St Pauls Photography - Gum Bichromate

Bit of an update

College has been all pro-formas and essays just lately, the dreaded time when a unit is about to end and you suddenly realise you have shoots to write up, last minute editing and you have lost the notes, files ect for the shoot you did way back when in September so to summerise it A bit manic! on the plus side some of my classmates and myself had a four days away in Krakow, Poland which has by far been the biggest highlight of my time at college, (why couldn't we have come up with this idea a year earlier? ) anyway krakow was brilliant, the food, people and the place was a real inspiration. One of the many highlights of the trip was a vist to  the cracow school of art and fashion design where we where given a warm welcome and a wonderful demonstration on Gum printing by Jerzy Gawet of of the founders of the college along with some German students who where studying there.
Other highlighlits of the trip where the old town and its wonderful architechture a day spent wandering the banks of the frozen river Wista with the hasselblad and a trip to Auscwitz which was very humbling and made you realise exactley how lucky we are.
Anway back to the graded unit and Im about to start making some of my prints which is going to be an eye opener due to the fact I have never printed on anything bigger than 8x10 before so I look forward to making some bigger 12 x 16 prints.

 Cracow School Of Art And Design

Cheer's

Night shoot

I have wanted to do a night shoot down the local beach for a while but getting the three things I needed to all come together has been a challenge, 1, tide out, 2, clear night and 3, a full moon!
My idea being to shoot a roll of HP5 using the Hasselblad as a tester too see what it comes out like and then go back and do it again with a 4x5 .

The conditions have been trying to say the least on the first night tide out, but the cloud was so dense it was pitch black, on the second night there was plenty of cloud but breaks in it so i had to work fast metering and getting my exposure before the cloud covered the moon again plus it was windy and very cold by the time i had set up the camera I could barely feel my fingers anyway I shot a roll but having developed them I am struggling to scan them so I will make a proper contact sheet to evaluate the negs properly.

Here is one that I did get to scan, the metered time was 4secs but I pulled the film a stop and exposed it as 200 ISO so my actual exposure including reciprocal failure was 15 seconds and then I bracketed around that by a stop.

Melrose Abbey

I recently took a trip into the borders to get a shot of Melrose Abbey for one of my upcoming photography units using a 5x4 camera.
Melrose Abbey is said to contain the heart of Robert the Bruce and is large Gothic ruin of a monastery of the  Cistercian order founded in 1136.

This was before I had the Wista field camera so I was using my trusty Arca Swiss monorail which is an excellent camera although a bit of a pain out of the studio. It was unreal a beautiful day, no wind lots of detail in the sky and hardly a soul to be seen, that is until I oped the flight case for the camera then half of the American tourists in Scotland descended on the Abbey and that made life interesting waiting for an empty frame into which I could capture the image I needed, I waited, waited and waited some more until finally after around 45 - 50 minutes I finally got the shot unfortunately the sky was now grey all the big white clouds had vanished and the blue sky was gone never to return that day.

I really love the detail you can capture on Large Format, printed on IlfordFB warmtone gloss and selinium toned for archival purposes

Happy New Year

Wishing everyone a happy new year, more updates to follow soon.

Pinhole Camera Conversion

To keep with the fine art theme of my graded unit I thought that it would be nice to try my hand at some pinhole photography, so I decided to convert an old folding camera that I have as it uses 120 roll film and gives a 6x9 negative.

Wirgin 6x9" folding camera

The first thing I did was a bit of research on the internet to find out about focal length and optimum pinhole size when I happened upon a wonderful resource for designing and building pinhole cameras at http://www.mrpinhole.com/index.php which did the calculations for me and worked out that for the focal length of the camera which was 4.5” I needed a pinhole with a 0.018 dia. I have decided that for the moment I don’t want to make any modifications that are not reversible but this may change at a later date.

The first job was to unscrew the rear lens element which gives you access to the shutter blades, I then cut down apiece of felt and placed it on the shutter blades as this will protect them from jamming when the pinhole disc is placed in there.

Rear lens element

Shutter Blades

Felt disc inserted to protect shutter

The next problem to address was the pinhole itself, further research has led me to the discovery that a size 10 sewing needle will produce a 0.018 Dia hole so as I didn’t have one to hand I bought one from a specialist sewing place as the packets numbers don’t seem to correspond with the needle sizes. There are numerous materials that the pinhole disc can be made from, drinks can, brass shim, tin foil (but these can tear easily) or as I chose a tee tree light tray. I started by finding the centre and then marked a dimple with a ball point pen which I then sanded slightly to thin the metal, the next job was to place the pin in the centre and work it gently drilling the hole through the aluminium and then it was on to check the size.

My pinhole disc

To check the diameter of the hole I scanned it and then opened it up in Photoshop and used the ruler tool to measure it, I fluffed it and have made it too big! It measures 0.031” which works out at F145 so it’ twice the size of the optimal 0.018” F254 that I was aiming for but I want to try it out of curiosity’s sake more than anything but I am going to measure the needles I bought with a micrometer and make another disc hopefully with the right size hole this time.

All that was needed to finish the job was the disc was placed onto the felt washer and the rear of the lens screwed back in place, the beauty of this conversion is that I still have a working shutter that I can use with a standard cable release I can’t wait to try it now when the weather gives me a break I will be out shooting a few shots that I have in mind to do in an old church yard.

Cyanotypes Part 2

Following on from my first cyanotype post I have now had the chance to test the process with the digital negative I had. The first test I did I exposed a sheet of parer for fifteen minutes under the U.V lamps that we have a college, lthough there was an out line of an image I could tell that we was going to need a much longer exposure time so I doubled the exposure time and then doubled it again, at an hour I was getting a good exposure but lacked any sky detail so I exposed the next sheet for an hour and a half this didn't overpower the main image and also put detail in to the sky area. After each exposure I washed the prints of with water, I have since learn't that I haven't been washing them for long enough and you can tell this in the two photographs that there is a bit of yellow staining from unwashed off sensitiser. T he prints require a good five mintes rinsing to ensure they are clean.

I have also found out by trial and error that differnt papers using the same negative require quite different exposure times, this is similar to the way different paper's behave in traditional B&W photography and I have got some really good results on some parchment paper that I purchased as single sheets from an art store.

The next step is going to be making some tea toner and toning some images, it will be intresting to see how the toner changes the images.

 The above image has been exposed for 1 hr

This is the image that was exposed for 1.30 mins as you can see there is detail in the sky area

The sensitiser I have made up from the formula gives a lovely china blue when it has fully dried, these images are just as they have dried.