Category: On film photography (Page 2 of 6)

Learning Large Format

16 July, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 1 Comment

Having convinced myself that I would never get into Large Format (sheet film) photography, I finally talked myself into buying a 5×7 view camera with an additional 4×5 back. Such is life.

This new series of posts will describe how I get on with the new format for I will undoubtedly make mistakes. I don’t mind sharing these as I have no pretences to keep up and writing about them helps me to stay objective. After all making mistakes is the only way of learning anything.

In this first post I talk about the rationale for going into large format and the kit that I acquired.

The pain and ecstasy of scanning

26 May, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

If you are like me, scanning is a bit of a pain. Never an ecstasy. However getting it right is important to some workflows. In this post I set out what works for me on black and white films, much which has been learnt through trial and mostly error …

Paper Negatives: Investigation 1

5 May, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 1 Comment

I am enthralled by the pictures that Andrew Sanderson makes with paper negatives.

My last visit to his darkroom was spent wholly on paper negatives. So I am now experimenting with what I learnt, and where better to begin than at the beginning …

First steps with Infrared Pinhole

28 April, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

Although simple in concept pinhole photography has its challenges in terms of framing and exposure. When coupled with infrared film the guesswork required multiplies up ….

Bookcase

16 April, 2020 / Sidewayseye

Some comments on the technical film photography books that I have on my bookshelves … (click on relevant book)

[mbm_book_grid id=’5558′]

Standardising on film/developer

2 April, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 1 Comment

film developer combinations — What film/developer?

The general advice on choosing a film/developer combination is to select just one (or two) and to stick to this until you have learned its subtleties. The snag is that I enjoy experimenting, so I find sticking to this advice difficult. However, aside from some specialist techniques like infrared or pinhole, I seem to have settled on a few combinations that I favour …

Split grade printing – again

14 December, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 6 Comments

I have written a few posts on split-grade printing before (here and here) but I thought that I would revisit it again in more detail. The reason for this is that I am having some problems with it, so a post like this forces me to re-evaluate what I am doing, starting with the basics and trying to understand where I am going wrong.

Developing 45 year old film

28 November, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

My ageing uncle recently gave me an old camera. An Agfa Isolette. This was the story that went with it.

Reproducing photographs for viewing – the example of Walker Evans “American Photographs”

6 October, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

The advantage that a print has over an on-line image, or even an image in a book, is that the photographer retains control over the look of the photograph, assuming that the photographer can specify the lighting conditions under which the photograph is viewed.

Working the Landscape

30 September, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

Mention ‘landscape photography’ these days and many would immediately think of that style of photography that looks to the ‘beautiful’ or to the ‘sublime’ or to the ‘picturesque’ in our countryside. Perhaps we have Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful‘ to blame for that.

Romanticism in landscape photography is nothing new of course. 19th century Romantic photography provided a position which enabled a counter-reaction into Modernism.