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.