Photo-Drive of Edinburgh

The day after yesterday was primarily reserved as a large format day. I started off out by the abandoned Woolworths store near Fort Kinnaird.

I walked around the block looking to gain access to the back to get near a pylon but couldn’t see any way in.

All I saw just a lot of abandoned trash lying around.

I finally settled on a tree in front of a Burger king sign. The angles of the building looked OK, the space to the right and below the tree seemed OK, but not great, since it had some lines to entertain the eye and make it less boring.

I then moved down a bit to what I saw as a cheap alternate take on the Angel of the North.

A bit of risey/tilty stuff.
 

Moving on to Fort Kinnaird itself for coffee and cake.

After a bit of that I made my way back to the scene of the Zorki VF loss the day before.

I had a look around again but couldn’t see it between the 2 or 3 places I could’ve dropped it so I moved on looking for a photo to make.

I settled on this scene because I liked the reflections of the tree, there were a few clumps of trees/half trees in the water but the backgrounds in the reflections were quite cluttered.

I did some twiddling with the front and back standards but I can’t remember what they were, still just sticking with Fomapan 100.

I wandered around a wee bit then headed back out the way I came for one last look for that Zorki 35mm VF.

After rummaging about in the bushes I went back to where the pigeons were but walked up just a bit farther.

There it freakin was!

I was so elated!
 

Next …
The next photo was only a few steps away and an attempt at using swing and stuff like that.

After that I headed up Arthurs Seat. Here I wanted to try out some IR in a slightly overcast day …

I’d happily say it worked out just find but only just. I miss-used the Massive Devchart app by only looking at 35mm times for Rodinal 1+50, I only saw times for 1+25. Lets just say my guess at 1+50 was a wee bit off and it nearly cost me the sheet.

I was later assured there was a timing for 1+50 under sheet film where I should’ve been looking in the first place.
 

Anyhoo that’s it for now.

le fin

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by sibokk on 6 May 2013  •  Permalink
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Self Induced Photo-Walk of Edinburgh

Mid week when I was off work I went for a walk with a few cameras; Panasonic GF1, Zorki 4K, Casio IR and the Pentax PC35AF (plus iPhone).

Instead of traversing the usual routes I went off in a slightly different direction through a park I never knew existed, but it came at a cost. More on that later.

I started off by warming up; lines division shapes etc. nothing great of course.

I made my way into the park beside a new Taoist Tai Chi venue I’d never seen before, a club I used attend a good number of years ago.

I was in a good mood since I’d had uninterrupted sleep for the past few nights so when I saw a lady with 4 dogs of all different sizes I said hi and asked if I could photograph them.

She chatted about having loads of dogs and how she also walks her friends dogs too. I said thanks and walked on to make a few rubbish photos, chase down some pigeons and rummage in the bushes a little.

I made my way to a pond and when I went to photograph a duck, disaster, I’d lost my Zorki’s 35mm Viewfinder. How, where?!

I searched around the area, up to the bushes and the pigeons and back again but no luck! 20 minutes later and I bumped into the lady with the dogs again but this time she had about 6 different dogs!

They were really funny looking!

They were a mixture of her and her friends dogs and a couple of which were blind.


 

Moving on sans 35mm VF

I searched around the Leith area looking out for bags and other urban scenery …


 

Heading up to Princess Street

I was still sort of persevering with the Zorki minus the 35mm VF. This next one looked much better through the 50mm coupled VF/rangefinder.

I made my way to the Mound with little to no activity in-between. I ate my lunch there while watching life go by.

Then I saw this group of Chinese tourists walk by being lead by a guy with a flag, the suddenly weather turned so it was now GF1 flash time!

Like I said in my last post, sometimes you have to chase a photo down.

This last one was the one I liked best; flag in the face.

Time to go home.

So that’s pretty much it. I had the Pentax PC35AF with me and although it has some focusing issues I still took the odd photo here and there.

Photo Walk 2 will probably up next.

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by sibokk on 5 May 2013  •  Permalink
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Streets of Edinburgh 4

It’s 20th of April and we meet again. This meet up is more a meet up and chat about potential future endeavours; exhibition, zine etc.

I believe I may have photographed the most and this is what I saw.

It was the usual gang, Gareth, Paul and Martin but no Gavin. I did meet Louis Brown and his old battered M3; a pretty young guy with a solid idea of what he wants from photography.
 

The Photos
Like last time I appeared to focus on colour …

… but not exclusively.


 

I did see a mini theme briefly develop around arms and elbows.


 

Zorki Fail
I had the Zorki 4K with me this time but sadly the Jupiter 12 35mm lens and the PC contacts on the body went all wonky and I had to call it a day really early on for that camera.


 

There were plenty of interesting opportunities but it seemed the focus was more on meeting and talking about interesting or classic SP books we’d been reading. I’d only recently bought Mark Cohen’s ‘Grim Street’ so that was fresh in my memory.


 

Continued …

Sometimes you have to chase something down even if the end product is sub-par at best.

… and sometimes you look and see something interesting repeating albeit slightly differently.

Other times you play with something simple …

… and occasionally you can make something look like something else, like a crime story!


 

Pigeon Count
To me a street photography meet-up isn’t the same unless there’s a pigeon hunt at some point.

I had a blast as they say.

But they’re not exactly winners though.

This was one of my favourite photos from the day:


 

Evening
We met up much later for this meet up, around 4pm, so once we were burnt out we stopped off for a pint in Labyrinth to chew the fat.

The GF1 at ISO3200 – mega grain.

… one from the Casio with IR flash.

Two pints or more later we went our separate ways and as I strolled down to catch my bus I made a few more snaps.

The red and white striped socks were pretty neat but alas the camera is red sensitive so the socks came out white. Silly me.

So that’s pretty much that. No Nazi groups or wild stag/hen parties just normal Edinburgh folk.

le fin

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by sibokk on 4 May 2013  •  Permalink
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Glass

I was talking about ground glass with some friends online and realised I haven’t actually mentioned upgrading the ULF camera’s ground glass from that shambolic affair with sandpaper and cream cleanser.

Well, I didin’t photograph myself upgrading that sheet of glass but I did photograph others.
 

Road to Silicon Carbide
I contacted Silver Print to see if they stocked any grits to make a ground glass after reading about different grits on forums here and there.

I got an amazing reply to say, sorry we don’t supply anything like that but you may want to try here and linked to a website that sold Silicon Carbide grits for grinding or shaping materials.

That’s customer service, do you hear that AG-Photographic?

I’d briefly read about different strengths or rather sizes of grit but the consensus was around F400 or ‘Fine’ 400. You could use a larger grit but you may start to see more traces of the marks it makes.

This is what I bought …

I wasn’t sure how much I would actually need so I went for the 3.5kg tub which came to around £40 plus delivery.

In order to grind an 8×10 sheet of glass I used less than 1/4 of the volume from that little red cap left of the tub in the above photo.

I reasoned with myself that the absurd amount I actually bought would be fine because I might be making a lot of ground glass especially if I’m going to be building big cameras.

I was quite right too because I leaned on my 8×10 sheet a day or two later and cracked the bastard in half!

Here’s one half in use with one of my Kodak folders …

This was another interesting use for having a ground glass kit around, testing the focus of cameras.

I was having a hard time getting my focusing right on my folders so I ground a piece of sheet plastic-glass from a cheap already-scratched Ikea frame.

I should say that by now the 2 halves of the 8×10 had been smashed to tiny bits.
 

Preparing To Grind
On the left is the plastic sheet and the right is a small sheet of real glass.

I dumped a little amount of grit on the plastic sheet; you can see how scratched it was.

Just add a little water.

I placed the small glass sheet on top and ground down using a circular motion.

You can see that after a short while the plastic sheet is pretty much done, a glass sheet would take about 10 minutes or so of constant grinding depending on size of course.

Here I’ve taped the sheet to the back of my Kodamatic …

… and here’s a view through the back. It turned out I am now shit at guessing distances and the rangefinder I was using was unreliable.


 

I’ll finish with this: photography is a fantastic medium to play with, there’s always something fascinating just around the corner.

I wonder what I would say to me if I showed these recent blog posts to myself 3 or more years ago?

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by sibokk on 11 April 2013  •  Permalink
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Streets of Edinburgh 3

So, it’s March now and we’re back in the centre of Edinburgh.

I started off with small details with my trusty GF1 as always and the Nikon F65 as backup.

The weather was bitterly cold but still managed to find a tiny “Scrap Trident” demonstration.

Moving on …

The weather was so cold I could barely feel my fingers and my feet were thoroughly soaked through but we soldiered on.


 

We ended up on the Royal Mile and headed up George the Fourth bridge, up ahead there was a lot of luminous safety vests. It turned out to be a protest against whatever by the Scottish Defence League, next door to Frankensteins bar.

On the opposite side of the road was the police trying to herd them in and random passers by pausing to shout insults at ‘protestors’.

Every now and then they’d make their way across the road shouting and waving flags but they’d get pushed back over.

There was this one guy filming everyone on our side of the road with his mobile, he started to film me as well so I lifted my camera to photograph him but he stopped filming and hid his face and all I got was his hand.

The Police saw this and moved him over beside his buddies.

Here’s a few photos from our side of the road:

“Nazi scum!” they shouted.

The street was busy with loads of people hanging about, It was pretty cool but the rain was murdering my flash contacts with loads of water getting on the lens so I missed a lot.

At one point I noticed a beautiful white bridal car turn onto the road so I ran up and prepared for it to pass which it did slowly and I got this photo:

I felt sorry for her because it was horrendous weather, there was a Scottish Nazi rally blocking the traffic and I guess I maybe didn’t help things.

We went into Malones an Irish bar nearby for a couple of pints and headed back out but before that we managed to end up on Facebook.

I guess I thought I wasn’t going to be fully in the picture and leaned out the way. Mistake. I just look like a weirdo. I did get a photo of the guy taking pictures though and looking at the timing I probably ruined his photo.

After the pub.

We moved on towards the Bridges and I found myself a Pentax PC35AF P&S camera for £4. I loaded it with film and added it to my repertoire for the day.

We had lunch and headed back out.

I bumped into Sandra the photography student that was going to make a documentary photo project about my obsession with cameras for college. Sorry you look so green.


 

At this point I was pretty tired and feeling seriously chilled so I headed off home to warm up with some whisky.
 

There’s another photo-walk this month, April 2013, so I’m certain to post something from that event as well.

If this has whet your appetite why not head over to Flickr to look at the great work by the other photographers in our group:

Gareth Bragdon
Gavin Bragdon
Paul Cruickshank
Martin Much

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by sibokk on 6 April 2013  •  Permalink
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Streets of Edinburgh 2

So, moving on from February we enter March but before we do that I remembered that a couple of us met up in January and it wasn’t the normal crew either; just Gareth and I with a special guest, Lesley A Ercolano.

I was following Lesley’s work on flickr, E.Yelsel, and was mightily impressed with her eye for composition and colour.

I’d no idea how celebrated she was by the SPNC or Street Photography Now community on Flickr and elsewhere and regardless of your feelings towards Eric Kim, he’d listed her amongst his list of 25 talented street photographers you should follow on flickr.

That aside Here’s what I saw in and around January’s walk:

A monk.


 

I liked this photo, below, but I don’t think I did the scene justice. It looked like the business failed with the exterior in disrepair and all the restaurant was serving was these leaflets:

Because we walked out from the centre of town we were more into Lesley’s territory so I saw more open spaces and colour opportunities.

It’d been snowing the night before and there were a few snowmen still hanging in there in the Meadows.

The parents in the photo below took a photo of their kid holding the snowman’s make-shift stick genitals; bad parents!


 

Back in town …


 


 

As you can probably see, on this walk the focus wasn’t about us perhaps forcing the issue by injecting our cameras into the scene. Finding it rather than making it I guess.

Some Urban ideas snuck in quite a bit, some more interesting than others.


 

Compared to February this was much more relaxed smooth and civilised but March is up next and it couldn’t be more different from January and maybe February too: “Nazi’s, I hate these guys!“

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by sibokk on 6 April 2013  •  Permalink
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Streets of Edinburgh

I’m so behind on my adventures/miss-adventures in street photography it’s crazy.

I’ve been on about 2 or 3 street photo-walks since my last non-blurb book post about SP (Street-Photography) and they’ve been pretty good experiences, I’ve met really nice guys bar one arsehole-idiot (‘douche-bag’ for any Americans reading).

We met up in February when I was off work on Birthday leave then again in March in the most appalling weather for some time but I’ll head back to February first.

February Meet-Up
We met up and had a coffee which has turned into a standard practice then toured around Princes Street, George Street, the Bridges etc. and many other places, back and fourth.

We saw many things including the average stag-do. It turned out we bumped into the same group about 4 times; they got to know us quite well by the end of the day.

Its funny how many people go out wearing odd costumes on a Saturday collecting for charity.


 

We met an outspoken Christian who actually didn’t try to convert us, maybe we seemed too lost?


 

I saw this guys shirt, below, and had to make a photo. I said “cool shirt” to which he smiled and grunted approvingly.

Cool shirt for a photograph because it does illustrate a fundamental issue within most western cultures. What does the photo on the shirt say about an accepted perception of women to you?


 

To me SP isn’t limited to just photos of people, strangers, I believe it should have some context. Context about what sort of environment we’re living in – the ingredients to our urban soup.

There are actually people in Edinburgh think that discarding food on the ground like this is OK:


 

Gareth’s approach to street portraiture is very Gildenesque. It’s a very easy comparison to make; he works close; he uses flash; but that’s as far as it goes really. Below you can see him chatting with one of his curious subjects about his photography.


 

The next couple of images came about after we’d stopped for a bite to eat, the sun was going down and I started to use my Casio. The guy we were chatting to clearly had an alcohol problem but one of the group appeared to know him quite well.

Was I wrong to photograph him?
 

A few more Casio frames…


 

We found our way into the Grass Market and bumped into another stag-do.

More Casio fun …


 

Pigeons
This is pretty much when my interest in pigeons began. Gareth and I started seeking out the winged beasts.


 

The rest:


 

March is up next…

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by sibokk on 5 April 2013  •  Permalink
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Kodalith The Mighty

Recently on eBay I won an auction for Kodalith Ortho film. The seller said the best speed to rate this film at was between 6 and 12, any higher and the contrast would be insane.

He was right, we even had an email chat about it; proof there are decent human beings on the Bay.

I believe Kodalith was designed as a high contrast film for reproducing line, probably technical drawings, so the faster you rate the film the sharper the contrast gets; lower that speed to get more tone.

Another interesting thing about this film is you can handle it under a red safe light. The packaging says a 1A light red light, I have a dark red light for handling X-Ray film so I took a gambled that it would be fine.

I cut off a strip of the Kodalith film in my changing tent but loaded the 35mm canister under the safe light, I then loaded the canister into my FED 3. I made a few shots with flash of my favourite model, Anna, and returned to the darkroom.

I developed the film in Ilfosol 3 – 1+9 for about 3 or 4 minutes in a tray so I could see the images appear. It took a wee while but something started to pop up, dark shapes! I couldn’t quite make them out but I believe it was the areas that were ‘burnt’ by the light.

Once they looked OK I gave them a wash and fixed in a developing tank, this is when the negatives became transparent. The artefact on the film below is a piece of stray tape.

All in all I probably under developed so I’ll go for around the 6 minutes mark next time.

The final negatives are pretty scratched thanks to that turn in a developing tray but I liked them …

Rated ISO 6 I also gave the film a double splash of flash to make sure it was exposed.

The tones look pretty even so I’m quite happy.

I’ll try exposing at ISO12 to see how they look.

Well how about that, 3 posts in one day! Don’t worry that’s my limit.

I’m currently making my way through about 13 rolls of colour film so there’ll be more film posts very soon.
 

le fin

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by sibokk on 24 March 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by sibokk on 24 March 2013

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Paper Magic

I’ll keep this post brief as I blew it all over Instagram, a wee bit on Twitter and Tumblr and mentioned it a couple of posts ago.

I decided to experiment with paper as a medium rolled into 120 backing paper. My initial idea was to roll the paper directly onto a 120 spool but I decided last minute to simply roll it onto the paper backing.

Because this was a test I only cut a slice from a sheet of 9×12 Kentmere VC Select which only gives me about 4 frames.

I loaded the roll into the Mamiya C330 because it has the fastest lens of all my MF cameras.

I exposed the frames as best I could though not very well I’m afraid. I setup my temporary darkroom again in Anna’s bedroom and developed the strip.

Only one frame came out good though a bit weird. I had the flash out firing away at f2.8 and I think it worked OK, the others didn’t.

A photo out the window without flash didn’t work so well when the slow shutter speed got a wee bit stuck.

The other exposed frame was a total flop:

 

The next day, Sunday morning around 7am, I tried single paper frames in the back of my Kodak No3A folder.

I also wanted to test out my Hoya + filters with the Kodak beast so I used my backup ground glass to see the focusing range and measured around 37cm between the lens and subject when the front standard was set at 2m with a +2 filter.

As I found out, it’s never a good idea to keep doing this kind of camera fudgery when the family awakes so when I accidentally slipped on the +4 instead of the +2 I got this blurry shite:

Realising my error I got the +2 on with a better result, only just.

Next step is to roll a longer strip of paper onto paper backing and let rip. More fun later I’m sure.

If only I had a dedicated darkroom …

fin

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by sibokk on 24 March 2013  •  Permalink
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Night Light

It’s taken me a wee bit of time to get around to this post because I wanted to make another video overlook and I’ve only just finished it.

After the last test book I wanted to make a book that was purely about street photography but the more I thought about it I decided to make it purely about street photography with the infra-red converted Casio Exilim.

It was that time of year when the night pulls in around 4pm in the UK so a Casio night photography book made sense. It only took a couple of weeks or so to pull it together and choose the photos; with the night theme I wanted to make the book as claustrophobic as I could.

I snuck in a few Urban Horror Story images to add a little breathing space but I really wanted it to be quite cluttered and wild.

I also bought a PDF version so if I can find a way to host it I’ll post a link so you can download it for free if you really wanted to.
 

Anyway, on with the video review. It isn’t the whole book in the video review as I managed to lose a chunk of it but you get the gist of it anyway.

I discuss my thoughts on the images, what I liked about them, and the book print quality which I believe is marred by the quality of the image files from the 2007 Casio.

le fin

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by sibokk on 24 March 2013  •  Permalink
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