A book which has influenced my thoughts recently is, “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki – there are many free downloads, here is one – is a very short, but I found it deep and enchanting.

Without shadows, we are blind, we could not see anything. I often wonder what the weight of a shadow is – or is it a negative weight as it is where fewer photons fall – but as a photon seems to have no mass than why should a shadow exist?

Whatever a shadow is, with them there can be no photography, so I am a borrower of shadows, a chaser of their beauty.

Collodion, wet-plate photography, suits me well as the shadows I borrow briefly in my cameras and put onto glass plates are more elusive than usual. I use a lot of light which I cannot see as it is ultra-violet. For nearly 50 years I have used the Zone System in all photography I have done, often cheating a lot when using roll film, but I try to use the principles set out by Ansel Adams in his Basic Photo Series of books. Applying this to collodion is a challenge as the lighting is more difficult to “see”, but the shadows are there as my friends and help me to gather the silver sunbeams in the right order.

Here is todays effort to get a plate of my son Jack, it may be one of the last of this particular camera/lens combination (a 360mm Rodenstock ‘Portrat’ Petzval on a 12″x10″ Watson?) I will be trying a 360mm Flor tomorrow. I found out he actually took a picture of me taking a picture of him with his ‘new’ Olympus OM1 – 16 seconds at f3.5 (me, not his).

A Gentleness of Shadows

We are offering our accommodation and all the photographic facilities at Villa Roquette for workshops and photographic services – the next collodion wet-plate workshop is the end of January 2015, run by Jon Brewer, book before the new year for a special price.