Sassoon - New Formality

Sometimes it's not what you know but who you know.

Thanks to excellent MUA Fiona Mckay for getting me this gig.

Random pics from the last month (or so)

A picture speaks a thousand words so rather than bore with you shit chat about what else I've been doing I'll just give you some images to look at and just a couple of words to read.

I went to wedding, my girlfriend's sister's. It was very swanky, very photogenic and a great day/night.

I went to Barcelona, with my girlfriend. It was very sunny and such a nice wee break.

I shot with my large format camera some more. Had a few f*** ups (notice I haven't posted a pic of the Red Road flats being demolished despite being there and getting a great exposure of it...) but starting to get the hang of it more and more.

Recently - Shetland

With final hand-ins, the end of year exhibition and trying to cram in working whenever possibly I haven't posted about some of the stuff I've been up to recently.

I managed to get a trip up to Shetland through one of the jobs I do, we were only there for one night but it was a nice change of scenery and the 28 hour round boat trip was an experience.

I'm pretty sure that even just the first leg of the journey, Glasgow - Aberdeen - Shetland, was the longest journey I've made and I didn't even leave Scotland!

Once we got to the ferry all that water just begged for some Sugimoto-esque seascapes and the waves the ferry was making were quite reminiscent of Hokusai I thought.

The departure from Aberdeen had all the tourists snapping away, oblivious to being photographed by me.

Shetland itself wasn't really anything like I expected it to be, not that I had really though about what it'd be like.

The skateboarders that were with us loved the smooth roads.

Inspiration

Today another member of a (non-photographic) forum I use cited me as an inspiration. I thought that was quite a compliment, especially when Mr Tom's work is so good.

Check him out on Flickr where he has some amazing work from all over the world.

Paper negatives

Getting a bit better at these now.
These were shot on normal darkroom paper (Ilford MGIV Resin Coated Pearl) and reversed in post.
Doing digital post on these doesn't really sit very well with me but it makes for a nice image so...
Really enjoying using the large format camera, it really does slow you down and make you think a bit more.

(Yet Another) New Toy

I should have known when I sold my ancient large format Manfrotto tripod head a few months ago that it wouldn't be long till I owned a stupidly big camera.

I didn't realise until after buying the damn thing that the negs wouldn't fit into my enlarger, oops! 

Of course 5x4 is getting on for the size where there isn't much needed in the way of enlargement so to get started I just chucked some standard Ilford RC darkroom paper into it to make paper negs. The results aren't great as you can see, especially in the contact prints (paper neg scanned and inverted on the left, contact print on the right) but I have some Harman Direct Positive paper to play with now so will post some results from that soon.

I got a tax rebate

And I got my big hand in for uni done - goto www.anotherseyesphotography.com for a look - so Roz and I went to Barcelona for a few nights. 

When the sun's so bright it seems a shame to not shoot color.

See more of my color photography in my book, A Colorful Summer.

Levi's Commuter Alleycat

Contre Jour is the new bokeh right? First nice evening in Glasgow in ages, was so glad to be out on the bike taking advantage of it. This was before the start of the alleycat, I didn't actually take any photos throughout it as I had intended to do but hey, I was rewarded for my lack of photographic effort with 3rd place in the alleycat. Unfortunately there was only a 1st place prize.

Fat Buddha produced a sweet video of the event which you can see here, 

Post race pics after the jump.

Done

Got my last bit of assessable uni work handed in today so hopefully that'll mean some more time (and brain capacity) for blog posts.

A couple of updates coming your way ASAP.

World Pinhole Day

I'm a bit late posting this but I always think it counts as the same day until you goto sleep.

Met up with some friendly members of the Edinburgh Lo-Fi photography group today and had fun shooting my Holga and pinhole 5D in the Dean cemetery and along Leith water.

It's great having a girlfriend that'll lend me her 5D whenever I want it now that I sold mine (I held onto my pinhole body cap thankfully), it's not so great forgetting that she said the sensor was a bit grubby until I've shot shaky, blurry 10 second plus exposures at about f150 all day!

Tried using the pinhole 5D to make more normal looking shots today. Wasn't very impressed at first but changing to black and white improved things I think.

Think my focal length/pinhole size is a bit off so focus isn't very good but interesting results none the less. 

Some colour images after the jump.