Sandbagged!

Sandbagged!
Photograph by Steve Barnett

Thursday 18 October 2012

Paint a thousand words...

...some of you may recall that a vow was made to carry a bigger camera this season.  Little was it realised at the time how this was going to snowball into something very obsessive. 

Hopefully it will not develop (no pun intended) into a compulsive disorder!

Creativity seems to come upon your faithfull blogger in waves.  Throughout childhood, attempts at painting and sculpture were made but, with a distinct lack of talent in those two disciplines, making photographs became a passion.  Other attractions pushed photography away for the early part of adulthood and then it came back as the urge to make images returned in strength.  Through the late '70s and the '80s it was an obsession and it fitted in nicely with fishing.  For the last decade or so the digital snapshot camera was the only tool and it was only used as a recording device.

Then the urge returned and more sizeable and capable digital cameras were added to the toolkit.  All this was fine and the images made have not been too lousy to use.  However, the influences of real photographer friends and their beautiful work, fanned a little spark within and a yearning flared up for a return to the slow, deliberate, contemplative approach of using film, rather than megapixels to create photographic images.

So the cameras got bigger and bigger.  Even to the point of making one out of a kid's toy just to be able to make panoramic photographs, like the one above, in one go rather than stitching them together in Photoshop.

Here is another such a one. 

Yes it interferes with the fishing, add in Henry and distraction is inevitable.  It's a miracle any fish get caught these days...



Regular Rod

7 comments:

  1. Lovely photos! I many times prefer black and white photos since they have such an impact that can't be made with color photos. When a lad I processed my black and white photo rolls myself and made hard copies (sometimes tricking a little to enhance them). Now I just carry a compact digital but with a good Leica lens so the photos turns out quite well. Thanks for sharing!

    Kind regards,
    M.O.

    PS What camera are you using? DS

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    1. Several cameras and another on its way hopefully. The two pictures above were made with the home-made, hacked-about, toy camera called a Holga 120 Pan. You can see how the change from a toy to a tool was made here http://freepdfhosting.com/b316cbe2ff.pdf

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    2. I downloaded the pdf and made a quick look. Really interesting! I was testing different Hasselblad cameras some time ago. I just about kick myself in my rear end for not buying one when I was in Champagne in France and found one for a bargain price. That was the totally mechanical camera that was a trademark for a long time. After that I tested a Hasselblad that could be set to take regular photos or panorama photos. Really nice camera. What would be really sweet though is the pretty new Leica M series Monochrome digital camera. That combined with the most resent noctilux 50/0.95 would be really something to go wild as a photographer.

      Have fun and keep showing us nice Holgagon photos,
      Mats Olsson

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  2. Absolutely gorgeous. Very glad you're discovering this passion. It's good for my eyes. ;)

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  3. I really like these photos. Show us more!
    Are you printing them yourselves or are these scans of the negatives?


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    1. No darkroom these days so they are hybrids made by scanning the negatives.

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