Pig Sty Avenue

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!