tlohde

through the lens

20:41 28/01/2025 1114 words
contents

history lesson

I first got a digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 2000) in 2003 (±1) having churned through a quantity of disposable cameras over the course of several years. With that camera, and an early version of Photoshop Elements, my creativity[1] took off. A few years later, and with both an SLR (Canon AE1) and a DSLR (Canon can't remember), I studied photography at A Level.

Mucking about in the dark room was a hoot. I loved it.

More novelty cameras followed, a lomography fisheye and an action sampler[2].

I left college and its darkroom, and continued to take photographs, mostly digital and mostly of life, for a period. And, then. Nothing. I stopped taking photos for creative[3] purposes for several years. Barely a snap snapped. Gradually, I pivoted to using a camera-phone, to take typical camera-phone images. This creative drought was briefly interrupted in 2013 when I enthusiastically made use of an Olympus PenEE, a half-frame camera (fig 1), snaffeled off eBay for not a lot[4]. That stopped working after a while, by which point, having also sold the DSLR and taken the SLR to a charity shop, the smart-phone become the only camera.

two photos, side-by-side. on the left an image looking up at a blue sky, with some thin branches and creeping in from the sides. on the right, an image that should be rotated by 90 degrees to be the correct way up, of a swarm of narrow tree trunks densely packed together
Fig 1: Half-frame fun

i miss it

Whilst making some maps for the 2023 #30DayMapChallenge I realised that there was some latent, unused, creativity[5] within me. A few other little[6] projects, like my solar calendar followed. That one in particular (eventually) gave me the neccessary nudge to set up a solarigraph[7][8]. And I am very pleased with the output (fig 2).

a two-tone image showing multiple arcs of the sun's path at the top. The edge of a building is just about visible in the foreground, and mountains with a clear ridge curtail the sun's path at various points
Fig 2: 136 days in the Dolomites

gathering momentum

In the run up to the winter solstice last year I drank a few more cans of fizzy-pop than I would usually[9], so that I could make, and deploy, a load of pinhole cameras across the neighbourhood. But these efforts didn't scratch the pinhole itch - perhaps because I now have to wait ~6 months before taking them down - so I got some tin foil and turned my office into a camera obscura for an afternoon[10]. With the pinhole itch scratched, but the bigger urge to make some stuff still not quite met, I drew some inspiration from daniel huffman and ordered a cyanotype kit. In due course i will create a few cyanotypes of my maps[11][12]. Using light to print things is, well, photography. Along the path that I was beginning to travel, there has to be a darkroom...right. Better make sure of it. First I looked for second-hand darkroom equipment. It is (a) not cheap; (b) I don't know anything; (c) I live in a small flat. Secondly, and more sensibly I looked to see if there was a darkroom locally. And there is. joy.

on course

Because of my perpetually low confidence, and the fact that (I think) I quite enjoyed school, I feel like I have to go on a course[13] to learn things[14]. The darkroom in town, requires you to be competent. Competence can be demonstrated in a ~30 minute session. I've been on a sabbatical from film photography for roughly ten times the length I practiced. In other words I'm quite[15] confident that I can't demonstrate any sort of competence. Handily, however, they offer courses. For four tuesday evenings, starting in about a month, I will be taught a load of things I once knew, and get to poke around with f-stops and print tongs. Afterwards, I can swing by the darkroom whenever I fancy.

be prepared for out of focus & underexposed black & white photographs

I am really looking forward to it. And kicking myself for selling/donating all of my camera equipment.

this had been languishing in my drafts for a few weeks, when this toot, pointing to this post prompoted me to tidy it up and get it out.

footnotes

  1. it feels a bit gross saying that ↩︎

  2. I intended on including an image from each of these cameras here, but...boring reasons to do with recently wiping this laptop and installing linux, coupled with the MacOS photos library storing images in a database...the logic of which makes finding a single image amongst thousands scattered across a dozen directories more effort than I can currently muster. ↩︎

  3. still feels a bit gross ↩︎

  4. any cost savings were swiftly offset my developing & printing charges ↩︎

  5. not much, perhaps, but some ↩︎

  6. predominantly coding projects ↩︎

  7. I have strong opinions about the 'i' in the that word. But I will defer to wikipedia's wisdom. ↩︎

  8. a pinhole camera that you abandon for months at a time. ↩︎

  9. now that I'm sober, and not cycling silly distances, my canned drink consumption is effectively zero ↩︎

  10. afterwards, i came across bonfoton and impulsively purcahsed their lens - and it is a hoot ↩︎

  11. the beginnings of an old photography hobby, slowly fusing with my long term love of maps, and more recent map-making hobby. ↩︎

  12. it's winter in scotland. and I don't have a UV lamp...so these might have to wait a little. ↩︎

  13. last year I went on two climbing courses; a CV course; a remote sensing for snow and ice course; a satellite data analysis course. ↩︎

  14. this is depsite having taught myself lots of things ↩︎

  15. there's that signature low confidence shining bright ↩︎

#photography #creative