Annual Blog Post

Well, it's been a year and 15 days (probably 16 by the time I finish writing) since my last blog post. It's not like anybody ever reads it anyway I don't think - most of the feedback seems to be from spambots posting nice comments about where I can source some cut-price viagra.

So, to catch up, this time last year I would've been in the early stages of second year. Second year was a bit crap for various reasons, and I finished up feeling a bit dissatisfied with where I'd ended up, artistically at least. By the end of it, I was really glad to be getting out of GSA for a while, since I'd be going on exchange to the University of New Mexico in the US. I did my usual summer stint at the bike shop, and by mid-August, I found myself in Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is quite a lot warmer than Scotland, though you probably didn't need me to tell you that, right? I got some mental sunburn, especially cycling around trying to find flats spread all across a very expansive city. Eventually, after dodging a few real dumps, I found myself (concidentally) in exactly the same flat that Theresa and Chris from Glasgow had stayed in the year before. The nearest Ikea is all the way up in Denver, so Walmart had to provide the furniture.

The only thing that was kinda worrying me was my class schedule. I'd been advised to take 200-level courses, roughly equivalent to second year at uni. The problem was that there were only two 200-level photography courses, and I hadn't been able to get on early and register for them due to a computer system error, so they were full by the time I got there. Luckily, I managed to beg a spare place on one of them, so I ended up with a timetable consisting of Digital Imaging Techniques, Intro to Printmaking, Modern Art History and History of Photography.

While there are many things I find confusing, bewildering or just plain annoying about the way the American educational system works, perhaps the biggest and most noticeable difference has been that of the workload compared to that of GSA. I find myself with a very frustrating mix - there's a lot more work to do, in terms of volume, but very little of it is particularly challenging.

Admittedly, my printmaking class is pretty challenging, but I put this down to the fact that I've never really had to create decent artworks without the aid of a camera before, and having to rely purely on my clumsy hands leaves me somewhat limited.

My big worry is that I'm going to be somewhat left behind as a photographer when I return to Glasgow. I've been hearing all about the really interesting stuff that people back home have been up to, and all I've been doing is photoshopping daft pictures of penguins looking at abandoned shopping trolleys (I scored a perfect 100% for that assignment by the way).

What I have been doing is trying to keep my own little personal side project on the go, shooting a LOT of Polaroid snapshots as I go along. I guess there's no deeper meaning to these, but they are really good fun (when my camera isn't deciding to spontaneously destroy itself) and definitely go a long way towards trying to keep me at least reasonably sane.

Getting There

Now into my third week of term two, and things aren't quite where I'd like them to be... that's not to say it's all bad though. The good news is, I can now develop and print in colour, which makes me happy - it's something I've wanted to learn for a long time. Admittedly, most of the tricky parts are taken care of by machines, but I still enjoy making the prints in the darkroom.

I'm not too keen on the colour paper though - I'm using Fuji Crystal Archive, as it's apparently the most easy to get regular supplies of. It has that weird plastic feel much like cheap inkjet and resin-coated black and white papers, definitely not too keen. The much nicer feel of fibre-based paper is just one of the many things drawing me back to black and white.

I'm still no further with choosing an aim for this term's work. It seems that with everything I read, and every artist's work that I look at, I just seem to be adding layer upon layer of confusing directions that I'd like to take my work in. I guess all I really need to do now is sit down and try and consolidate these messy thoughts into some kind of coherent form that I can make a body of work based on.

Researching can be dangerous in some ways. I had an idea for some work based on the telephone network equipment that I used to work with on a daily basis. The equipment comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, and degrees of flashy LED illumination, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to be found in telephone exchanges, not to mention their great significance as great unrecognised hubs of social interaction. I'd pre-visualised some of the images I had in mind - what I had wanted to feature in the pictures, and how I wanted them to look. With this idea in mind, you can only imagine how it felt when I discovered Lewis Baltz had made a set of almost perfectly identical images in the early 1990s... Damn!

I have to wonder how things might've turned out had I not discovered this Baltz body of work. I wonder about whether I could've confidently forged ahead unknowing, and produced work I was genuinely happy with; whether I could've exhibited the work without anybody ever noticing, or whether I'd even get the chance to hear viewers making the snide "he's just ripping off Baltz" comments. Mysteries indeed. Either way, I'm not sure I can feel confident in going ahead and making that set of images knowing there's something so close to my intentions already out there.

As it stands, I've cobbled together a couple of things that I might look into. One that's standing forward in my mind is the idea of the Scottish colour palette. I'd been looking at Joel Meyerowitz's Cape Light series, along with the work of Stephen Shore (among others) and really getting this feel for a very American type of light. I'd noticed this in New Zealand too - that the light had a very different quality about it. Scottish light is something special though, never does light get so incredibly flat and featureless. It has an incredible ability to absolutely suck the life and colour out of any given scene.

At first, this was of great frustration for me as a photographer in my early days. I was a big fan of high-saturation film, especially Kodak 160VC, and it made for some really crappy looking pictures when the light was flat. Trying to push out tons of contrast on overcast days just led to some really disappointing images. I almost wouldn't bother leaving the house some days if the skies were cloudy. On a recent trip up through the north-west of Scotland, I started beginning to appreciate this flat light as something very fundamental to the Scottish way of life.

Being Scottish is something I quite often have problems with. On one hand, I do find a lot of the landscapes, places and people very inspiring; but on the other hand, there's nothing that pisses me off quite like stupid nationalism (Scottish or otherwise), and the last thing I would want to do would be to take postcard shots of beautiful mountains and for anyone to get this idea that I was a full-blown proud Scot, because I'm most certainly not that.

The Beginning of What's About to Happen

Today was the first day back at art school again after working all summer. Was good to see all the people I hadn't been able to see over the summer, although in truth it felt like we'd hardly been away any time at all.

The big thing this term is colour photography. I'm kinda excited about the prospect of learning about colour developing and printing, although not so sure how enthusiastic I am about working in colour. I seem to have developed a bit of an attachment to black and white, something about it just seems right to me. However, it's always pretty good to be able to push my personal boundaries, so I guess I'll just need to see how it all looks once I get the ball rolling.

My biggest worry was a potential shortage of ideas coming into the year - I had grand plans of using my summer in order to investigate and begin initial developments into ideas for photographic projects; although with the joys of working full time, this didn't really happen. Thankfully, a lecture from our year tutor gave us quite a few useful starting points to have a look at. It definitely makes generating ideas a lot easier when you've got some good people to rip off - lots of further digging into a few names needed I think. I'm certainly not reluctant to say that I thought quite a lot of the images were total crap as well, but such are the joys of being an opinionated bastard sometimes.

I guess my next task is more reading. I have Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art on loan, and Susan Sontag's On Photography waiting on my bookshelf. Think I'll need to give Chromophobia by David Batchelor another run over too - it made for quite interesting reading, but a wee refresher with more of a look specifically at where my project's aims are would be pretty handy I think.

Let's see what happens next.

Polaroid DS-34 GelCam

This is the latest weird and wonderful addition to my camera collection - a Polaroid/Fotodyne DS-34 GelCam, apparently used to record Gel Electrophoresis.

It's a pretty interesting camera. It takes regular Polaroid/Fuji packfilm (FP-100, FP-3000 etc.). The rollers and stuff were pretty disgusting when I opened it up, but it was nothing a quick wash down couldn't sort out. It has a Tominon 105mm f/4.5 lens on the front with a Copal shutter. Shutter speeds range from 1/125 to 1sec and bulb, and apertures from f/4.5 to f/32. The shutter is actuated by a cable release - the pistol-grip handle on the bottom of the camera has its own cable release built in, but the handle can be removed for mounting the camera to a tripod, and the cable release replaced with a regular bog-standard model. There's also a PC flash terminal with x-sync, which works.

Because it's a rigid body with a large format style leaf shutter, it's basically a fixed macro camera. Focus distance is somewhere in the region of about 30cm. Because it was designed to be mounted to scientific equipment using a fixed lens hood type thing, there's no way of telling whether or not you're in focus. I work out the correct camera-to-subject distance by using a shoelace that I calibrated to the correct distance and marked with a pen.

There's no viewfinder either. You may notice the three bits of gaffer tape on the top - I stuck them on to roughly indicate the angle of view. Not ideal, but it'll do for now I suppose!

The best part of it all? It only cost me about £12 :-)

I'll write a more full and detailed post on the camera once I've got to know my way around it a bit better.

Quick-N-Dirty Film Removal

Previously, whenever I've been developing my own 35mm film, I've always used a manual-rewind camera, and deliberately made sure not to wind all the film back into the cannister. This meant it was nice and easy to get the film from the cannister onto the dev tank spiral, as there was no faffing about trying to get the film out of the cannister. You just made sure there was always a wee bit hanging out.

Now though, I've been using my new and super-cheap Nikon F75, which has an automatic film rewind on it. This is great, because it saves you having to wind a daft wee crank for ages. However, it has the downside that it sucks the film all the way back into the cannister. I've read about various techniques for getting the film back out, but those involved special film extractor tools (I don't have one), or hacking the cannister to pieces (not so easy in a dark bag). I decided to try and find some more "quick-and-dirty" ways of getting the film out, and I stumbled across This Page via google.

The technique, which was brilliantly effective, involved using a strip of dymo tape, sticking it inside the cannister, and using the sticky side to pick up the film and pull it out. For those of you unaware, Dymo tape is the old-skool plastic tape used for embossing letters onto, used before the days of laser label printers and stuff (See example).

Here are the simple stages required:

1. Take a strip of dymo tape, approximately 10cm (4 inches) long.
2. Peel backing plastic off, exposing sticky adhesive.
3. Push piece of tape into the film cannister through the opening slot, with the sticky side facing in towards the central spindle.
4. Once the tape is in about 7cm (3 inches), you'll start to feel it jam. Pull the tape in a little further by winding the film spindle.
5. Firmly (but not too hard), pull on the tape that's left outside the cannister. This should pull the end of the roll out through the opening slot.

For those of you worried, the adhesive on the dymo tape shouldn't damage the film at all. For starters, the adhesive only touches on the backing film, not on the emulsion side, so the emulsion will not be damaged. The tape only touches on the first 10cm (4 inches) of the roll anyway, which will usually be exposed to sunlight when loading, so will be no use anyway.

Works a treat!

Waiting For Film

Waiting for film has to be one of the most frustrating things about photography for me. Don't get me wrong, I love getting the films back from processing, but it's that anxious spell in between that gets to me!

At present, waiting is what I'm doing a lot of. I've shot about twelve rolls on my Hasselblad since returning from Hong Kong, and now I just need to get around to processing them so that I can see if I'm doing things right or not.

I'm living in Fife at the moment. That basically means I don't have a lab near me that does medium format film, which kinda stinks. Edinburgh's the nearest city that would have the facilities, but my biggest problem is that I don't know or trust any labs there to handle my colour processing. Thankfully though, I do know some labs through in Glasgow who do medium format processing, and even though I live about 70 miles away, I've opted to use Glasgow for my films. I use a wee place called Snappy Snaps on Byres Road, in the West End of the city. It sounds a wee bit like a cheesy holiday-snaps kinda shop, but their range of services is actually pretty great, even doing traditional black and white processing. Unfortunately their staff are a bit crap and unfriendly, but for convenience, I guess you have to put up with these sort of things.

There are (to my knowledge) only two other labs who do medium format film in Glasgow - Loxley Colour at Port Dundas and B&S Imaging in Govan. Loxley do a premium service with the prices to match, and are just a wee bit too out of the way to quickly drop films off to. B&S are more aimed at large-scale commercial operations, but their services are almost on a par of those of Loxley's, but at much more reasonable prices. Unfortunately however, B&S is really out of the way, being out in an industrial estate in Govan.

Labs though, are only necessary for colour processing, since I have all of the kit necessary to process black and white films here at home. It's been a good while since I've done any processing, but I'm looking forward to getting started again. I've decided to change films and developers since last time, to see if I can hopefully get some better results. I had previously been shooting almost exclusively on Ilford HP5 and processing with Ilfotec HC, but I'd found HP5 to be a bit wishy-washy and lacking the real punch I like from my images. In the last year of shooting, I've developed a real love for Kodak TMax 100 & 400 films, so I've fired through a load of TMax 400 over the past couple of weeks.

I've also decided to go with Kodak TMax Developer too - mostly because of how much easier it is to mix than Ilfotec HC. Ilfotec is a 1+31 mix, meaning a bottle can go for a crazy number of tankfuls. TMax on the other hand, is a 1+4 mix, meaning that it's much easier to mix, although won't go quite so far. I've also been looking a lot more into things like how often developer can be re-used, as I'd previously just used the Ilfotec as single-shot, using it once then pouring it away.

All I need to get down to business are a couple more Irn Bru bottles for storing water, and to find what I've done with my neg holder sheets, so that I've actually got somewhere to put the films once I've processed them.

If you've any feedback or hints/tips you'd like to share, please feel free to add comments to this post :-)

Scanner Has Arrived

I'm very very happy now, because yesterday, I went and picked up my new Epson Perfection 4490 Scanner, which means all those little silly images that I uploaded to flickr as poor-quality contact sheets, can now be seen in their full glory. It makes me happy!

I scanned my first roll of 35mm last night, which was kinda nice. Thankfully it was one of the rolls I'd made a bit better a job of in the developing stages, so the scans all came out pretty nicely. I think the plan for tonight is to try and get another roll scanned, and just keep gradually builing up a nice wee archive. At the moment, I'm only scanning at half the maximum resolution to keep times and file sizes down for scanning everything, but I reckon I'll just crank it to max for anything where I need that wee bit extra quality.

The developing's been going mostly OK so far, I had a wee bit of a worry when I changed developers from Ilfosol to Ilfotec HC - the methods of mixing are a bit different, but thankfully the Ilford data sheet came in very handy. I'm just hoping my Ilfotec "stock" mix keeps OK in its current container. I'll also have to get my backside in gear and develop the backlog that's currently building up of films that I need to process. And to think when I first got my developing gear, I actually rushed out the house and shot off a roll just for the sake of having something to develop!

Next challenge is to see about maybe moving outside my HP5 comfort zone. So far I've decided to shoot nothing but HP5, due to it being very widely available and a lot of people saying it's quite a "forgiving" film to work with. Last night I was shooting a gig, so I decided to pop a roll of Fuji Neopan 1600 through, so we'll see how that turns out. Also very tempted to try experimenting with pushing HP5, although I've heard it's pretty bad at 1600.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of photos on my Flickr Page (www.flickr.com/photos/twentyhertz) coming soon for anyone who cares to read this to see how I'm doing :)

DIY SOS!

As much of a fan of Nick Knowles and his team of merry workmen as I am, I'm focusing more on the photographic rather than home improvement side of DIY! Recently, I've been growing ever discontent with the service from photo processing labs - having to spend the best part of £10 every time I finish a roll, just for the lab to give me the wrong prints, not scan all of the pictures, and in the worst case, even completely ruin a set of negatives.

• (Name and shame corner: Jessops on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow managed to put a deep scratch through an entire roll of film that effectively rendered it unusable after the first set of prints.)

I decided I'd be a lot better off taking matters into my own hands. Seeing how I love shooting on XP2 monochrome film most of the time anyway, I decided it'd be quite cool fun just to shoot on proper black and white film, and develop it myself.

The grand plan as it stands runs in two stages: firstly, learn to process the black and white film, then scan it into my PC for the full joy of digital working. So far, I'm in the process of working with the film, and hopefully by next pay day, I'll be able to afford a decent scanner. My reasoning for thinking like this was that when I get a film processed, I usually flick through the prints a few times then stash them in a box under my bed, and use the negative scans on supplied CD on my PC for any future printing/publishing to Flickr etc. Rather than get bogged down in the extra hassle involved in making my own prints, I decided a decent film scanner would be the easiest way to go for creating a "finished product" so to speak.

So I took the plunge and invested in a developing tank and some basic chemistry to get me started. I'm currently using the following:

• Paterson 600ml Developer Tank (2x35mm or 1x120 film)
• Ilfosol Developer
• Ilfostop Stop Bath
• Ilford Rapid Fixer
• Jessops thermometer

I've been a big fan of stuff shot on Ilford HP5 film, so that's been my main material for practicing with. My choosing Ilford stuff through and through isn't due to some big brand loyalty by the way - it's just a simple case of it being the most commonly available b/w stuff in shops in Glasgow. I'm just sticking with HP5 at the moment, as it's a reasonably decent all-round performer, and sticking with one type of film makes it a lot easier for practicing my developing skills.

My setup at the moment is somewhat primitive - my chemicals are all mixed/stored/poured from 750ml Irn Bru glass bottles, and my darkroom is the bathroom with the light off! My biggest challenge has been trying to keep everything at the required 20degrees C.

The first attempt at processing film was a bit of a disaster - with passable, but not great results. I think I was in too much of a rush and got too shaken up by the whole experience, not to mention shaking my tank up a bit too much in the process! After taking my results and going back on the web, I managed to find some sites telling me exactly what I'd done wrong.

Since this roll, I've processed another three rolls, the following all having been done using 120 film rather than 35mm due to both of my 35mm cameras dying on me. They've all turned out pretty well as far as I can tell. Sadly one of them is mostly ruined due to a shutter failure on my Seagull. The last one I did, I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with it, whether it was overdeveloped or whether it was overexposed - I thought it had all been shot at 1/125 sec, but the motion blur on a lot of the pictures would suggest it had been much slower than this, and my Seagull had been having shutter difficulties that day.

Anyways, that's it so far. Hopefully the other OM-10 I bought from ebay should arrive soon and allow me to keep shooting 35mm stuff, and hopefully next month I'll have a shiny new scanner to allow me to put proper big pictures on Flickr for the world to look at!