Pig Sty Avenue

the ceilings are higher , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

flitting to glasgow , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Most weekdays for the last year found me here at this desk from 6am, pondering over test tasks and texts, constructs, and wtf? emails from management.  Today, Tuesday 4th December 2012, is the last day.  We pick up the keys for the new flat tomorrow and will move over the succeeding three days.  There's a table booked at Coia's for 7pm on Saturday, by which time we'll be substantially flitted.  Inshallah.   And I'm hoying in the word "paradigm" because being in Glasgow should change the photographic landscape sufficiently for a shift, a whole new way of looking at things.  Things are that way: I know about the gear, film, developing, techniques...  I've got some ideas about the kind of photos I want to take.  What I don't have in Saltcoats is anything outside the house which feels like it's worth photographing.  I mean, someone might get inspiration from Dock Head Street, bu...

Untitled-25 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . I wish I could remember what film this was - some cheap stuff, probably. I like the way the sitting room's green walls have given it a kind of underwater look. I DON'T like the way I've gotten an echo of the lamp there. Next time I'll surely remember to take the filter off when I'm taking a photo with a bright light source in it. I should have learned from the Elvis at Kelvingrove fiasco .  Also, I think I lost the bottom of it in the scanning by bloody Tesco. In other news, this is likely one of the last Saltcoats pics I'll be taking for the foreseeable future, the move to Glasgow is now only two weeks hence. [Should those weeks have had a possessive apostrophe there?]. Though I do have a roll of EFKE 127 that was in the Kodak Brownie Reflex which I might dev this evening. And, anyway, I'm expecting a pre-AI 28mm Nikkor in the post perhaps tomorrow (for photos of people in rooms, so you can se...

Meanwhile, I've started again with Little Gwion . I'm only putting photos I really, really, really like there, and excluding all the family ones, unless they're objectively exceptional. And yes, we will be there by Chrismas, it seems.  December 22nd is being bounced around now.  No, really.  Or maybe earlier.  By Christmas, anyway.

I put all the cameras away last week, the shitty ones in a box, the good ones in the bag...  The manfrotto's sitting there, forlorn.  I got a roll of cheap Kodak done in Tesco the other week, which I'd taken with the Kodak Pony during a fraught, flash-wouldn't-work episode, (that's the best of the roll, below).  And I've got a roll of EFKE 127 sitting on the coffee table, to dev, and then that's it for photography in Saltcoats.   And when we get to Glasgow, I'm still on for roll four from the Old Film Project , which I'm going to use at the Necropolis,  with the F.  Just tonight I've managed to get a bargain on a 28mm f3.4 Nikkor-H, which I've got some ideas for.  The move should be early December, but I might be wanted in Shanghai around that time. Which rather rambling and futile blog post is indicative of the way things are when you've been expecting to move house for months, and then it becomes imminent, but yet still with no exact d...

Loathe as I am, of course, to recommend any commercial site, I'm giving this lot a go for digital prints online. They had more options regarding size/proportions than another site I looked at.  Not bad prices, a 12x8" and 10x8" for six quid something, with postage.  I wanted to be doing wet prints, and all that, but for now I just want to get stuff off the Cloud and onto a real life wall. Online and irl interact of course, as they are here .

There was something by Buxtehude on Late Junction just now, (with Max Rheinhardt, Tues night, about 11.30).  This is a note-to-self to find out what it was, in the morning, when I'm less "tired" etc.

This blog is of course named after Jarrow's allotments, and I've been itching to get back to earth, work and location permitting.  The last allotment I had, the third one, in West Kilbride, was fun whilst it lasted .  In fact, I remember thinking, if nothing else, I've taught myself to dig an irrigation ditch. But it was always a bit too far away, and it needed a lot of work which I couldn't give it, working away from home so much at that time.  I hope someone with a good back took it over and got all the stones out, and I like to think that whatever else happened, it's properly drained now. But with the (imminent) move to Glasgow, there are four sites within a couple of miles cycling, and I'm getting my name onto waiting lists.  I'm told that cycling and hard gardening is the best exercise at my age, and I certainly need it stuck at this feckin laptop and thinking all day. I spoke to the Old Man on the phone and he's been faithfully keeping my too...

Untitled-10 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . This is from a roll of expired (2009) Fujicolor Pro 800z I got from Tim Connolly . Never used it before, but I'll use it again. Funny how lovely professional grade film looks after you've been using the quid-a-roll stuff from Poundland. I really like this one because that's the photo I took. I mean, I framed it with the kids at the edge of the frame, and the adult's hand, with the balloons and the table taking your eye in first, so you have to work out what's going on.  You can do this shit with an F's viewfinder. In other photographic news: I had a go with a Kodak Pony I'd bought on eBay, all the way from New Jersey, yesterday. I bought it because it would fit a Kodak flashgun I'd got, also from the States, Illinois or one of those places. One bulb went off when I was putting the batteries in. Another when I tried to take the lead off the camera. Another bulb went off in my hand when...

Conscientious | Review: Dive Dark Dream Slow by Melissa Catanese Might be worth a shufty.

Photo24_21A , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

make a blog of it, day 2, 30th October 2012 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

At last! Touching wood, inshallah, and all that stuff, we should be moved to Glasgow in the next month or so. The bloody wait is almost over. And we go there with a bit of a swagger, we lived in Red Road for a year in 2002/3, so we know the score. And now Red Road flats are being demolished, and we'll be in Dennistoun this time. We've got Matthias Pintscher and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to thank for this move, by the way. I went with Boy to see a free gig at the City Halls in the spring of 2010. It was Pintscher's first as Artist-in-Association with the orchestra. (God knows why I didn't blog about it at the time, very strange). I was very impressed: listening to a symphony orchestra, and the first performance of one of the conductor's own works (a flute concerto), for FREE, ffs... The shine was taken off the evening somewhat by the train full of drunks back to Saltcoats. Wouldn't it be splendid if we lived a short taxi ride from the Cit...

Still busy, but hang on a minute. During my working-from-home lunchbreak, I was noodling around the BBC iPlayer, and came across episode 1 of  Speaking Our Language .  It only lasted 20 minutes, so I thought I'd give it a go. It's always instructive to encounter language learning - good, bad or indifferent - from the other side of the teacher's desk.  It wasn't bad at all, methodologically speaking, though a bit too much L1, maybe, and it was clearly low-budget and not on its first run.  I'll watch episode 2, anyways. I'm road testing an iPad for work, so I had a quick shufty at BBC Alba's learning links, and found Learn Gaelic, with lots of links for beginners .  There's also BBC Alba , of course. And Radio Nan Gaidheal , which kills two birds with one stone: I like a bit of radio when I'm working, but Radcliffe and Maconie's banter, for example, can be distracting, and working with Radio 4 on is out of the question.  Radio in Gaelic means I...

Photo21_21 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

No trialing ?  That, in the world of Assessment, is a jaw dropper.  A national exam, on the results of which the lives of all its candidates may be shaped, in an advanced democracy with centuries of educational and assessment experience.  AND THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRIAL IT.  I've heard it all, now.

I read this with interest .  A Libyan film would be something to see.  I remember seeing films on TV there, I would guess Egyptian and from the early 50s, with production values on a par with anything from Hollywood at that time.  But the thing that article brought most to mind was one day whilst staying at the laughingly named "Holiday Village" near Janzur, I came out from the usual late lunch en route to the daily siesta, and just outside the dining room say two men and a woman holding sheafs of paper. The first thing I noticed was that the woman's head was uncovered and she was wearing jeans...  This was a rare sight indeed in Libya.  And as I walked by them I realized that they were rehearsing or learning lines from a play or a film script, in Arabic.  It was jaw-droppingly surreal, then, the sort of thing, you'd wake up after the siesta and think, "Did I dream that?"   Maybe I did, I never saw those three again.

Not exactly a Tour of Scotland, I'll grant you, but it was a start.  I think the trick will be, as in Shanghai, sussing out the best routes.

There was a definite thrill when it emerged from its cardboard box, all black and shiny and 2012 .  It took half an hour, less, to get it unpacked, the pedals put on, the handlebars and saddle adjusted: thank God for allen key technology.  So I went out, a bit wobbly at first, down to the nearest cycle track, just a few hundred yards away.  This was a mistake, because the schools had just come out, and it was busy with kids and their parents; besides, it's not well maintained, so the track itself is narrow, overgrown at the edges, and it was necessary to get onto the grass to let pushchairs, kids and parents past.  Towards the end of the path, some bastard had tipped rubbish, with broken glass amongst it, I had to dismount to skirt that. Then back towards home on side streets, which are hazardous because of the parked cars with room, just , for a cyclist and a van, say,  to get by, with only a few inches of wiggle room.  Concentrating on all of the above ...

What do you reckon?  Jack White or Little Willie John?  The wee fella's great, but, for me, Jack wins it by a short head because he's more "noy-vous".

I got some expired Kodak Color Plus in the post off of eBay this morning, and then on a trip to Glasgow to meet up with FWOT  I popped into Poundland and at last found the pound-a-roll-film loads of flickrpeeps have been telling me about.  Agfa Vista Plus, 200iso.  So I got five rolls.  It's certainly got possibilities, though it's grainy.  Works best, so far as I can gather from flickr, in artificial light, like this .  Anyways, that's eleven rolls of super-cheap film to get creative on, shoot them in the Nikon and then get all Frankenstein with the processing.

It should be here next Thursday.  I've got a Revolution Trailfinder , which is a commuter/hybrid, bottom-of-the-range, to get me started.  I might splash out a bit on something snazzier in future, when I've concluded the  mountain/road/touring debate.  But here's the thing: I'm not going to upgrade until I can manage this  in less than 8 hours, without undue pain.

C41, but replace the blix with any ordinary b&w fixer. The bleach removes the silver, so take it out of the process, the silver will stay and hopefully the colours will look subdued, a bit ghostly.  Worth a go.   Especially if I'm doing a start-from-scratch c41 process, avoiding a kit .

Twelve out of twelve: from a fifty-odd years old plastic camera, with a plastic lens , developed and fixed in roughly estimated formulae because the scales weren't working.  Not bad, eh?

Interesting bit of information from threepinner in the Flickr DIY Color group, here .  (See?  Sometimes it's worth keeping up with Flickr - you never know what needles of genius will be found in the haystack of nonsense). I'll give it a try with some pound-a-roll film initially.  It does seem to enhance black clothes, for example here .  I'm envisaging it as emphasising the blackness of the background of a colour exposure with flash, outdoors at night, as it seems to be doing, here .  Essentially, it's the addition of an alkaline bath to the process, between dev and blix.  Underexpose a couple of stops, too.  No filter. Be interesting to see what it looked like with xpro. This led me to google "Stoeckler Two Bath", (never heard of before, in our house) and get the formula here .  Blimey.  How simple and cool is that?

At last! Coming to the realization that I spend most days at this bloody desk, or on the sofa, that I've not led a blameless life so far as booze, tobacco, etc goes, that I like fried food, and that my maternal grandfather had a fatal heart-attack when he was five years younger than I am now...  I really can't procrastinate longer, (I was procrastinating back in the summer of 2009 , ffs), I've got to get a bike, and get out and about.  Enough of, it's the wrong time of year, wait 'til we move to Glasgow, at least I commute on  my old-fashioned bike  when I'm in Shanghai... blah, blah, bloody blah. I've been looking today at the Edinburgh Bike Co-operative's site .  Having been discussing and processing the ideas for more than three years, I've gone for a relatively inexpensive commuter/hybrid, with gears, and relatively high handlebars, so that I can sit up straight as I do in Shanghai.  (Leaning forward, you can't breath  properly, your nuts...

Ms Sherman is a the Mammy of the sort of stuff being cogitated in the Avenue just now.  And Trish Morrisey brings it closer to home.  Both of them get claimed by postmodernism and feminism, and I'm avoiding one of those roads and am unsuited for the other. I don't know what gear Sherman was using, I suspect large format, and I read somewhere that that's what Morrisey is doing - which is fair enough, to get the right look, and maybe also to point up the ambiguity  of the images.  But I'm going with MF, and the Sporti .  It's the right camera for the era - a Holga would be foolishly lomo, (I'm starting to hate that description), and the Nikon F would feel too near-perfect. I've already blogged that I'm getting shagged-off with Black and White, lately.  This was reinforced when I was having a discussion in Flickr with Cliff about family photos, and he pointed me to these, which crystallized the emerging antipathy - beautiful photos, but their beauty...

Multi-tasking of a Saturday morning , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

Photo31_28A , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . "When we get to Glasgow I'll do this." And, "When we get to Glasgow I'll do that." But let's not kid ourselves, we could be stuck (as John Cooper Clarke had it,) in fucking Chickentown for several months yet whilst the complex machine that is buying/selling/mortgaging flats during a double dip recession grinds so slowly round. So tonight, I've just said, ('scuse the French), "Fuck it", I'm not waiting for Glasgow's charms to start taking photos again, I'm going to keep on snapping, with the Android, with the Nikon, with whatever the fuck comes to hand, and put them all, good, bad or indifferent, in a set on Flickr , (which, BTW, deadens the soul almost as much as Saltcoats - but that's another story). There's something therapeutic, life-affirming, not to say just plain bracing, about deciding on a project.  To put it another way, you can live-for-the-mome...

Colour.  There's that cliche in movies or TV when someone falls in love, or smokes pot for the first time, and everything goes from monochrome to colour.  The Wizard of Oz moment. B&W's fine, it's just time to move on.  Which makes discovering these formulae really very fortuitous.  I've got some of those chemicals for B&W developing anyway.  C41 developing, playing around in a sink full of warm water is the sort of innocent fun you don't get much in adulthood.  Thanks to this guy , in this Flickr DIY Color Group thread for passing on the craic.  I've been trying to get that on and off for years. My mate cliffdotmac flickrmailed me tonight and said he was giving up on film, because of the expense.  Which is fair enough, if you've shelled out for a DSLR and its all-singing-and-dancing lenses, I can see how film would feel like and extra expense.  But if you haven't done that, if your biggest expense has been a few hundred quid a ...

EVEREADY NINE LIVES FLASHLIGHT BATTERIES , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

I'm just not happy with the quality of the photos I've taken lately, especially the  ones from San Francisco , and  some others from Shanghai , that I took with the Agfa Isolette. They're crap.  And this photo confirms it: Could Do Better. See, it's quite a good photo, (taken with the F, a very good camera), but it's fatally flawed because I didn't take the time to see that the subject was properly centred.  Also, maybe f1.8 would have been better than f1.4, just that bit more dof. All these things, of course, can be forgiven when you're using a Sporti, say, and have little control over the settings, and the viewfinder gives only an approximation - but I really should be getting them right with a Nikon F. To put it more plainly, if you take a not-very-good photo with an F, you've no bugger to blame but yourself.  You need to look at it, as I am with this one, and say "Wtf went wrong here?"  And when you've worked out wtf it was, ...

The kitchen scales I've been using to mix up developer and fixer said that they went to a gram, but I was suspicious of that.  Regardless, when I got them off the shelf tonight they weren't working, and still weren't working after trying several batteries.  I got onto Amazon and bought another set - this time ones which say they go to .01g - the sort a dealer would use, ("after looking at this item other customers bought" those ziplock bags - I'm just saying).  Anyway, they should be fine,  but by the time I'd established the old ones weren't working I'd got the chemicals out onto the kitchen bench, and anyway I've got a roll HP5 from Shanghai in the tank, waiting to go, and I'd made time this evening to get the dev and fixer made up to use tomorrow... So I decided to go bareback.  One 5ml spoon holds around 3g of powder, probably, I read somewhere...  And there are three of them in heaped desert spoon, so 50g of Sodium Sulfate is, er, te...

Photo20_20 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . With hilarious results!

IF I was going to try Polaroid, I'd start by looking here and here .  I'm only thinking about it because I bought  5 Philips Flashbars by mistake, and they apparently go with the Polaroids that us SX70 film.  But it's a whole world of its own, and a bit hipsterish, too. And the battery is in the film pack, ffs.  Does that power the flash, too?  I can't find out.   I do like the idea of a narrative in 10 photos, put like a cartoon strip, in a frame...

I've got a roll of Efke 127, and another of HP5 120 to dev.  I'm out of mixed chemicals, though, so I need to make some up, and this is a note whilst I remember: Fixer24 ID11/D76  (+ a pinch of bromide)

Michael Raso made me a contact, or maybe I first made him one, three years ago.  In all that time, I never had a look at his website .  Criminal, or maybe just an illustration of the way Flickr doesn't really facilitate sideways referencing.  Anyways, I'm making up for it now, and when I get time I'll have a good old ratch around there, and listen to the podcasts .

  Untitled-2 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . The flash that goes with the KBR will only work with a Kodak - I think they got into standard PC fittings some time later in the 60s. One of its big advantages is that it takes two ordinary C batteries, which you can buy at any supermarket or garage. On the downside, it takes No. 5 GE bulbs, which are less available than some others. I've got only two bulbs, but I decided to put a roll of Efke in, and give one of them a go during a break from another morning slaving over a hot laptop... Bingo! The usual flash-test photo, in a mirror, left me with bright green retina shadow, the shape of the reflector: one hell of a flash. I've got some craic from the Flickr Flashbulbs group, here . The upshot of the advice being, best to use a tripod and a quick B setting, (B = "Bulb", see?) So, knowing that it works, I went in search of more bulbs, and found someone in the States selling a Kodak flashgun, with a...

Always on the lookout for any kind of 127 film, I bought a couple of odd rolls from the early 60s on eBay.  One of them is from Gratispool . They were a company that developed and printed your film by mail order, and sent you a "free" roll with the prints.  According to the craic on photomemorabilia, they shifted to Verichrome at some point in the early 60s, but previously gave out orthochromatic film.  There's nothing on the box or roll to say this, but apparently the clue is in the backing paper, with yellow for Verichrome, and red for the orthochromatic.  My roll has red backing paper, which is interesting. I'll shoot it with the Reflex, and it's B setting - because I intend to overexpose more than somewhat.  And then I'll dev it in the formula I used before , ID11 with a pinch of bromide to combat the likely fogging.  I've got a flashgun for the KBR which I've not tried yet, but only a couple of bulbs.  The instructions with the film say to rat...

More on this later .

As I begin at last to break free of the drivel that is Flickr, I've resuscitated my APUG and Tumblr accounts. I also stumbled onto Fomapan's site just now, (cut out the middleman). I'll put them on the sidebar later. I had a lot to blog about, but exhausted by a weekend of flat-hunting in Glasgow and ready to hit the hay. Briefly though, as notes to self:  I read on Flickr tonight (it's still good for some things), that Efke's going out of business . Which is bloody bad news. They're the only European manufacturer of 127, so far as I know. I'll have to look across the water, it seems.  Anyway, I need to look for C41 127 - that's a whole 'nother story.

It was almost exactly three years ago that I was buying a tetenal kit whilst wondering about the eventual possibility of getting wet prints... I just developed a roll of Portra tonight - photos I took in March in San Francisco, ffs, and also happened to have a quick google for public darkroom facilities in Glasgow.  There's  Street Level Photoworks .  Fingers crossed, we'll be moved to Dennistoun and only a 20 minute walk from Trongate in a few weeks, and I can at last get away from the masturbatory not-quite-photography world of the internet, and just use digital media as a form of elaborate contact sheet.  Proper prints, framed and on a wall.  Bye-bye, pixels.

San Francisco on Portra March 2012 3 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . This is one snap from a roll of Portra I took with the Agfa Isolette II on a work-trip to San Francisco back in March. They're all awful . It's a salutary lesson to stop taking opportunistic snapshots. I've put them on Flickr as a reminder of that. Another thing I've learned is that Portra would be gorgeous film properly used. AND, whilst a bit of dust is ok in lo-fi quasi early 60s shots, can even be part of the aesthetic, it's no bloody good if you're trying to do something conventionally beautiful, like a regular portrait. So I need to address the dust issue (drying the negs in a length of plastic drainpipe, perhaps?) before I start taking print-worthy pics. Finally, for more-or-less conventional portraits, the Agfa isn't really going to cut the mustard - it doesn't sit comfortably on the tripod because of its door, for one thing. So back on eBay it will go, as ...

Link for reference.

Untitled-1 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Out of focus, (because the focal length of the Ilford Sporti is more than five feet). The Fomapan is just right for flashbulbs. Bits of dust are fine. She was videoing me on the phone, but decided to hold it to her face like a camera. This is it, this is the style.

I was trawling eBay, looking for cheap(er) 127 film, hoping to pay something less than the standard fiver a roll for Efke, say . I had some luck with various out-of-date films, (of which more later), but best of all was someone auctioning an Ilford Sprite, and throwing in a couple of rolls of Efke for good measure. Result.  I got the two rolls (exp Sept 2013, forsooth), plus a camera for about seven quid. Film and camera arrived this morning. The Sprite is a dinky wee thing : nice shape and feel, minimalist settings, (fixed speed and focus, two apertures). I couldn't resist it, I bunged in a roll of the Efke and snapped all 12 exposures in the garden.  Should get that dev'd and scanned in the next week or so. Here's something from 1963, taken with a Sprite . There are photos taken recently with them, but that photo illustrates what it can do. Almost Holga-like, the sharp central area, with gentle vignetting around the edges. Lovely. Just what I'm wanting for...

Developed the first roll of Fomapan tonight - pics here tomorrow if I get time to scan them.  I used 1+50 Rodinal, 8 minutes @ 22C .  That was a test roll in the Ilford Sporti shot a couple of months ago, to see if it was synching with the flashgun - and from the negs, it has. Fomapan has a nice look to it - good contrast, low grain, - but I'm not sure if it's quite the look I want.  More information from the manufacturers here .  I actually only read that after I developed the roll, as usual, and didn't follow it to the letter - no distilled water in my processing, and the rinse was only five minutes or so after each stage, with my customary drop of washing up liquid.  Anyways, whatever else it is, it's cheap .

                                        e                     Gawd bless 'em.  A group of very clever lassies.  Never mind the private-jets-against-climate-change people who've gotten onto the bandwagon, or the fact that when you get hold of this on The Guardian website you first have to listen to a cringing commercial for some pay-as-you go baloney. The whole thing, from cathedral to trial to "penal colony" (whatever the foot-of-our-stairs that involves; nice touch of Kafka, though, eh?) is a work of art. And don't let this Russian madness let us lose sight of the fact that the UK is currently governed by a set of neoliberal greedy bloody fruitcakes, either, mind.

dinner , originally uploaded by Beaulawrence . This is just the look I've been visualising. And it's one of those things that makes so much sense when it's put right under your nose: Shanghai GP3. I used a couple of rolls, ( in Shanghai, as it happens), and it was hopeless in a Holga for street , cruelly underexposed. But this is perfect. It's the flashbulb that does it. I could get something very similar with a roll of Shanghai, the Ilford Sporti, and of course a flashbulb.

bulb for Kodak flash holder type B , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue .

I've been missing my original Ilford Sporti, but hip-hooray, there it was in an old suitcase I had a shufty in yesterday.  And, forsooth, a film in it, which turned out to be Adox CHS 25 Art, with three exposures left.  So I used them up with the wee National electronic flash to see if it was synching...  Devd it tonight: 20mins in ID11 1:1.  The whole roll is underexposed, from the negs, (what was I thinking of, putting 25iso film into the Sporti?  Hello?)  But the last three frames contain no discernible image, so, like the Sporti 4, it's not synching. Heigh ho.  I can live with this.  The theory is that these cameras will synch, with a flashgun. Actually, I was looking for flash bulbs when I found the Sporti.  And I found 22 PF1Bs.  Which was nice.  They fit a National flashgun I've also got, which has a capacitor.  I've ordered the  battery . That's for the Sporti, I also came across a Kodak brand flash gun to use w...

The sun was fairly low on the horizon - 7ish on midsummer evening in Scotland, subject looking west.   So you'd want a bit less light than that.   Going from the top: 20ft, 15ft, 10ft, 7ft, 5ft -  the focus looks at its best at 5ft, so good for (very) lo-fi portraits.  Lost three exposures trying the flash, again - it's clearly not going to synch.  I discovered an annoying feature of the Sporti 4: getting the old spool into the right hand side ready for the next roll is bloody fiddly.  

Gathering intelligence on flashbulbs:   Start here .

The processing of that roll last night seems to have worked out fine - though I did some unashamed post-processing to get rid of the worst of Velvia xpro's orange-rosiness. And I don't much like the photos - just people going by in a parade, boring, really.  I've uploaded them all as a reminder to stop random snapping. As I've been on a development bender this week, I've been thinking a lot about photography and what I'm going to do with it now that I've got a nice full camera bag, decent tripod, and a fair amount of technical know how. I started to formulate some ideas a few days ago , and I've gotten a bit further now. Here we are: Conceptualize: get an idea for a set of up to a couple of dozen photos, a situation, a theme, whatever. Visualize how they're going to look. Choose the best camera for the idea and the vision. Choose the best film, ditto.  Click, click, click... Keep in mind when clicking the WHOLE frame. Involve the sub...

The only funny thing I noticed when mixing up the chemicals was that the clear-ish liquid from the blix, (it came in two 200ml bottles in the kit, one dark and the other light, presumably one's bleach and the other's fix), had formed a thick crust on the outside of its wee plastic bottle.  I'd mixed the blix before I noticed that. I remembered the feeling of initial surprise about, actually, how straightforward C41 deving is.  The whole process takes about 20 minutes and reminds me of the water play we got in Infant School - apparently meaningful sloshing about of liquids from one container to another, with a handy sink of nicely warm water.  Meanwhile, listening to Radio 4's take on Ulysses. What's not to like? I pre-soaked the film in 38C tap water for 5 mins, (don't think I've done that before?) and the wash that came out was the most wonderful purple.  Thereafter it went all according to the instructions, without calamity.  The negs came out a n...

Down to the last two exposed rolls in the fridge, both colour 120.  I was disgusted to realize that one of them's Velvia for xpro, (if I wanted all those horrible oranges I'd go back to digital), but I'll use it to remind myself how to do colour, because it's been a while and the other roll's Portra, and I want to make a good job of that - I've never used it before, let alone deving it. Digging down through the layers of the Avenue's archaeology I find that I first did C41 in October 2009.  I bought a litre kit of Tetenal, and made up half a litre of developer, blix and stabilizer.  I continued to use it throughout 2010, though I can't easily work out now how many rolls I did, three I pooled in DIY Color on Flickr, but I probably did more.  Mostly slide for xpro, but some straight C41, too. During 2011 I was mostly in Shanghai, and just went to the Lomography shop there for any processing.  At the end of that year, though, I xproed a roll of Provia...

2012 1969? The first roll has turned out better than I could have expected. Out of twelve exposures, a couple were too underexposed, a couple more (taken on a dreich day on the Isle of Arran) are somewhat dark, but the rest are fine.  2 or 3 seconds indoors seems to work, too. On the 2012 photo, Molly was about 6 ft away from the camera, and she's a bit OOF.  Dad and Grandad are about the same distance in 1969, shot on the same model, and they too are a bit OOF.  So forty odd years have had no effect on the shape of a lens or the laws of physics.  The lamp behind The Bairn is about 10 ft away, and it's fairly crisp.  Even the doll's face is clear, and that's a foot or so deeper than Molly. So the focusing distance is looking like 7ft plus, as a rule of thumb.  In fact, at 10 ft or thereabouts, it's remarkably clear for such a low end camera: the scan's 1600 dpi, and I can read all the lettering on the framed poster by zooming the sc...

There's something that feels just right about a roll of 127 - easily handled, unlike a roll of 36 exposure 35mm, for example which is about 5' 6".  I developed the roll of 80s I'd put through the Brownie Reflex tonight. Quite a moment.  It was my first camera, (not this actual camera, God knows where that one got to, this one came off eBay for a fiver, on the upside of our globalized age).  I'm fairly sure that this photo was taken with it, and this one  , and this one , (both stupidly cropped when I scanned them, before I knew better). I dev'd it in the ID11 with bromide.  I gave it 20 mins at 22C, which was pushing it somewhat.  From the negs the exposures look lovely and crisp.  There are four or five from a day trip to Arran, and the rest I took the other week of The Bairn in the sitting room.  I used the tripod and B setting for those, 2 or 3 seconds.  I'll scan and upload them tomorrow.

These were a bit underexposed, but that's down to my sunny-16 miscalculations, no doubt.  A pretty good show for film that's nearly 40 years old .  That P bromide is the bollocks for fog.  Rolls 4 and 5 of the OFP, I'm going to do in the F, such venerable emulsion deserves a meter.

Glasgow Subway, 2009.  This sort of disgraceful behaviour, taking photos of your family, will be illegal if SPT get their way .  They say that this will reflect"existing policies", and furthermore it's required for "security reasons" . What security reasons?  And what brought about the existing policy?  Another argument is that it's the norm elsewhere.  It is against by-laws on the Tyneside Metro, I've been told , though that never stopped me . It's like a disease, treating every one as a terrorist, looking for excuses to molest the law-abiding.  Don't get me fucking started.

The Old Film Project looks to have gone very quiet, but I've just gotten around to developing the third roll, (subject "People", a cinch when most of your photos have people in them). If you don't have an attention span of several years, the OFP arose when whitenviro  kindly decided to give away 400 rolls of Efke 100, expired in 1977, to applicants around the globe, in batches of five rolls. In the group we debated and agreed on themes for each roll. I did the first roll in a 127 camera, to get sprocket holes, the next in the FED2.  This third roll I did in the FED also. This evening, until I'd dev'd it, I couldn't recall when or where I'd shot it, but a quick look at the negs tells me it was the St Patrick's day parade in San Francisco.  I developed it in an ID11 mix, with added potassium bromide to help combat any fogging.  The suggested time for the film was 11 mins at 20C, so in view of its age I gave it 20 mins at 22C. More than half the ...

Untitled-3 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . From a roll of Delta 3200 I put through the F in Shanghai, before it was CLAd. Pushed it to 6400 in Rodinal. (20 mins at 20C, 1+25) Only got a few images, it was a very dark bar. A bit less grainy would have been better, but it's getting there: what we call Shanghai Dirty. I've opened a set on Flickr.

Untitled-3 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . However, one good thing has emerged out of a mostly underexposed roll, where there's a lot of black: no dust. The method is to set the shower going a few minutes before I take the film out of the tank; then pin it diagonally between a couple of shelves in the bathroom. And then take a shower. This is significant if your favourite genre is photos with dark backgrounds, where the tiniest dust particles show up brightly in the scan.

Untitled-9 , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Most of a roll of NP 1600 I shot at Kelvingrove was underexposed. I should have allowed a couple of stops for the red filter I had on - or maybe not used a filter at all. Also, take more time focusing. Take more time, full stop.

This is where the F would come into its own, nothing else I've got could take pics like these . Film and developer here .

Bicycle Cart People Nanjing Lu , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . OOF, I'd like to say on purpose, but I like the effect - I'll try to do something similar with one of the 127s when I go back out. I like the way the NP has worked with the Rodinal

After a hard day chained to a hot laptop, puzzling over the relationship between functional language constructs, pedagogy, and assessment, it's nice to spend a bit of time in the kitchen shaking a dev tank.  Last night I did a roll of Fuji Neopan in Rodinal and Fixer 24, and I'm going to scan it now.  From the negs, it's a roll I shot in Shanghai a month or two ago on the FED2. The other night I dev'd the roll of 127 I'd put through the Baby Brownie.  Hello.  There was a mark along the edge of the film which looked like a light leak, (which would have been fine), but the rest of it looked as if it hadn't been exposed at all... When I looked again, there were numbers from the backing paper.  I've looked at the camera, and the shutter appears to be going fine.  So I don't know what to think about that.  Pity, because the Baby's such a cute wee camera to use. Meanwhile, for when I get to the bottom of the exposed film mountain, I've been looking...

Medium term memory loss.  As I've come over all 127 the last couple of weeks, I resurrected the Sporti 4, and  was pleased to try out a flash and find that it fired, sans film.  Oh joy.  And then this morning, when digging back into the Avenue, I found - with no sense of deja vu whatsoever - that I'd been here before, almost exactly three years ago, and it wasn't working .  Heigh bloody ho.   As I remember it now, the flash fired, apparently as one clicked the shutter, but must have fired out of synch.  Other posts indicate I went at it with WD40, at some point...  I wrote back in 2009, " What I'm after is a kind of flash-gun look, where the background is in deep shadow, and the foreground overlit. And I want to do that with a very simple camera like the Sporti 4, to get the vignetting and other distortions."  Nothing has changed.  I've got the F for straightforward photography, but a very simple 127 camera, with flash, is the thing. ...

I've got seven or eight films in the fridge, waiting to dev.  I decided to put one in the tank the other night, and dev it tonight, and then I remembered why I've got such a backlog, I've lost - or any rate mislaid - the lovely old Ilford thermometer.   But meanwhile, when looking for a recipe for the Rollei 80s shot in the Baby Brownie I was going to dev, I came across this .

"Sturdy" it is.  Rock solid, more like. Blimey.  To paraphrase Tom Waits, "It's the only tripod you will ever need!"  Three spirit levels. Splendid bit of kit. Big, mind.  You wouldn't want to take it on a hike.  And it certainly won't fit on the back of the camera bag.  I'll need to get a strap or something.  I've started now on one version of the 9to5 project.  The idea is to get photos from the workplace.  So I'm going to do two complementary sets, one from the Shanghai office, the other from my desk here at home.  The idea is to have a fixed vantage point, but to photograph throughout the day, so there'll be changing light, slight changes in the desk objects etc.  And the Shanghai version will be more dynamic, of course. 

The last bit of essential kit is in the post.  A Manfrotto ART 075, with a 029 three way head .  "Sturdy" is a word that comes up when you google it.  Which it wants to be, the F weighs .86kg , so it must be 1.2 or 1.3 with the lens and finder...  When it arrives, tomorrow, Inshallah, it'll be quite a moment.  When I was giving up most weekends to study for the MA, I had it in mind that if it helped me to step off the casual teaching merry-go-round and get a steady job, I'd get a decent camera and the gear to go with it.  Of course, conceptions change.  Back in 2007, I was dreaming of a D3 .  And then there was the flirtation with Leica.  And then it all clicked into place: collectible pro gear .  Which might as well be Nikon, (as that was my first SLR, back in the day).  And Manfrotto is so much classier than the chimper's favourite, Slik.  Voila.  Meanwhile, I've put the time in, learning to use all kinds of cheap ol...

Here .  And a bit craic. Thirty bob a pop, and no postage. 

Ça marche! It might be overexposing just a tad - the Newton Ellis guy said the adjustment to the meter, (a diode to adjust for the shift from mercury to alkaline batteries) could leave it maybe a 1/4 stop out, and that's probably about right. And the 3+ diopter compensates just like reading glasses, so I can get the focus right: actually, it's a bit difficult adjusting to TTL focusing after using a rangefinder for a while, but I'm getting there.  So, it's all good . I got the test roll developed at Tesco, cheap, (£1.79) but there's more dust and strange marks than if I'd dev'd it at home. Also, the Kodak ColorPlus gives lots of grain, and the colours are bit off, so it's not great for portraits, (though my mate Cliff pointed me in the direction of this collection by Åsa Sjöström which looks as if it could have been taken with ColorPlus, it works for "grainy and grimy", and that might be what you want for a particular aesthetic). And...

The manual's here. And the batteries are V625U.

The F came back from Newton Ellis this morning.  I had to take some time out from the work I'm doing to check it out.  Nice and clean, in and out, (tiniest bit of dust on the mirror).  Best of all, the meter is functioning coherently, (though I'll see for sure when I get the test roll - Kodak ColorPlus 200 - developed).  So I've come over all vintage Nikon again.  I'm looking at getting, eventually, the full set of original Nikon filters .  But now I've to get back to my work, even though my feet and fingers are itching to get out and finish the test roll. 

Back in the day, I used to love to listen to Irish folk music in Carlisle's pubs.  The musicians were all friends or friends-of-friends.  The bowram fella, an accordionist, couple of whistle players, a fiddler.  Others would come and go.  The fiddler could sing a mean rendition of Carrickfergus, but it was mostly jigs, reels and polkas: there was no one who could sing a whole repertoire of songs.  It was the same when we all went to a festival in Girvan.  Loose assemblages of musicians could knock out tunes like nobody's business, but singers were thin on the ground.  Last night we went to the House of Jazz and Blues on Fuzhou Lu, and I realised I could never belt the Blues out like the singer.  But then I remembered Carlisle and Girvan, and that I could hold my own in the bar with Carrickfergus or She Moved Through the Fair or Paddy's Sicknote . I just need to get a bigger repertoire of Irish songs , find a singerless band in Glasgow, and, vo...

Just today encountered a fascinating blog . Well, fascinating for those who find themselves stumbling further and further each day into the dark forest of applied linguistic anorakism. A fellow anorak passed it on to me after telling me about a study regarding Baboons' reading ability, which I need to follow up on.  

Ardrossan beach kite , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . Ardrossan beach kite

Still available from those nice Adox people, here .

The developer and fixer in the press are ancient, so I'm making up fresh for that roll of Verichrome. For fixer, using Kodak F-24 , except that I'm using S metabisulphite, not bisulphite. I have no idea what the difference is, and think I've been here before, and used this with no ill-effects. The developer is Steady-Eddie, D76/ID11 , but with 1.5g of Potassium bromide to combat any fog. I got the film onto the reel and into the tank tonight. It was, naturally, very curly and springy indeed, but went onto the reel ok once it had done the first circuit, so to speak. It was the strangest, hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling to sit down once the film was in the tank with the backing paper, take it off the spool, and think that the person who put that end of the paper into that slot on the spool did that years before I was born.

I heard this on The John Peel Show, it must have been around 1980.  And I've just tracked it down this afternoon, when I should be working.

Note-to-self, to get this when I get back from Shanghai in May.

It's amazing what you learn when you buy an old camera which happens to have film in it.  eBay University, forsooth.  The old Verichrome is a type of safety film, (as in it won't catch fire easily), and is orthochromatic, which means it's not sensitive to red light, you can dev it with a safe light, and any reds will show up as very dark.  None of which, so far as I've learned, will effect the developing chemistry.   A likely problem will be fogging, regarding which Ansell Adams, says  "The fog level that comes from age, heat, and so on, can often be reduced by adding Potassium bromide or Benzotriazole to the developer."   I quoted that in DIY B&W on Flickr , which as usual was of variable quality so far as advice goes.  What this Kitsaplorax  had to say in that thread about Glycin is interesting, and I'll look at replacing Metol with it in the future, perhaps, but I can't find any to buy, online, this morning, so I'll go with Potassium bro...

The nice people at Flickr's B&W DIY group have suggested Kodak HC-110, but that was patented after Verichrome was discontinued, and, strangely, I can't find a on online supplier anywhere in the UK. (Only $12 on amazon.com, but another $60 for p&p. I should bloody cocoa). The ingredients are secret. Rodinal is also being suggested, but I don't have all the ingredients for that . So my best guess at the moment is Beutler A + B .

Kodak Verichrome Exposed , originally uploaded by Pig Sty Avenue . The F's still away getting its CLA, and I've come over all rudimentary again, and got a Baby Brownie off eBay for a couple of quid. Blimey, what a gorgeous wee thing of beauty it is. I'm waiting for some 127 film to arrive. Meanwhile, it had this roll of Verichrome in it. The developing will be a work of art in itself: research what they used back in the day for orthochromatic films, but probably something like diafine or beutler, and fixing in straight sodium thiosulphate (aka "hypo"); and then factoring in that it's been left in a small cheap plastic camera in someone's cupboard-under-the stairs for at least 50-odd years... So, plenty of time - at least 20 mins, and quite cool chemicals, so that the emulsion doesn't come off, less than 20C, anyhoo. Getting it off the spool and onto the reel, omg. And I've got to do all of the above with all my fingers crossed. What la...

I keep thinking about this photo: You'd have difficulty reproducing those splendid wee coats nowadays, of course, but the quality of the photo should be do-able. I'm looking again at a Brownie Reflex on eBay. And of course I've got the Ilford Sporti 4, which should do a similar job. I've ordered a few rolls of EFKE R100 127. I got them for a fiver a pop from photo supplies uk , but I've since rediscovered this rather bewildering place where, if I've read it correctly, you can get a roll for 3 Euros if you order in sufficient quantity. They, helpfully, if you look hard enough, also give you an R100 dev chart . Which is jolly decent of them. Ignoring the sprocket holes, the photo below is getting near the sort of quality I'm looking for. That was Ilford Delta, and I suspect developed in ID11. The same camera, (or maybe a Brownie Reflex), with Efke R100, perhaps developed in Beutler A+B, would be getting near. The composition could be something l...