New year, new outlook.
The Christmas break gave me time to think about stuff a bit more, where I’m going as a photographer, and what I need to do. First steps – I’ve altered and cleaned up the layout of my portfolio site so now I can separate genres a bit better. I liked the design of my last one, but it was a bit of a mishmash trying to show what I shot. Now I have space for projects and extra pages, and I’ve also added in a new ‘journal’ that I’ll use to put all my shoots/work/business related things. Because of that, I’m going to keep this blog as an archive, but maybe the odd the DIY post every now and then. For RSS readers, the new journal feed address is http://www.mikeophoto.co.uk/?feed=rss2 If it wasn’t for the four-years-plus worth of stuff on here then I’d probably remove this. It’s not like I post regularly anyway… :-)
I think this will give me direction, and will be good in the old site-promotion stakes, which is my next area of attack. I have started to use twitter - follow me here. I can’t promise anything ground breaking, but I will also try not to post up what I’m having for breakfast either. It’s usually coffee.
But for now, on this blog, Adios, and have a good 2012…
I enjoy shooting on film. After my friend Tom sent me an email linking a diy pinhole camera, with a small ‘challenge’ added, I thought it couldn’t be that hard. After a couple of hours in the shed, I had made a box. A couple more hours later, I had made a film holder/winder mechanism out of Lego to shoot 6×7 120 film, specifically some Pan F I had lying about in the fridge. Pinhole was constructed from card and tinfoil.
Next step was to work out how to develop film on the cheap. I didn’t want to send it off and wait three days to get a blank roll back, or buy some developer just for one roll of film, so I decided to make my own developer from Coffee, using some recipes off the Caffenol blogspot.
The developer was coffee, washing soda and salt. I had these ingredients lying about the house, as well as some white vinegar for the stop. I had some old fixer and paper from when I was doing lots of developing at home, so I just used that to keep the costs down. The only think I had to buy was ascorbic acid, (vitamin C) that I got in a health food shop for the princely sum of £2.
OK, it’s not the best image, the pinhole needs to be smaller, I think it worked out about f/109, and I need to refine my coffee developing technique, but based mostly on luck and guesswork I do at least have an image, and you can see what it is… Sharpness is overrated anyway. The Coffee adds a nice ‘vintage’ photo look too. Instagram? pfft.
Mmmm. Fuzzy.
I’ve not shot any MTBing for a very long time, so was nice to get out again and shoot some stuff. Adam rung me with a ‘vision’ he wanted to try out, so we built and got some good results in the bag and some new ideas for other things to try. Then we moved on and shot a little log drop in the dappled sun. Adams recovering from a broken wrist so nothing too crazy.
Check out his blog here.
