I’ve taken the plunge and made a video for YouTube. The plan is to make a few and see if I can develop a style I’m comfortable with. The motivation is just to share the fun I have messing about with analogue photo stuff.
Category: Misc
The ‘other’ always needed in any classification.
On hope: A response to Lea Ypi
I just read an article in the Guardian by Lea Ypi titled “The day my students stopped me in my tracks – and changed how I thought about hope“. There is someone wrong on the internet and I have to put it right by tea time! Lea Ypi is a…
Hello Fediverse!
I’ve just added an ActivityPub plugin to WordPress so that my posts should appear in the federated social media sites like Mastodon. If you have a Mastodon account or an account with another ActivityPub site then you can follow my posts here with @rootAdmin.
Should I start using “Photographist”?
If a term applies to everyone then it isn’t very useful. Now everyone takes photos all the time with their phones everyone is a photographer. The word is losing its meaning. Or it is beginning to mean just a guy (and it is usually is a guy) with a dedicated…
Misc
Continue Reading
One dev to rule them all and in the darkness bind them?
A thinking aloud/allowed blog post. I’ve decided I need to rationalise things a bit on the old developer front. Choosing the best developer is a rabbit hole that I’m not keen to fall down. I’ve been reading the film developer cook book and it just depresses me. It can result…
Misc
Continue Reading
A quick Hill & Adamson retake
I dropped my daughter back at St Andrews University the other day and it gave me the chance to make a reproduction of a Hill & Adamson view. It was very sunny and very busy with tourists – who appear as smears. I’m really getting the itch to go full…
Misc
Continue Reading
Lacock Abbey 2022
A trip to the West of England gave an opportunity to visit perhaps the most significant location in the history of photography, Lacock Abbey, the family home of William Henry Fox Talbot. I grew up just down the road from Lacock but had never visited. Of course I had to…
Misc
Continue Reading
Guillotine Shutter using BBC micro:bits
I got covid so had to stay at home for ten days. I couldn’t really work due to the brain fog. It was like having very bad jet lag and I didn’t want to mess with production servers in that state. But you can only sleep so much and so…
Misc
Continue Reading
Vageeswari 10×12 inch field camera
I’ve been falling behind with posting. I swear I’m going to post more often. Working with glass plates and contact printing means that you can only make prints the same size as the plate your camera will hold and there is always a desire to go a bit bigger –…
Why “more in common” is wrong
There is a movement in “Britain” that, in modern times, was kicked off by Gordon Brown with his 2006 speech on “British Values”. I believe this threw fuel on the fire of the nationalist project that eventually lead to Brexit – which is another story. Recently an organisation called More…
Misc
Continue Reading
Victorian book-form, whole-plate holder on Intrepid 8×10 camera
I’ve got a routine going of pouring my own 4×5″ gelatine silver plates and then scanning them and inkjet printing the results but I’ve felt unsettled because I would like to have a 100% analogue process, [AAA] in stead fo [ADD]. To address this I’ve been messing with salt printing…
Why do so many liberals not like foreigners?
I’m not intending this blog to be too driven by politics but no longer venting my spleen on Twitter or Facebook means I occasionally have to write an opinion piece. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaigns people on the unionist side of the debate would occasionally let slip that…
Misc
Continue Reading
There is nothing so dangerous as unmediated facts
The trouble with open data is that you can find yourself wasting a weekend answering a question that is bugging you. I spent Saturday night and Sunday morning producing this.
Devolution: The invisible disaster
Over the weekend I thought of starting a podcast in the style of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America – A Letter from Edinburgh. To explore the possibility I wrote a pilot episode. And the conclusion of that pilot? I won’t do it. Producing a five minute recording each week would…
Misc
Continue Reading
Is analogue photography worth it?
The combined image above shows three photographs I made over the course of an afternoon and evening. I had my wet-plate collodion set up running and wanted to refine how I made glass plate negatives specifically for scanning. Once I had what I felt was a successful wet-plate negative it…
Misc
Continue Reading
Backpack Collodion: Expedition to the end of the … garden
My three month old iodising collodion finally got to me. Today I mounted an expedition to the bottom of the garden to make some collodion negatives. I’ve often wondered whether it would be feasible to do backpack collodion – to head for the hills with all that I need to…
Misc
Continue Reading
Argyrotype: First tests
The Argyrotype print process is a “modern” nineteeth century way of making silver prints on paper. It was created by Mike Ware in the early 1990’s [British Journal of Photography, 139, (6824), 17-19 (13 June 1991)]. Back in 1842, right at the start of photography, Sir John Herschel created a process…
Misc
Continue Reading
Elementary Blueprint
Stills Gallery and photography centre in Edinburgh was planning to run a project called Elementary Blueprint where they sent out cyanotype papers for people to expose to the elements around Edinburgh and sent them back to make a single exhibit – like a blueprint of the city I guess. Then…
Misc
Continue Reading
Negatives for alternative processes
During the Covid-19 lock down I’m messing with cyanotypes and want to have a go at Argyrotypes. These processes use contact negatives the same size as the finished print. The negatives need to have a long tonal range – be very contrasty. Many people produce such negatives using an inkjet…
Misc
Continue Reading
Wet Plate Party 2020
I turned 55 on 28th February and we used that as an excuse to invite friends around on Sunday 1st March for an open house. This is something we only do once every five years or so. This time I set up what is basically a Victorian photo booth. I…
Misc
Continue Reading
Snow Stops Play
I attempted to make it to Braemar today to photograph the pinewoods – possibly in the snow. It was forecast to rain later but the rain came sooner and as snow. After two attempts I had to turn back. Ho hum. Try again another time.
Misc
Continue Reading
Stearman SP-810: First Impressions
This is a really quick post about the new Stearman SP-810 developing tank because someone asked me my opinion. I must be one of the first to own it. I’m not going to talk through the tank as you can see what it is and what it does in this…
Mindfulness & Buddhism
Continue Reading
From Zombies to Tattoos
I went to a lecture on The Walking Dead (a TV series about zombie apocalypse living) and photography at Stills by David Grinly last week. It was heavy post modern, French philosopher type stuff but also entertaining. David expounded in a semi random fashion. When I left after two hours…
How to be more radical and effective than XR.
Three little questions everyone can answer How many flights have you taken in the last year? How many days in the last week have you travelled by car? How many days in the last week have you eaten meat? Add the three numbers together. What was your total score? What…
Mindfulness & Buddhism
Continue Reading
Marathon Monk: August 2019 – 358 days & 2,148 mindful miles
Not much to say this month. Very crowded with the festival. Such a relief when the posters come down.
Misc
Continue Reading
Marathon Monk: July 2019 – 340 days & 2,040 mindful miles
Breaking the 2,000 mile barrier. Lots of energy this month. First week on holiday in the Lake district.
Misc
Continue Reading
Wet plate collodion: Why bother?
There is no doubt that making wet plate collodion photographs is a faff. I can make an image with my phone in just a few seconds. Setting up the darkroom, making a wet plate photo then packing everything away again is measured in hours. When we principally consume images on…
Misc
Continue Reading
Food Forever
It was nice to have my photos used in the Food Forever exhibition that has just opened at the botanics.
Misc
Continue Reading
Scots rejecting BBC up 49% since 2014
We don’t have a TV licence. We have Amazon Prime and Netflix and YouTube and hundreds of DVDs so just don’t watch BBC TV programming enough to justify £150 a year. To be clear you need a TV licence to watch live broadcast programmes in the UK from any channel…