The past week has been full on and utterly exhausting. What with hanging the Trafalgar show at Prettys and the scary incident of a 24 year old fellow student working on the hang suffering a stroke, fitting in a 6 hour shooting day for Edgelands, researching for degree project and dissertation I feel wrung out. Today I have had writer’s block. It was a struggle reading so I thought I’d better update the blog and crash out. My body needs to recharge.

One thing put into perspective though was the continued abuse of my and fellow ‘equals’ work in the Waterfront building by other users of the foyer. The sheer ignorance shown by some people to artwork has to be seen to be believed. I was led to believe that creating art is what differentiates us from animals. I’d like to think these same art-blind and disrespectful people would have seen the signs of the stroke my young colleague suffered and acted with alacrity but somehow I have my doubts. There are none so blind as those who cannot see.

On another front I am getting very concerned over the degree of a central band of yellow appearing in C41 negatives processed at Uni. It would seem that the issue is not isolated but is also experienced when using labs. I love shooting film but some one-off degree project shots are becoming unusable and this is from 220 and 5×4 film. I can see why some of my year are sticking with digital or self processed B&W.

This is one I managed to save from Monday afternoon’s 3 hour shoot Portra 400, Zensa Bronica, 200mm, F19,8s (metered at 4s- doubled for reciprocity)

If this had been one of the earlier shots I would have had a quite visible dark band running down the centre portion of the image. If you look closely there is evidence of it here also.