film camera, before everything is either burried beneath a supermarket or cleared for redevelopement.

 At first I found myself at an ends as to how to approach photographing the site, I am so used to walking past it that I had to spend a little time taking everything in, to try to look at it with fresh eyes. But it wasn't until twilight that the pictures started to reveal themselves, the encroaching shadows adding to the sense of emptiness, pockets of night amongst the skeletons of stalls and sheds that litter the space.

I recall that as a child I would visit the regular markets held there with my mother, along side the livestock market there was a produce matket selling everything from steaks to stakes , and later as a teenager would go for a mooch around with my friends to pass the time on a saturday afternoon. My memories of the place are always brightly lit, daytime memories, in complete antithesis to the mood of the place at twilight. Where at one time it was an area filled with activity, there now is a feeling of absense & space.
It is a shame that in a time when space is at a premium, that a piece of a town's heritage should be let slip into obscurity, allowed to fade from memory remaining only as a paragraph or two in a little known book on local history.
Depending on the sites future purpose is the identity of the town of which it is so much an integral part of the fabric.

Welcome!

Hi, and welcome to my first ever attempt at a blog! I've been a bit slack of late with keeping my online presence up to date, mostly its through dread of sifting through an interminable backlog of images; but as they say... a stitch in time is worth nine!

Anyway, onto business.

At present I am devoting most of my time developing my Landscape skills and have been working a lot with both film & digital Infrared. I have always enjoyed using Black & White techniques in my Landscape work, Infrared allows me to achieve a range of different effects along with standard Monochrome. The characteristics of Infrared create Images that have an hint of the Unearthly in their aspect, water becomes darker whilst grass & leaves glow brightly in the sunlight, all of which has as a backdrop a sky that deepens in tone to black in the extreme, creating images that look as though they were taken on a moonlit night rather than a summers day. It is these signature characteristics that I manipulate within my Images, to varying degrees, combined with long exposure times that help portray a sense of movement and passing time.