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Rocking the tray!
My journey with photography began as a child while spending wondrous hours with my father, a gifted portrait photographer, in his darkroom in the amber glow of the safe lights. It was astonishing to watch an image blossom to life in the developer, sometimes I even got to rock the tray! The magic of making a photograph had a life changing impact on me and when gifted a Brownie Hawkeye on my 7th birthday my destiny was etched in stone... I'd become a photographer!
Later I was privileged ...
When you hold a hand printed FB darkroom print there is something special about it. It has been so amazing to see how many of you are making FB prints in your darkooms today. It was hard to choose just 5 images for this week's #ilfordphoto #fridayfavourites #fbprint theme but we got there in the end. (Nearly)!
@Virgil_Roger @ILFORDPhoto makes the nicest paper, it was my go-to choice for my first ever hand printed solo show a while back. Let's throwback for the #fridayfavourites! Collages, a composite ...
It's week 25 in our In Focus interview series and this time we set our questions to Arkadiy Shlein who was nominated by Lina Bessonova back in August. Arkadiy is a Russian large format photographer and analog printer with a classical style.
BACKGROUND
SHARE YOUR FAVOURITE IMAGE / PRINT SHOT ON ILFORD FILM AND TELL US WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU?
I’ve got so many favourite photographs that I don’t have a single one hanging at home (yes, couldn’t decide :). This is one of them. I photographed this beech gla...
My Darkroom
I have always liked the quote of the master printer Ansel Adams “Photography is like music, the negative is the score and the print is its performance”.
Every performance is different. That’s so true, the prints I do now I are often different from the ones I did a few years ago. Better technique, more experience perhaps, but more likely my mood and interpretation of the image has changed.
Good advice
When I was starting my photographic practice I used to buy my ILFORD materials...
'Something Special'
There is a unique rendering to photographs made with Multigrade enlarging papers. It's difficult to define, maybe it's the timeless mood or perhaps it's the mystical feeling, or even a haunting aura... it's certainly there for me I like this very much!
Add to this, it's super economical and can be visually handled via darkroom safe-lights. No more fussing around in total darkness which often requires the use strong language! Humour aside, I find the physical involvement of handling the...
“I’ll just fix it in the darkroom.” is the motto I’ve lived by for decades.
I Was Too Deep Into Analog
Studying photojournalism in the late 80s, I was taught to print well but never learned advanced printing techniques because we were being prepared for quick turn-around journalism assignments. Commercially available digital photography was in its infancy, so it wasn’t on my radar, and even when it became standard, I was too deep into analog to have any interest. I shot for a local paper for se...
Oh, crap! What have I done?
Let’s see. I committed to do a solo photography show, with twenty-seven images. All twenty-seven are 4x5 black and white negatives, so they need to be darkroom printed. And those will be 20x24 prints. Yeah, and I need to have them matted and framed. The icing on the cake? I have just under three months to do this.
Yep, this is going to be an interesting project. But let’s back up to the beginning.
The Event
It was April 2023, three years after the pand...