I am a film photographer.

I love the film development and darkroom/alternative printing process. I see my photographs as simply the first stage of a long process that culminates in a print. If a photograph does not end up as a print, I feel the lack of something important, an unfinished business.

The manual craft of producing photographs with your hands seems to satisfies something that is deep in me. Computer software just doesn’t do the same job for me. It is difficult to explain why this is so.

On these pages I share some of my frustrations in learning film development and print making. I also write about what photography means to me by looking at the work of other photographers and sometimes my own.

As an independent philosopher, I write about philosophy, mainly in a discursive way. For me philosophy is nothing other than learning to employ concepts in the making sense of things. It does not aim to strive for the ‘hidden truth’ of things, but only to re-conceive what is already there in a different light. And that, of course, is what we photographers do too, re-conceive in a different light.

Altar, Tunbridge Church North Dakota, USA; FP4+ developed in PMK-Pyro; Printed on Ilford MGWT semi-matt using Ansco 120 developer diluted 1:3. Partially Selenium toned.

I hope there is something of value in these pages.

Kind Regards, Tony Cearns.