Pig Sty Avenue

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.