Pig Sty Avenue

Everyone must start with some degree of enthusiasm. Your name has been on a waiting list for several years. And here you are, with ground and weeds and a spade. Weeds, because no-one ever gets an allotment in good condition. The previous holder will have gotten slowly disillusioned, or bought a boat, or fell in love, and then let things slide. Weeds. Or as in my case, he had been struggling with health, bereavement and old age for some time.  One starts to battle the weeds with fire and fury. Gradually you think it's taking shape, and in that shape you see problems deeper than weeds, like drainage. And the levels of the earth are all wrong. Wrestling in the mud. Eating like a horse, sleeping like a log.  That was the first year. The second was excavations of old walls and stray bricks, the central path under a foot of earth. It's at this point that I didn't give up. Dad will recount numerous instances where he's seen fellas go mad, tearing into it. And then getting...

The first time I've ever developed slide film in actual E6 chemistry. This one might be an actual print, though it's slightly wonky, it can be straightened. As soon as I looked at the first slides through the viewer, I fell in love with Ektachrome. It makes the best cross processed prints, and now I get t he whole National Geographic thing . This was the last roll, long expired. But I'm expecting a new roll through the letter box any day now.

This is the only exposure worth saving out of two rolls of film for the Orangemen's Walk. It's a decisive moment, at least, but a technical disaster. There was the problem of the Nikon F's meter, underexposing everything by at least 2 stops. And a bright sunny day meant his bald head was fine, but his face in deep shadow. Post processing gave me a not-bad shot, which could have been a good print with better technique. I'm not blaming everything on the equipment, I'd have to give myself a "must try harder" in the autodidact's  report card. The whole Nikon F Photomic meter/battery farrago means - so far as I can tell - the meter is useless. I could replace with an eye-level prism, for a stylish looking non-metered camera, but photography for me now is about getting good quality prints, not looking stylish. So lesson one, the F won't cut the mustard. Lesson two, now I know why press photographers ALWAYS use a flash - this guy's face in shado...

It was a bit like what (I suppose) it might feel like to drive a classic sports car: other drivers would give it a second glance. For drivers read photographers. It's a very stylish camera. An icon. But I need to be hard headed, and it's just not up to the job. Long story short, when I bought it back in 2011 or thereabouts, I learned that the meter would have to be tweaked to function with modern batteries. It was sent away to Liverpool for that and a CLA. It came back with dust on the mirror which hadn't been there before, and (as I've eventually worked out) a meter leading to underexposure of about two stops. It's all come to light in 2018, because it sat unused for several years, so I can hardly kick up a fuss with the technicians in Liverpool now. I don't even know if they're still in business. No one else is, apparently: camera repairers in Edinburgh and Glasgow didn't respond to my inquiries. I read somewhere you can send any Nikon back to the mo...

(Almost) everything must go. I've started flogging my expired film collection on eBay . It seems to be going for the same price as new film. And REALLY old film is clearly collectable. I've got some Ilford 127 from the 1960s, which someone will perhaps pay good money for, as a display item. I'll spend the profits on new film. Gone are the days when unreliability in the process was what I wanted. I've got a few rolls of expired 120 which I'll use, though, because they're Portra, Ektachrome and Tri-X. I'm going to put them through the Holga, whose hot-shoe is working. You can't rely on natural light with a plastic camera. And there's the Ilford Sporti 4, which takes a 35mm film onto a 127 reel, AND has a functioning PC flash socket. The idea's been growing for some time: when using a camera with few controls and a plastic lens, I need reliable film.

I've had 8 or 9 rolls of film through the Nikon F in the last few months. Every one of them has been underexposed by about 2 stops. I realised this suddenly whilst scanning the 2 rolls from the Orange Walk, and 2 more from the anti-Trump protest in George Sq. And I cast my mind back to the black and white darkroom course I did at Streetlevel back in March, when my prints were all coming out underexposed. Since then I've learned to compensate with the enlarger, which is ok, but one wants good negatives. You can compensate in scanning software, too, but you lose that pin-sharpness you should get from an F and the f1.4 50mm lens. Soon after I got the F I sent it off for a CLA to a company in Liverpool . That was back in 2011, and after seven years I'm unwilling to say categorically that they didn't do a good job. It does seem that a year later I blamed myself for the fact the F wasn't taking quite the photos I wanted, "If you take a not-very-good photo with ...

I took a few not-bad photos at the 10k womens' race: the one of the winner crossing the line with her hands up would have made the back page of a paper in the olden days, but not really good enough to make a sell-able print, now. I learned a lot,including: just be calm, and remember to look at the meter needle, look at the background. And think , don't just snap away. I also learned that I really don't like HP5+, not enough contrast. I've only got the negs to go on from the Orange walk, and from the anti Trump protest in George Square. Several of them look intriguing, and I'm looking forward to scanning them to see what's print-worthy, sometime later this week. I processed four films yesterday, different makes, different speeds and therefore dev times, and promised myself I'll never get into that ridiculous situation again, taking four times longer than it should have. I've been using up expired film, all different manufacturers, but from hereon in i...

As far as I recall, I got to this point five years ago when I just stopped doing photography. The point where scanning the negs and putting the digital images obtained on Flickr so that virtual friends and passers-by can say "Great shot!" has lost its appeal. The point where instead of "Great shot!" people in-real-life need to be saying of an actual print, "Hmm... £60 quid, eh? That would go nicely in the hall." My last bit of experimentation was with 6x9 contact prints, and I'll come back to that eventually, but the rest of 2018 is about getting to be really good with 35mm, that means the Nikon, black and white, and 10x12 or 11x14 prints. I've just finished Victor Blackman's My Way with a Camera, probably the best book about photography I've ever read, and I'm going to adopt the strategy of being a press photographer circa 1970, and showing up at any potentially photogenic event in Glasgow, Nikon F in hand. Not to sell them to a pa...

The Gevabox , I have learned, focusses pretty well on f11 from about 6ft to infinity, and is only a little blurred at 4ft. Whilst developing the first roll from it, and making the contact prints, it occurred to me that a slightly less than 6x9cm contact print was a staple in vernacular photography until the 60s - think of all those old prints an older relative used to keep in a Quality Street tin. So I went on eBay and got an old frame: I assume that a small chemist's shop with no enlarger, just a cupboard darkroom would use that. I need to cut up photographic paper to just the right size, dozens of 6x9s, and away I go. Instead of a single photo, roughly A4 size, I'll produce 8 6x9s, and that's the image, all 8 of them, relating to each other, looking simultaneously like some thing from your granny's photo tin, the same image size as almost everyone now takes on their mobile phone. Voila.

 I bought a Bilora Gevabox on eBay because of its "film inside". I'll be processing the film next week. The plan with this project is to re-sell the cameras on eBay once I've extracted the film and put another one or two through the camera. That's the plan. But look at this beauty: two f stops, a B setting, and top right corner, a fully functional PC flash fitting. AND it does 6x9 negatives. The cherry on the cake is that the filters to go with the Agfa Isolette will fit it, with a smidgen of blu-tac. Which last detail got me to looking on Flickr, where I found this, taken with a YA2 orange filter. I'd like to get that dark sky effect on Glasgow 6x9 architecture shots. And I've got a YA2.

An ex-smoker has a few drinks too many one evening in the convivial company of a smoker, cadges one, buys a pack of ten the next day, and the next a pack of twenty, and there they are, re-hooked. I am told that heroin works in a similar way. And I can tell you that so does photography, no matter how many years you've been away from it. My particular obsession right now is "film inside" searching eBay for old cameras with that phrase in their description. I got started on this back in 2009.   I think it got a hold of me when I developed these photos of the Queen Mary and the photographer's family near Southampton. Someone takes photos on holiday or of a historic event. They don't finish the roll so the camera goes in a drawer, life intervenes and it's forgotten there. When these films get developed you get a glimpse into a forgotten holiday. Before they get developed, the possibilities are endless. And the decades have changed the chemistry of the film in ...

It's taken me since early 2008 to get around to this. At last, this past weekend, I've learned how to develop and print photos properly thanks to Street Level Photoworks & our tutor Alicia Bruce . On Saturday morning it was the basics of how an SLR works, (you can see my hands in the bottom right of the first photo, here , and my Nikon F in the second one); then we went out and took photos. In the afternoon we developed the negs. None of this was new to me, but it was still useful to go through it all again, professionally. I didn't let on, for example, that I've never used stop bath, I've always just got by with washing up liquid. The negs dried over night, and on Sunday we went into the darkroom with the enlargers and this is all new to me now. It got really paradoxical: making a test strip, contact sheet, and then the actual print was all pretty straightforward, once you get the hang of obvious no-nos like leaving the photographic paper out of the box, ...

I have a Fed-4 which apparently I've never used... Just now did a bit of research and worked out as best I could, (no one has published online a comprehensive serial no./production date schedule) that it dates to some time in the 70s. It carries a contrary (for a Soviet camera) Queen's Silver Jubilee sticker on the case, so that suggests it was in the UK at some time before 1977. I thought the ASA/Shutter speed/aperture dial on the top left was some kind of analogue sunny 16 reckoner, when... the needle to the left of it was working! Put my finger over the sensor on the front and... it dropped to nothing. It's alive! Forty years and counting . Makes you wonder how the Soviet Union ever collapsed.  

Why oh why did I sell my Jupiter 8 lens when I was 'having a clear out' ?  Not like it took up a lot of space. But at least having a blog meant I could find out where it was, save all that searching through boxes and wondering what I'd done with it. Today has been getting re-acquainted with the FED-2 day. See these resolutions I made in 2013 . That's where I'm picking up from. I somehow managed to mend the diopter without entirely getting the top off the FED-2.

"The last 'proper' photo I'm going to take for a while, all the spare energy is going into learning the piano.  I'll dust off the cameras after I get to Grade 8." UPDATE: I didn't get to grade 8, (though I could probably now do grade 1 if I put in the effort). But I have dusted the cameras off after a break of almost 5 years. Watch this space.

There was a lot of snow, slush and ice on the ground until last night. There's been a rise in temperature and some rain, so if the drainage is going to work, this morning was the time to find out. The pond was over full, the overflow to the Council's drain being a bit blocked. I was able to clear it easily, with the result you can see in the video. There was some waterlogging in the beds adjoining the pond, (see below) and I'm hoping that was a result only of the blocked overflow. Otherwise, I might have to dig another 15 feet or so of drainage ditch, around the NW corner. Or maybe not: the sudden thaw has left standing water all over Glasgow.