It's fishing Jim ...

 ... but not as you know it.

Although I am no fisherman, I have often thought that photography must be a little like fishing. Whatever the skill of the one with the rod and line, some days are successful and others are not. There is an element of luck - or at least there are forces at play beyond our understanding (perhaps that's the definition of luck).

So, like the fisherman who has missed the 'big one' (again) but comes home with a satisfying bag of fish for the kettle; an hour spent at the river yesterday bagged a clutch of nice pictures suitable for printing, even if not splendid enough to displace those occupying our limited wall space.

The Waimakariri Gorge bridge
(originally built for rail, now a road bridge)

The intake

From the intake

Graffiti tryptic

Framing the up-river

Up-river from the Gorge
(yes, the water really was that colour)

Oh, and when I left for home, two fishermen arrived and cast their lines just downstream from the bridge. I wonder what their luck was like?

Falling in love again ...

Yes, definitely in love again. It's OlyPen's fault, I just love going out taking photographs with this little camera. Five rolls of film (about 300 images) and my 'better' cameras are moping around at home feeling sorry for themselves. The latest trial was a roll of HP5 - Ilford's gritty, blue-collar, cousin of its more sophisticated FP4. It didn't disappoint.  I picked 12 shots out of the 46 I got from this roll. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

All these pictures were taken within 500 meters of our front gate, and the tight view from the OlyPen's fixed lens, seems perfect for creating these little abstractions from our home town. The familiarity of home can easily breed a sort of contempt due to its routine ordinariness but, being forced to look closer uncovers the unique, the fleeting and the juxtaposition of ordinary with ordinary, that sometimes makes for 'wonderful'.

Olympus Pen D3

 

Until you hold an Olympus Pen camera in your hand, it is hard to imagine just how small they are.  Pictures show a perfectly proportioned 35mm film camera (which it is) but in the hand, it is quite diminutive - smaller even than my everyday digital Fujifilm cameras, the X-M1 and the X-E3 (themselves quite small).

The "Oly-pen" arrived just before Christmas and it took a couple of weeks to run through the first roll of film - not least of all because a standard 36 exposure film can accommodate 72 shots in the Oly-pen's half-frame format.  I had been concerned that the quality of the images, given the smaller negatives, wouldn't meet my normal standards. Usually, I get clean 24Mp images from standard 35mm film and, rather surprisingly, I found that the Oly-pen produced equally clean 20Mp files in a 4:3 aspect ratio (despite its size disadvantage).

That first roll was a resounding success - despite this photographer's mess-up. Knowing that the light-meter would be reading incorrectly (due to an incorrect voltage battery) I compensated by adjusting the ISO. Only, dingbat that I am, I adjusted the ISO the wrong way, resulting in 72 frames that were about 3 stops underexposed. Despite this, the rescued shots all turned out remarkably well and demonstrated that the Oly-pen was a very useable camera.

Manufactured between 1965 and 1969, the Oly-pen D3 makes a great street camera, it is discrete and, using zone focusing, quick to use. With the appropriate exposure dialled in (not necessarily too accurately!) and the focus set, taking a shot is a simple wind, shoot ... wind, shoot, affair with an almost inaudible 'snick' as each shot is taken. 

Given its small size, ease of operation, fast and sharp f1.7 lens, and immense 'fun' factor, the Oly-pen is destined to become my everyday, casual photography, film-favourite.

Photos (except the first) were taken on Ilford FP4, developed in 'Caffenol' for 8 minutes, scanned and processed in Exposure X7.

Not a resolution ...

More a statement of intent really;  a new photographic focus for 2022. There's a list of reasons far too long to go into here but, in 2022, I'll be shooting mainly on film, mainly black and white and mainly developed at home. The last couple of months have been spent assembling equipment and refining processes but, for 2022, it's back to my photographic roots to reprise the past with the benefit of sixty years of hindsight.

I cut my photographic teeth on black and white film photography, but put it behind me too soon for the sake of colour and, later, digital. I'm pretty sure that I didn't learn enough of what black and white should have taught me before I moved on, so it's back to the beginning to finish what I started back in the 1960s. In part, I've been inspired by the work of Martin Henson (https://www.martinhensonphotography.co.uk) if only because his outstanding work holds out the promise of the possible.

They say that "there's no fool like an old fool" and I guess that's something I'll have to wear while I make this journey. But it's a long-time itch which, it seems to me, I might as well scratch and, if not now (at 73), then when? "Make hay while the sun shines", seems quite a compelling aphorism at my age.

So, I've been testing equipment and trying out processes. These test shots were all taken on Ilford FP4 but, along the way, I'll probably try some other emulsions as well. Developing film in coffee (a.k.a. "Caffenol") seems to work quite well and, being a somewhat quirky approach, appeals to my New Zealand induced "Number 8 wire" mentality.

Anyway, I think I might have fun seeing where this takes me. Will it last the year? Will it run beyond 2022? Who knows where this path might lead.

Here's to a happy New Year, everyone!

In praise of pottering

I had heard of 'pottering'; I thought it was something usually done in a garden. I may have even engaged in a little pottering without realising it. But the true nature of pottering had eluded me until this year. Now, I am a converted potterer and, like all converts, I am feeling a little evangelical about it.

Watching things grow, an intrinsic feature of pottering.

I am still working on a definition of pottering. The dictionary says that pottering is "to move around without hurrying, and in a relaxed and pleasant way." I find that a little unsatisfactory; when I am doing that, I believe that I am "wandering" - something different from "pottering" (though related). What pottering and wandering do have in common is a lack of deadlines and only vague goals. Pottering, it seems to me, is about getting things done, while wandering is about going places - both in a relaxed manner.

So pottering, in my book, is about unhurried, leisurely, work without any demanding deadlines. I can potter in the garden, potter at my lathe, potter with my cameras or potter around in the office. Pottering is discovering the joy of doing something for its own sake. Pottering can be work, but pottering is never a job. My current working definition of pottering: "work at a whim." This seems to be getting close to the whole point of pottering - doing what you want, when you want.

Here's the thing though; by deliberately engaging in pottering these last few months, more things seem to be getting done than by any previous use of goal setting, or to-do lists. Perhaps this sounds a little counterintuitive, but I do seem to be achieving more, simply by doing what I feel like doing at any point in time. It's an idea worth pondering (now there's another related word). Pottering, wandering and pondering - PWP - a more relaxed philosophy for life.

Mea Culpa

So, I build a pinhole camera out of a broken Ensign Selfix. Then, to test it, I load a film I had never shot in a pinhole camera before (long exposures). Once I had taken all the shots, I decided to develop the film myself (for the first time in about 50 years) and to try developing it in coffee (yes, that really is a thing). Of course, what I should have realised, is that I would have no way to tell whether any problems were the camera, the film, my ancient developing skills, or the coffee? One variable at a time, Einstein, one variable at a time.

And so it was that I found myself standing in the bathroom, staring at a wet strip of 120 film, comprising eight, very dark (almost black) frames, wondering what on earth had gone wrong.

Fortunately, Son of Ep, the scanner, was able to see more in those dark negatives than I could, though it was all pretty close to the scanner's own noise floor. Nevertheless, there was enough to see that the camera didn't have any light leaks and that the image was as sharp as a pinhole camera is allowed to be. The film also hadn't been fogged by my clumsy blind transfer to the development tank in an ancient dark-bag.

What I did find, was a combination of over-exposure and over-development of the film. Well, at least the coffee works - just a lot better than I had envisaged! And, to prove the point, here is our local observatory excavated from the dark matter of a black (pin) hole:

Pinhole camera, yellow filter, Ilford Delta 400, 15 mins in Caffenol (much too long).

A bit meta ...

September this year skipped by without my realising that this blog has been going for ten years. The first post was on September 1, 2011. It was also the date of the first comment, by Mx5Pixie (Mia), welcoming me to Blogger. 

258 posts in the first 10 years; that's just over 2 per month. Though, curiously, 2017 was not a very productive year with only 5 posts, while I was obviously feeling ultra garrulous in 2012. with 57 posts.

Back in 2011, I described the blog as, "A rather indirect ramble through the aft end of life."  And so it has proved to be and will continue as such for the foreseeable future. Anyway, happy tenth birthday, blog!

Through the pinhole

A year or so ago, I started dabbling in old film cameras. Not the cult film cameras that still cost thousands of dollars, but the 'cheap as chips' cameras that can often be had for a hundred dollars or so and, preferably, have no electronics. It has been fun exploring some of the cameras that I could never have afforded back in the 1950s and 60s when I was starting out in photography. But, I thought, why stop there?

Kornel, is in Budapest. He makes pinhole cameras that are simple, cheap and very well built. His business is called "Infinie Camera" and, global mail delays notwithstanding, he sent me this beautiful little pinhole camera from his Etsy store...

6x6 pinhole camera, f130 pinhole at 32mm.

The camera arrived well ahead of the film stock I had ordered from Melbourne, so I set the camera aside and exercised my patience while I waited for the film to arrive. Finally, the camera and film were both in my hands and a nice spring day called for a bike ride. The pictures were shot in colour on Ektachrome but, in deference to the pinhole aesthetic, here they are in black and white ...

Pearson Park, Oxford

Farm entrance, Coopers Creek

Bridge, Coopers Creek

Coopers Creek

Woolfs Road ford and swing bridge

Derelict swing bridge, Woolfs Road

Unnamed ford, Island Road

Eyre River, Harewood Road

But, I can almost hear you asking, don't pinhole cameras produce rather fuzzy pictures? Why do these look so much sharper? Well, it's part of an experiment: What happens when you marry old technology with modern computers? These pictures are not really that sharp, but they are much sharper than a pinhole camera can produce on its own. The results are a blend of the pinhole's simplicity and infinite depth of field, with modern, AI, computational photography. I'm sure I can't be the first to have thought of doing this, but I like the results enough to want to follow this path a little further. Your thoughts?

Google reads your thoughts

So, today I open up YouTube, thinking as I do so, "I'll just be offered the same old videos as yesterday."

For many months now, YouTube has been really slack in its recommendations - about 20% seem to be videos that I have already watched (why am I being "recommended" them again?) the other 80% seem to be videos that I have little interest in watching but get offered over and over. Maybe, there will be a handful of videos I haven't seen before. It's all become rather tiresome. I thought there was an algorithm for that - well it doesn't work! 

Then, today, there was this:

What? Google's in my head now?

I expectantly click the button, hoping for something 'different'.

Only ... no ... I'm offered the same old videos as usual, just in a different order. 

Dear Algorithm, you suck.

Or, perhaps it's just that I have watched all of YouTube and there isn't anything else left?

Lockdown travels

Lock-down, level 4 - check. Lock-down, level 3 - check. Lock-down level 2 - in progress. 

Looking on the positive side, these lock-downs have provided the opportunity to catch up on scanning the pre-digital photo archive and engaging in some present-day virtual travel. I find it quite fascinating to visit places that I photographed decades ago, to see what they look like today. Lock-downs or not, a 12,000-mile distance means this type of travel is best done on Google Street View.

This last week, three pictures from the mid-1970s, had me stumped. They were in a box of slides with pictures of Portugal and a couple of shots of a cross-Channel ferry, but I couldn't place them at all - they were certainly UK pictures, but where? I drew a blank at all the known ferry ports, and my memory was equally devoid of clues. The second two shots were clearly in the same town, but the first could have been anywhere.

There was one clue - "MURDINS", sign-written on the side of the parked van. Google took me to the Companies Office and a typewriter repair company based in Kings Lynn. I couldn't recall ever having been to Kings Lynn, but it was worth a shot. After a couple of hours on Google Street View, I came up with these:

It would have been cool if some of those 1970s shops had still been in the same locations, and way too impossible that the modern, white, van could have had "MURDINS" written on the side, but I suppose that there's not much call for typewriter repair companies these days. Still, a nice trip down Memory Lane (almost literally, but without the 'memory' bit!)