This week we had no photo shoot planned with our selected artists from BIMM so we had to find something to engage us and make some movement on our band project.
I had some things to keep me occupied as I was still writing the end of my post on the Chanarin and Altintzoglou In Conversation session at the art gallery. As well as this I also had a roll of Ilford HP5+ that I had shot the end of at the BIMM band rehearsal the previous week.
In the studio in the morning there was some work underway for a couple of my coursemates who were photographing an artist called Daisy from BIMM and they were setting up the scoops with some interesting items and methods to get some great looking portraits. It was nice and busy everywhere, apart from there not being a lot of the members of our course actually in.
Film Time
Once I’d picked up the Contact Printer 35mm and the Ilford Multigrade Filters from the Stores from Dan, I prepared to begin the task of developing the film and then look at some prints.
Into the “Loading Room” with a pair of scissors, my fim and a paterson tank, turning off my watch and phone so there was no risk of fogging my film and then locking the door.
I wound the film out of the cartridge and onto the spiral reel, carefully cutting off the end of the film near the spool. This then went into the Paterson tank and the lids put on to maintain the light-tight fit, thereby protecting my latent photos that sat on the emulsion awaiting processing.
Into the Production room next. 300ml of Stop and another 300ml of fix into some flasks ready for use and then 150ml of 20 deg water and the same again of D76 developer. I then fired up Massive Dev Chart and selected the roll of 35mm Ilford HP5+ 400 and D76 combo.
The dev went into the tank and then inversions and rotations were required for around thirteen minutes until that was tipped away and then one minute of immersion with Stop solution before this was tipped back into it’s container and then the fixer was used for five minutes and inversions of the tank keepign the fluid moving.
Once the Dev, Stop, and Fix are completed it was time to take the lid of the paterson tank and leave it under a cold tap for 10 minutes to rinse the chemistry from it.
Back into the studio area and I fired up one of the new 24″ iMacs that are now available, logged into Onedrive and my Adobe Portfolio link to check through the photos that I had captured of Wooden Dog, last week. After chatting to a couple of my coursemates and being nosey around the shoot of Daisy, I had easily used up the ten minutes of wash time.
Into the processing room again and I picked the spiral out of the tank, whooshed it around for 30 seconds in the wetting agent that helps the film dry without loads of damp marks and water spots. From here it was then removed from the spiral and a hook attached to each end before being placed into the drying cabinet for 30 minutes. Time to go back and get on with some work.
Mac Work
Back at the iMac I was getting on with some writing when Sam came and asked how I was getting on and I shared the photos of the Wooden Dog shoot with him, and Dan too. They were quite complementary about my work which I took as a huge positive. I discussed the written work too and then chatted about the timeline.
Wooden Dog have a gig on the 22nd March in Soho so I was wondering if this was too late and may not have left enough time to make the work fit into the project. Sam was ok with this and I am happy to travel to London, spend the day doing some street toggin and then capture the band loading in to the venue, and then also take some photos of them on stage.
I was carrying on writing my post on Chanarin etc and then Euripides himself came around the corner so I had a little two second chat with him before continuing.
After the 30 minutes drying time was up I grabbed my scissors and negative sleeve then headed off to the lightbox to see what I’d got. I was pleasantly surprised that many of the frames had apparently come out well. I had been shooting 400ISO film at 400 and sometimes using the small Godox Lux Jr flash which I was not convinced about really but the photos generally came out well. the start of the film consisted of images taken on the day when I went to Ascot to drive the Batmobile, and was photos of the rifle ranges at Bisley and Brunel University’s Brutalist Lecture theatre.
Once happy with this I cut the images up into strips of 6 negatives and slid them into the protective sleeve, then grabbed my stuff and headed to the Black and White Darkroom to make some prints as well as a contact sheet for the film.
Time To Print
I started off with a test strip from the whole film in the contact printer and figured out that four seconds was the right exposure for the whole sheet. You can see the test strip on the left image and the contact sheet on the right.
After this I started to concentrate on a photo of the band as a whole and my first test strip came out very underexposed using an aperture of f/8 so I opened it up to f/5.6 and repeated the process. This was much better and I made a Full strip at the exposure of 10 seconds with a 2.5 filter in the drawer.
The full strip was a bit grainy but I’m not surprised as the HP5+ was being used in a super dark environment and it is normally on the grainy side. I chose to print up a full 10×8 sheet and it came out ok. I noticed that in the bottom left corner there was a little bit of a laminate or wooden floor that was brighter than I wanted it to be so I thought that I’d burn it a little on the next exposure.
As you can see from the gallery below there are several different versions. 1 shows the brighter floor on the bottom left of the image, 2 shows it burned in a bit, 3 shows same burn and I wanted to dodge on the guitarist on the left a little but forgot so I tried it again in 4 and then on the 5 I was surrounded by other students in the dark room and got a bit overzealous on the dodging, so much so that it has messed the top left corner of the image up.
I switched over then to a photo of Alfie, the vocalist and did a test strip before going into a full print. I was on a 10 second exposure again and it all worked out pretty well. Apart from a bit of a weird mark on the image near the microphone and the singer’s face. I thought it might be a hair at first glance so I removed the negative holder and blew it out a bit before banging in a full sheet of 10×8 and trying a reprint.
You can see from the second image that this is showing clear signs of water marks and there is a mark that goes from the face and down onto the guitar body. It’s annoying but I haven’t got time to look at cleaning the negative yet so I take it out and try another print. This time one of Luca, the guitarist.
This print looked ok, maybe a bit on the dark side but closer inspection after I’d pulled it off the RC dryer showed me that there were water marks all over this image too.
From a mark on his face and then across his strumming hand and guitar with another splodge under where he is sitting on the amplifier. With this I drew a line under the session. I was finding it troublesome getting around past the other sin the darkroom, some of them were using my developer dish, despite Dan warning them not to get confused, and I was unable to fully concentrate on the job in hand as the time was almost running out too.
I tidied my enlarger up, pulled out the filter and then gathered all my belongings together before heading back to the studio area to see if I could look at the negs on the light table, and hopefully be able to clean them up. Euripides and Dan were there and asked me how I was getting on, I showed them the prints and explained about the water mark and both explained that I should breathe on the neg with a hot breath and then se a lens cleaning cloth to carefully wipe off the marks. This needed to be done whilst ensuring that I did not also scratch the emulsion underneath. Upon looking at the emulsion side I can also see some water stains but I’m going to need to be a little more careful about this removal.
With the water marks carefully removed, I slid the negs into the sleeve and then finished tidying up and waited for the stores to open so I could then return my borrowed equipment. Dan had also said earlier that he was looking at my digital shots of the band at the rehearsal space and thinking that my framing had improved from when I was first starting out and sharing my work with him. I discussed that I had been on the Street Photography workshop and picked up some “vision” from that as to what I think looks pleasing and makes for a good composition. It was very kind of him to say that, I hadn’t requested any feedback at that point so I really appreciated his kind words. I also appreciate greatly Dan’s critical feedback and I’ve learnt many ystrategies from having a good technical chat with him about ways to look at an image without focussing on the subjects and more on the light and dark and the framing.
Other Thoughts
It’s now Wednesday night as I write this post and I’m looking forward to getting more shoots in with the band. I’ve been having a few ideas about shoots that might fit more with what the band are looking for, such as the covers of albums by Fleet Foxes, Mumfords, Starsailor, Bombay Bicycle Club, British Sea Power etc… Whether it’s in Birmingham, Wolves or maybe even London I think that we can work to get some nice photos of them in a relaxed set of poses.
I also had an idea last night about using the drone to photograph them laying down on the floor, perhaps in a pose that looks like it could be stood up but slightly off kilter. I thought of laying them in a Bus Stop box on a road with someone keeping an eye out as it’s a chilled out vibe with a different perspective of a common object. I also thought that they could lie in a field for an overhead photo or even on a piece of street furniture like the steps in the centre of manchester, the sculptures around wolves city centre or even in a public space. I’ll run this idea by them next time I get a chance to have a chat with them all.
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