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 will it be tomorrow? The…
Read More How to be more radical and effective than XR.
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Not much to say this month. Very crowded with the festival. Such a relief when the posters come down.
Read More Marathon Monk: August 2019 – 358 days & 2,148 mindful miles
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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 the collodion behaved. After two exposures it was still way over exposed/developed. But then this evening I held it up to the light and realised I’d made quite a nice…
Read More Accidental Collodion Negative
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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 the format I’m working with and by how much? Having salvaged the Schneider Kreuznach Vintage Lens Data I found myself with a piece of A4 paper and a compass trying…
Read More Vintage Lens Coverage Graphic
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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 be hosted on the Schneider Optics site has disappeared. The URL now redirects to https://schneiderkreuznach.com/ I’ve looked around but can only find the data on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine…
Read More Schneider Kreuznach Vintage Lens Data
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Breaking the 2,000 mile barrier. Lots of energy this month. First week on holiday in the Lake district.
Read More Marathon Monk: July 2019 – 340 days & 2,040 mindful miles
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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 that came after WWII (I think). These cameras took 9x12cm film which was common in Europe and used by several other manufactures. The Avus was really well made. I remember…
Read More Voigtländer Avus Upgrade
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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 small screens the whole wet…
Read More Wet plate collodion: Why bother?
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Another two months down. I lost more than ten days to a retreat and a little illness in May. In June I was in Germany for a week and had a couple of offsite meetings. I passed the two year mark on the solstice. I’m way off two hundred days per year but close to…
Read More Marathon Monk: May & June 2019 – 323 days & 1,938 mindful miles
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“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 into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” Susan Sontag 1977 It is worth dwelling on the date of the Susan Sontag quote. This was long before…
Read More An aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted
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April was more like a ‘normal’ month. I’ve started to feel like I’m in the swing of it again and slowly sinking the well of my practice. May is going to be a busy month. I’m running my regular workshops at the botanics as well as helping out on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in George…
Read More Marathon Monk: April 2019 – 301 days & 1,806 mindful miles
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It was nice to have my photos used in the Food Forever exhibition that has just opened at the botanics.
Read More Food Forever
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Three months to do one months worth of walking. What a start to the year! January walking didn’t start till 7th because of the way the New Year holiday fell. I walked normally for a week and a half but then came down with a horrible cold. I think it was the one that many…
Read More Marathon Monk: January to March 2019 – 281 days & 1,686 mindful miles
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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 and you need it to…
Read More Scots rejecting BBC up 49% since 2014
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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 course last year which was unfortunately cancelled but as I was fantasy shopping for wet plate kit I came across someone selling “everything” on eBay. It included a silver tank,…
Read More First Plate Euphoria
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I continuously wrestle with why the hell I want to make images. Sure a hell of a lot of it is a fascination with the process. I like the technology. Not the modern pixel peaking type so much as the physical side of traditional photography. But then I’m sitting at the breakfast table wondering what…
Read More Why did I make this?
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Another year over. Time of reflectance and long sleeps. Resolutions for New Year are “all of the above”: diet, exercise, practice, etc, etc. I passed the 1,500 mile mark almost at the solstice so that is sticking with the thousand miles a year average. There was a workshop at the university and I broke up…
Read More Marathon Monk: December 2018 – 258 days & 1,548 mindful miles
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What has happened this month? I’ve started to Bullet Journal. Bought new camera bag and Hasselblads. Spending too much on camera gear but enjoying the sensations of owning in my 50s what I wanted in my 20s. I’m calling my Sunday Anxieties FOMO now. That’s what it comes down to. A list of things I…
Read More Marathon Monk: November 2018 – 248 days & 1,488 mindful miles
NDVI Composite satellite image over OpenStreetMap data of Scotland
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 between red and near infra-red light as seen by a satellite. This image is a composite of around one hundred and fifty satellite passes over three summers. The sensor on…
Read More Real Photography with a CAMRA
Inside the dark box there is a shelf of the dry area and a wet area below. Tray push underneath the shelf when not actually in use.
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 already somewhere else” policy. Feeling a bit post viral a couple of weekend back I stayed indoors and had some fun with paper negatives and using my dark box for…
Read More Christening the dark box with a session of paper negs
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Scotland is a country. Countries choose their own governments. No countries are truly independent but choose to pool some sovereignty for mutual benefit. or Scotland is a region. Regions choose local representatives to a central government. Regions are delegated powers by a central government which may choose to revoke them. Pick one option. To coin a…
Read More On Scottish Independence
Old College War Memorial
Another month already! Towards the end of the month I’ve been finding joy again in walking and in mundane things – the true test of happiness. The extra energy has allowed me to cut back on my media consumption so I’m not looking at Twitter, Facebook or news websites just at the moment. It doesn’t…
Read More Marathon Monk: October 2018 – 233 days & 1,398 mindful miles
Pinhole photo of nearby the Meadows shrine at the beginning of the month.
A quiet month again. Lost a few days to my sinuses playing up. Had to get the bus back or work at home. There is a general feeling of embeddedness. I feel the period of being really low has past. Perhaps 2018 will just be a year I remember for dipping my toe in more…
Read More Marathon Monk: September 2018 – 217 days & 1,302 mindful miles
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Twelve years ago we moved into our flat in Edinburgh with our two daughters who were six and a four years old. We aren’t fussy about decor but the fibreglass bath looked like it was about to crack and would have to be changed really soon. This week, just after one of those daughters has…
Read More Bath Climate Mews
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I had a interesting exchange on the way to work. I was taking this picture of a window – just interested in the symmetry and tone – and when I took my camera down a guy said “I wonder what you were finding interesting in that?” to which I spontaneously replied “I’m an artist”. He…
Read More I’m an Artist
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Not sure what to say this month. Not quite to 200 days – although I am on the 200th as I type. Here are two photos.
Read More Marathon Monk: August 2018 – 199 days & 1,194 mindful miles
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Much more upbeat in July. Walks have been really regular and been feeling good again. First time back at yoga on 31st. I weigh 1lb more than last month @ 14st 4lb (90.7kg). I’ve noticed that I have nearly exactly the same attitude to a tub of ice-cream or packet of biscuits that I used…
Read More Marathon Monk: July 2018 – 182 days & 1,092 mindful miles
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A year on the road. Not the road in the picture. That is the A383 in the Highlands. It has been a time of reflection. The summer solstice on the 21st June marked the first year of this Marathon Monk project and I was hoping to have completed 200 days and over a thousand miles…
Read More Marathon Monk: June 2018 – 166 days & 996 mindful miles
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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 had the urge to “waste” a couple of weekends building one. Now it is more or less working and I’ve learnt my lessons I can move on to something…
Read More Afghan Box Camera a.k.a. Cuban Polaroid a.k.a Camera Minutera
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May is the month that I lead the Two Feet, One Mind walking workshops in the Botanics so, strangely, I do a few less marathon monk days. The workshops are for two hours, 6-8pm, and it is just too much to walk there and back as well as a days work so I go on…
Read More Marathon Monk: May 2018 – 152 days & 912 mindful miles