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)…
Category: Photography
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…
I don’t feel I really understand something until I have had a go at it so, having watched some YouTube videos on Afghan Box Cameras,…
I don’t have access to a darkroom at home so pre-flashing paper negatives to reduce contrast is difficult. I wondered whether using a piece of…
Why bark if you have a dog? We need to be reminded to let someone else take over and do a job rather than doing…
I’m just back from a four day retreat at Wiston Lodge lead by Dene Donalds that I found very powerful. My sinuses were playing up…
These trees are the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were a vivid yellow/green and just a red filter in post process produces this effect. They were…
Stepping out for a few minutes before breakfast can be magical. Camping makes this more likely.
To encounter something living that is massively larger than you are on your way to nursery but change you.