Chinchilla Weir 4x5 : 2

Chinchilla Weir 4x5 : 2, originally uploaded by The Central Scrutiniser.

It's a long learning process fiddling around with large format cameras. I have a distinct hankering to get into 8x10 photography but have decided I need to be getting consistently good results with 4x5 before I make the shift up.

Chinchilla is town on the western edge of the Darling Downs in South Queensland. It's a pretty quiet place on a Sunday when we went there for a look-see. Out at the weir, just south of town on the Tara road, there were a few grey nomads camped and a few locals fishing.

I'd like to go back there for a dawn shoot. It's a peaceful spot, with a lot of interesting photographic subjects.

On the streets of Cologne, Germany

On the streets of Cologne, Germany, originally uploaded by asthmatic.

flickr's decision to censor content to germany, korea, singapore and taiwan has not gone down well with many of it's users.

i've been using flickr as a networking tool for photography for about 2 years now and i am sad that the management of flickr have deconded to listen to their lawyers rather than their users.

i've been enjoying the freedom of the internet for over a decade now. it seems that freedom is bad for business.

Water quality

I mix up my photo-chemicals with filtered water that has been through a "Brita" cartridge filter containing activated charcoal and ion exchange resin, but i rinse my films with water straight from the tap. It's never been a big problem until this week.

There is a darkroom at my place of work, which is rarely used. I have started using it lately just to load film holders and such. This week I decided to develop some films.

1. The first film was a 120 roll of Delta Pro 400 shot in my Holga. I just used the tap water. When I turned on the tap the water came out orange. Apparently the pipes had not been used for a long time and were full of rust. I let the water run a long time and it cleaned up a bit.

"What the hell", i thought - its a Holga film. I went ahead. Development was unremarkable but the result was filthy and over-developed. The negs were almost black and covered with grains of grit. Washing the grit off caused some scratches. Total write off.

Question - do iron salts in water accelerate the action of the developer?

2. Next batch - 6 sheets of 4x5 delta 100 shot in my Speed Graphic. This time I mixed up the chemicals using water from the water filter in the tea-room. It has two big cartridges full of resins and things. However I rinsed in tap water.

Tray development, timed with music. Result was perfectly developed negs but again with grit from the tap water. Careful washing in filtered water and Photoflo removed this and I am happy with the end product.

3. Last film. having learnt my lesson I developed my final film for the week (a 120 of delta 400 shot in my Rolleiflex) totally in the filtered water, including the rinse - which was the Patterson inversion rinsing technique.

End result was the cleanest set of negs I have ever made. They didn't even need dusting to be printed or scanned.

So - I thought I'd tell my story as an illustration of the need to control water quality - but I'd like to know the answer to my question about iron salts.

Photographic time capsule

photographic time capsule 1, originally uploaded by jayavant.

Here's another found film. It was stored in similar conditions to the other and is a few years younger, but for some reason has faired much worse. This film was exposed in the early 80's and developed just last night.

It shows my eldest son, Kim, with his mother, Jan. There is an odd dendritic intrusion across the image. Fungus? Bacteria? Static electric discharge?

The denity of the image is very low. When I took the negs out of the tank and hung them up I thought there was nothing on the film at all. It was not until I examined them closely that I saw faint mages - barely there at all.

I like lo-fi photography, and I like found films.As a technique though, leaving a film for years before it is developed requires a lot of patience.

Here's an idea. Shoot a roll of film, seal it up and bury it for 25 years. Then dig it up and develop it. I think I may just do that. I know just where to put it too. Watch this space in 25 years for the result....

I may experiment with simply mistreating films. heating them, feezing them, then developing them. I don;t think I'll get those detrite forms again though.

새해복 많이 받으세요!

scene of the crime, originally uploaded by jayavant.

New Year's wish - a darkroom.

Oh and a house...

watch out for that sprocket hole!

Green Bridge, originally uploaded by jayavant.

Something you don't see every day - I jammed a 35mm film into a 120 camera and the resultant images went all the way to the edge of the film. This photo was shot from the hip and shows two folks jogging across the new "green" bridge in Brisbane. The bridge carries people on foot, bikes and buses only.

The camera was a Holga - a cheap Chinese 120-roll camera with fixed shutter-speed and aperture and a plastic lens. It has a curious soft focus and interesting colour rendition.

To fit a 35mm film into the Holga I had to make a few temporary modifications to the camera. Click on the pictures to go to my flickr site where further explanation can be found.



I am wondering about the possibilities of using 35mm film in other types of camera too. A mosaic of pieces of 35mm film could be held somehow within a 4x5 sheet film holder....

Brisbane - found film

Brisbane - found film, originally uploaded by jayavant.

Found films are fascinating. this is my fourth. I am so interested in found films now I am starting to look for them. In second-hand shops sometimes you will find and old camera with a film still in it. I have found one like that.

In this case however, I found a negative file among my negatives, containing photos that I did not take.

In the 70's, some of my friends used my darkroom occassionally and one of them must have left these negs behind. So I have scanned them and they are a fascinating collection of street scenes in Brisbane taken it seems in 1978.

Many of the photos show a crowd of people waiting to watch a parade of young Aussie athletes returning from the Commonwealth Games. Some show scenes of Brisbane streets which take me back to Brisbane's quieter country-town-like days. This was during the Bjelke-Petersen years, when we used to call New South Wales "the socialist south". There are even cigarette ads on buses - they became illegal long ago now.

Seems like a good time though looking at these pictures. Brisbane was not yet Brisvegas. Old codgers like this walking along Queens Street (before it became a pedestrian mall) in his Akubra and suit, were common-place.

See the rest of this film here.

Or as a slideshow here.

365 days

For three weeks I have been posting photos to my Flickr acount specifically to contribute to the 365 days group. It sounded like a good idea at first but the necessity of taking a self-portrait every day for a year was too much for me. I got to day 22 (the day before yesterday) then decided that was quite enough.

I still like the idea however and think I will continue it in the form of a photo-diary here on blogger. No manditory self-portraits however.