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.

A Short Poem

I love the sound,
of rain so heavy it sets off car alarms.

Fuck cycling to work tomorrow.

Cycling is Shit

Today, I decided cycling is shit.

I got about three hours sleep last night, had a non-productive and rubbish day at work, and snuck out the door a few minutes early. I sprinted along the road from work on my bike, in order to catch a train that didn't really go where I wanted to go, and meant extra work at the other end. Sweaty, with steamed up glasses, I hopped off the train and embarked on my journey from the wrong station back towards home.

My legs felt like they were made of wood, there was a mean headwind, and it was raining. Of course, this meant wearing a waterproof jacket, and coupled with the warm temperature, I felt like I was riding inside my own personal oven. My tyres were a bit flatter than they ought to have been, the chain was in serious need of a good degrease-and-relube, and my saddle was its usual unforgiving self.

I had to ride along a shitty potholed road, with fuckwit Daily Star reading Transit drivers trying to kill me at every given opportunity, as well as the joys of dodging the fat morons who like to walk on the cycle lane.

To sum it up, I hated my legs, I hated my bike, and I hated the route.

Which led me on to wondering why the hell I do this? My aim of course, is to work over the summer in order to pay off my debts from the last year at uni, and to hopefully allow me a degree of cushioning when it comes time to piss away all the money again next year. Most depressing however, is that three whole days of this would only add up to one 50 pack of Ilford 16x20" photographic paper, a lot of which I'd usually end up throwing straight in the bin because I'd forgotten to stop the enlarger down or the darkroom door had been left open.

Which in turn, led me on to wondering why the hell I'd decided to ditch my job and go to the Art School in the first place. Why I'd given up a stable, well-paying job where I got paid to go on fun wee trips to silly wee villages in the middle of nowhere, and could afford as many pints or rolls of film as I liked without having to worry too much.

In case you're wondering by the way, horrible cycle runs in the rain are the perfect time to be thinking about such things. It gives your mind lots of free time, and an amazing ability to focus purely on the negative.

And then I remembered. Working in my old safe job was alright, but actually it wasn't that safe at all - a lot of instability came to the job after I left, and I think I managed to jump ship at just the right time. And although I got to go on nice wee jaunts fairly often, the majority of the time was spent sitting at a desk facing death by spreadsheet. Of course, my main reason for wanting a well-paying job was so that I could afford things like Nikons and rolls of 160VC and be able to enjoy taking photographs. In fact, without that job, I never would've been able to get into photography at all, so I suppose I owe it one.

And then I remembered my year at Art School so far. The excellent (and not so excellent) people, the fun times had, and most importantly - the personal reward of having pushed myself into unknown territory and having come out the other side with a lot of good experiences.

Maybe if this cycle journey has taught me anything, it's not to make any more stupid expensive projects out of Ikea lamps and Polaroid film and give a little more love back to the digital camera!

As for the cycling thing, I often think about just buying a car, but I don't think I can be that person. I was happy to have my folks' old Corsa when I didn't have to pay for it, but the idea of spending hundreds of pounds on a car seems mad, when I could have so much more fun with it instead. Same with the guys I saw on expensive, lightweight road bikes with neon yellow jackets and lycra on - I'll quite happily take my rickety wee hack bike, old jeans and scabby old waterproof jacket and save the rest for having fun, whatever that may involve.

And anyway, all those horrible rides along crap roads just make those mountain biking days all that more special. I still don't think I can quite think of anything that compares to that feeling of nailing it down a dusty trail with sunshine and trees and the odd fly in the teeth for good measure.

Cycling is shit sometimes, but it's good for gaining a sense of perspective on things.

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.

Fandan

You may have noticed it's been quite a while since I last posted a blog entry. This is very bad of me, and a bad habit I seem to get into from time to time - just plain forgetting to keep things up to date.

Since my last post in November, I've undertaken a pretty big step with my photography. I'm now studying towards a BA in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, and it's great. I'm now about three quarters of the way through the first year of the course, and actually amazed how time has flown by, seems like no time at all since I first appeared there.

Before I arrived at the Art School, I wasn't really sure what the hell to expect. I'd not managed to go on any of the open days because I'd been in New Zealand, and my only experience of the school had been a few visits to the degree shows. My last experience of any formal art education had been in my standard grade art class at high school, back in 2001 or thereabouts, and even at that I wasn't very great.

Anyway, in spite of the nerves beforehand, I've been managing to cope pretty well so far I reckon. The stuff along the lines of theory and history were what I was most worried about, but thankfully the essays have been pretty short for that, and I don't mind presentations too much.

The general working environment has been quite interesting to get used to as well. Having come from a very task-based environment as an engineer, it's been a bit weird getting used to the more free-flowing way of working in a studio with a pretty open timetable. I have to say, I definitely enjoy the freedom, but it does sometimes make it pretty tricky trying to force yourself to get work done when things are quiet.

The people are good, and a lot easier to get on with than I had expected. Admittedly, there are very few (if any) people who share my taste for a spot of Slayer, but it's nice to be surrounded by lots of people with lots of interesting ideas and different viewpoints. I don't see myself putting on the skinny jeans and buying dubstep records just yet, but being one of those art school fandans isn't quite so bad after all...

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!

Holy Mountain

Last night, I had the pleasure of shooting a band called Holy Mountain, playing live at the Captain's Rest, Glasgow. For me, Holy Mountain are one of those bands that make Glasgow music ace. It's kinda cool but kinda depressing knowing that there are some excellent bands in Glasgow that totally rule, but are never ever going to be on Top of the Pops. Holy Mountain, Black Sun and Take A Worm For A Walk Week are all prime examples of top notch bands living out on the fringes.

So anyway, the Captain's Rest is a bit of a mixed-bag venue for me. I kinda like the space and all, but the lighting's pretty terrible, and it can get very very hot downstairs. Lighting was bad enough for the first two bands who played on stage, but Holy Mountain did their usual thing of playing out on the floor, so there was pretty much no light whatsoever - meaning there was no choice but to go to the wide-angle lens and flashgun and try a little bit of slow-sync.

Full Gallery is available on my website.

Here Come The Waterworks

I'm just back from possibly the biggest failure of a holiday ever! My friend Sara and I decided it'd be good fun to get away from things for a couple of days and head to the Isle of Arran, just off the west coast of Scotland. Arran's great, because it's so easy to reach from Glasgow by public transport - a train from Glasgow Central station to Ardrossan Harbour (about 40mins), then jump straight on the MV Caledonian Isles, the CalMac Ferry between Ardrossan and Brodick, the main town on the island.

Being poor and all, we decided it'd be a good plan to go camping. I had a tent and knew of a great wee camp spot at a place called Glen Rosa, about a mile's walk to the north of Brodick. I'd been to Glen Rosa the two summers previous to this trip, and it had proven to be a perfect base for getting around the island, in a quiet-yet-convenient-enough setting.

After arriving, we got our tent pitched up in a fairly nice spot by the Rosa Burn, the river running adjacent to the campsite. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't great, so we decided just to sit in the tent and wait until the weather passed over. Unfortunately though, the weather didn't pass over for a while, and in fact, the heavy rain had caused the river to swell up. Luckily, another group of campers had been paying close attention to the river levels and had alerted us just in time to pack up all of our things and shift the tent to higher ground before the deluge came forth and swept us down to the Firth of Clyde!

We managed to get our gear to safety, and I managed to grab a few snaps of the last remaining tents getting dragged through the rising floods. Unfortunately however, in the rush to get everything moved, most of what we were carrying ended up getting pretty well soaked. While I had made what I thought to be a safe shout relying on one pair of waterproof hiking boots to last me the trip, I hadn't bargained on having to wade through a couple of feet of flood water, so I'd have had to traipse around in soggy boots for the remainder of the time.

We stayed the night at the campsite, but decided on hearing rain on the tent the next morning, that we'd just abandon the trip and head home early. Some bacon rolls at the Bilslands cafe soon lifted our spirits though, and we even got a top notch celebrity-spot in the form of former Deacon Blue drummer turned TV presenter Dougie Vipond. Obviously, Bilslands Cafe is the place to be seen for top celebrities when holidaying in Brodick. Of course, true to form, the minute we got on the boat, the skies miraculously cleared, making the rest of my journey home all nice and sunny. Damn.

Riding The Rails

Just got linked to a great set of images from Photographer Ben Speck on Getty Images, looking at the hobo subculture in the USA, specifically those hitching rides on freight trains. Quite an interesting read, as well as a fantastic selection of photographs.

The whole idea of hopping on and off trains has always interested me to a large degree, ever since first reading Kerouac's On The Road. Seeing the movie Into The Wild just helped hammer this fascination home, although definitely didn't show it as the easy-going free ride that it would be all to easy to think of it as.

Of course, my own rail experiences in the US were limited to regular Amtrak passenger routes, but even these were a good deal more romantic than the usual Scotrail experience!

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 :-)