Scattered light

I have read that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to master a craft.

So if you work at you passion for ten hours a day every day, then in three years you should become proficient. This does not mean you will be good or creative, just proficient at what you do, playing the piano, painting or, in my case, photography.

From 1969 through to 1983 worked as a professional and artistic photographer, so I have already done the thousands of hours of practice in studios, darkrooms, film sets, in exotic and horrid locations so I have served my apprenticeship of thousand of hours of practice and I was beginning to get recognition for the use of my skills with publications and exhibitions. I taught photography for an American a university and lectured on photojournalism

Then I stopped and packed my stuff away

Three years ago I started to learn gain, the hours I spent at college and working have helped me to feel and see again. I found my world had changed, equipment had got bigger and is totally dependant on batteries, it was also much more expensive and was obsolete the moment you bought it.

I found the quality of the image I was seeing was weakened by a dependence on colour and electronic manipulation. Images are made to be looked at mostly on a screen, not held or seen by reflected light.

This is all good, now anyone, with no need for thousands of hours of learning and practice, can record a good image, which is correctly exposed and framed to remember an event or a place they visited. The is no need to adjust the apparatus, there is no need to consider the variables or to use these to interpret the scene, the computer chips will do this automatically to pre-determined visualisations.

I tried for a while to adapt to this new world, but I found that too much had been lost, so I thought I would go back to where I left off, working with large format analogue cameras and printing with high quality papers and processes. But this had all disappeared, the pares and chemistry has been replaced by digital processes and ink printing. Cameras using chemical films and sensitised silver salts were not being made, lenses were using electronics to decide exposure and focus and the instruction books only talk about the technical resources in their hundreds of pages, most say nothing about visualisation of the techniques of photography. Camera manuals were once only five of six pages and half of this was depth of field tables.

By accident I went on a wet plate collodion workshop in London, run by John Brewer. I had planned to go on a platinum printing workshop in Cambridge and flights were booked, but the instructor was ill, so as I was I the UK, I went to the london workshop.

Wet Plate is a technique which dominated photography in the 19th century, it was still in use commercially in some graphics applications until the middle of the 20th century, due to the high quality it allows. It is a simple process, but like many simple things, it needs a lot of practice – a lot.

It was refreshing to be a complete beginner again and I thought it would be a good way for me to get back into traditional photography.

So – three years later, I have started again.

It has meant a total immersion in learning and practicing. I wa not sure where I would find my ‘niche’, so I have experimented with a wide range of techniques and a large selection of equipment.

I already had a lot of stuff from my earlier work and I found that equipment which was once beyond my budget, was selling on ebay for pennies – so I bought a lot of cameras, lenses and equipment to experiment with.

I found that most cameras had not used for taking photographs, but were bought for collections – nearly all had problems, especially the ones over 100 years old. I have had to repair and replace parts, adapt film holders, . I also had to find the types of equipment I was happy with and which lenses I could use to give the “feel” I wanted for my ideas.

So,I now have a lot of stuff I will not be working with and will be putting back onto the market.

John Brewer has become a friend, he has come to our place in the South of France several times now to give his Wet Plate Collodion workshops.

I have built new darkrooms in our accommodation in Villa Roquette, I have also put a mobile darkroom on the road (essential for local landscape work with wet plate photography)

I have a selection of classic wood and brass cameras for sale, these are all adapted to work well for wet plate photography, all are complete, are ready to take photographs immediately and all have been used by me. I will give a collodion plate which I have taken with the camera.

All the cameras have a lens which is suitable for the format of the camera.

Prices depend on the size (half plate, full plate or larger) and the lens or lenses supplied, the prices start at 250 euro.

If you book one of our residential collodion workshops, you can choose a camera to work with and if you like it – keep it and we give you a discount of up to 50 percent off the price of the camera.

Sing in the Light to make a Harmony of Darkness

The more I practise wet-plate (collodion) photography, the more I realise how much has been lost from our culture due to the “convenience” of digital technology.

I have been thinking hard to put into words the reasons I prefer the restrictions and errors, the dust spots and chemical mistakes I have to accept with traditional photography. Why do I avoid the simple manipulations I could use with photoshop to “enhance” an image, decline to scan an image and print with expensive and time consuming chemistry, when for a fraction of the cost and the time I could shoot, modify and print digitally, with high quality inks, to a very high standard – generally cleaner and sharper than is possible with a mechanical camera, on an emulsion of chemistry on plastic or glass (or tin) and printed onto paper (or glass etc) coated with more expensive and fickle chemistry. Or not even make a print – simply send a digital image through the Internet to be seen instantly on any computer screen.

Well, the truth is I do this – here is a tintype I took this week…

5x4 tintype - 18 seconds f4 (ish)

5×4 tintype – 18 seconds f4 (ish)

This was a quick portrait I did of another photographer, it is to be used for the publicity material for an upcoming exhibition If you are reading this then you are seeing a hand-held snap I took of the tintype which was on our dining-room table, lit by a convenient table lamp – I took it with a 4/3 digital camera, so I am happy to use this equipment, there is no other way I would have been able to simply show it on this page (or Facebook or anywhere else).

But you are not looking at the original – you can have no idea of what the original represents. OK, it looks much the same – but it isn’t.

It occurred to me that the difference is, to me, the same as going to a live concert compared to hearing the same sounds on a digital (or even vinyl) player. Live music will probably have crappy acoustics in the venue, musicians will make mistakes and it may be uncomfortable and will certainly be more expensive than listening at home – but which is preferable – for me I would much prefer to hear something I loved at a live performance than to hear it from any recording. Live music has “soul”.

Possibly the most famous, probably the most important and certainly the oldest poetry we know is Homers’ Odyssey and Iliad (or Iliad and Odyssey, whichever way round you prefer) – This was made to be performed live – but – importantly, it was sung, not narrated or quoted, it was sung. It says so at the beginning of the Iliad.

Thanks to the need for companies to continue to make big returns for their shareholders, we are caught in a vortex of consumer evolution which is accelerating the redundancy of “goods” (or should some of this be called “bads”) so the marketing departments can use their skills to create in us a “need” to upgrade our possessions. For sure, but using technological innovation, many things can be made easier to use to get a result. Any digital camera today is much much cheaper to make due to the use of electronics and plastics and it can record and enhance an image very simply and at minimal cost (of the image) – but by not giving the user the need to understand what the hell is happening, the image taken has no need of any form or structure.

The image provided by a digital camera is a convenience and usually a compromise and will come from the programmed enhancements of the computers in the camera, not from the skills and training of the user.

In skilled and artistic hands the digital camera can be used as a tool to make images – David Hockney created with Polaroids, fax machines and now uses an iPad to paint with, he explores and embraces all tools which “enable” him. For me, he is a wonderful artist. So I am not saying that digital technology is in itself bad, but I am saying that a great deal has been lost by replacing the disciplines of traditional photographic procedures and processes with the simplicity of automatic “smart” cameras is a loss. It is a loss of perception and has enabled a tidal-wave of unconsidered images to engulf us.

I want to “sing” my pictures – to do this I have to learn my craft – I also want to make good images, to do this I have to learn to be a poet, a good poet.