A week off the day job has given me time to work on my silver gelatine glass plate negatives. I’ve learnt a big lesson and…
Category: Photography
I realised I had all the chemistry, apart from gelatin, to make dry plates. So I bought some cooks gelatin from Waitrose and gave 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…
Fun this afternoon playing with my adapted Voigtländer Avus and three month old Poe Boy collodion. I’m using quarter plate glass from some old glass…
The mechanical shutters found in many analogue cameras, especially those before the 1980s, are amazing pieces of engineering. Many still work accurately but alas many…
Twenty minutes walk from home the Hermitage of Braid is a wooded valley beside the volcanic plug that is Blackford Hill. Scattered across the whole…
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…
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. Abraham Lincoln (attributed to at least)…
Are you bored during lockdown? Are you speaking to neighbours more than you did before? Would you like to be part of an art project…
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…
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…
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…
With the family at home for the Covid-19 lock down there is no space to set up the darkroom and so little hope of analogue…
Working with the wet plate collodion technique is something of a “lifestyle choice” in that it isn’t an activity you can just choose to do…
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.…
Very inspiring. Shintoism/animism is important to me but so lost in our Scottish culture where gods of nature seem to have been shrunk to faery…
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…
My first Salt Print (a la Fox Talbot). As usually I took the “bull at a gate” approach to something new. Google some Watch some…
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.…
I made a disappointing ambrotype by pointing my half-plate, wet-plate camera out of the window. I was just doing a test shot to see how…
When you’re shopping for a large format lens one of the first things you want to know is what the coverage is. Will it cover…
If, like me, you spend too much time and money on old large format lenses you may be frustrated that the data that used to…
From 1913 to 1935 the German company Voigtländer manufactured a midrange plate camera called the Avus. This was before the standardisation of sheet film holders…
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…
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens…
Oh great joy – I’ve spent ages researching this and at last I’ve made my first wet plate collodion image! I tried to do a…
This is an image of Scotland that I created as part of my job. The green is Normalised Difference Vegetation Index which is basically the difference…
I really must stop posting things on Facebook without posting them here first. I’ve reverted back to my “nothing on Facebook or Twitter that isn’t…
I had a interesting exchange on the way to work. I was taking this picture of a window – just interested in the symmetry and…
Not sure what to say this month. Not quite to 200 days – although I am on the 200th as I type. Here are two…