Search results for: 'of trai roll a'

A medium for the moment  I always travel with my 35mm SLR and a stack of Ilford HP5 and Ilford FP4 film. I definitely prefer the look and process of shooting film when traveling and photographing on the street and I find my small SLR with it’s 50mm lens is small and inconspicuous enough to capture intimate street portraits. Shooting everything on the same 50mm lens and film medium gives my work a consistent look and feel. I have always found shooting film slows down my process, it forces me to think mor...

Window Cleaners shot on ILFORD XP2S An unknown language When I started in photography I was always put off from film, by the balance (in my mind anyway), between the effort and time taken out of my workflow in developing, and the rolling cost. As well as my dependence and already intimate comprehension of digital systems. Film was an unknown language, and not one I was prepared to learn at the time. Expanding my understanding Recently however I have been looking for different ways to expand my und...

An experiment in chemical possibilities When I took up a camera after a few years’ hiatus in 1990, I was surprised to discover that I could no longer get a black & white film developed through the nearest camera shop, never mind through the local pharmacy.  If memory serves, I was told it would cost $40 for a single film. Naturally, I returned to processing my own film just I had done when I first took up a camera in the early 1970s. The world had moved on, and colour film was the default medium f...

Road Trip In October of last year, I sold most of what I owned at that time and went on a 10,000-mile road trip across the American West, capturing all of it on film. Among the few possessions I brought with me, my reliable medium format camera Bronica SQ-Ai and 100 rolls of ILFORD HP5+. Along the way, I photographed the tallest trees on Earth, the coastal Redwoods in Northern California; the volcanoes of the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest; the oldest trees in the world, the Bristlecone Pines in t...

Heading West Last September my family and I headed west. It had been a few years since we’d visited the West Country, we had come to love it when our family was young, and now that they were grown we decided to return to see if it still has a special place in our hearts. While my teenagers packed their essentials - clothes and iPhones, and my other half packed enough books to keep a large reading group going, I set about doing the important task of packing my camera equipment. My focus was on which...

The Outlaw Project shooting portraits with a large format camera The Outlaw Project, was inspired by Edward Sheriff Curtis, the 19th Century photographer, known for his portraits of native Americans, shot with a large format camera. In 2011, Peter acquired a giant copy camera, made by Sidney R. Littlejohn Co., in the East end of London circa 1926. The camera, though having been used heavily in the newspaper industry for copying documents, was generally in working condition. With its inner mechanical str...

Beginnings I came to analog photography late. I enjoy being able to feel the film and create with my hands, and the suspense of not knowing how the final shots look until you develop the film. Shooting film changes the style of how I work.  I take less pictures and think more. It is more immersive, I have more time to feel their characters, their experiences. I shoot all my projects in medium format film.  I do use digital, but only for commercial photography or for working on reports. Materials ag...

Opportunities Now and again in life opportunities arises that you just have to take. You know, the ones that if you think about for too long will be missed, so you have to jump in with your best foot forward, or in this case with your best film forward.  This happened to me last year as I was casually talking to someone about my work they mentioned that they had access to an old building that had recently been vacated and was to be sold at auction. The building had been untouched for years, and they sai...

Of course, we see in color - but vision is just one part of how we sense the environment and moments. In the mountains I see tremendous peaks, I feel and hear the storms, freeze, and feel emotions from success, failure and intense personal experiences. All that black + white can convey more intensively - for me this is not a reduction over colour photography, but an amplification of impressions.  This is the translation of a short text I wrote a few years back for the German Schwarzweiss Magazine. Si...

Towards the end of 2018 I was reviewing some of my Autumn film photography and feeling put off by the results. I've been working with film for some now in an effort to take advantage of the superior dynamic range. And, when shooting in strongly backlit scenes to move away from silhouettes and ambiguity and towards a more controlled journalistic style. Shades of Autumn I found that because of the diffused cloudy conditions in London I was struggling with my exposures and the overall look of my images. T...