Blogging has been low on my agenda these past 16 days. To be honest, I was utterly exhausted by the time Christmas arrived what with all the planned and unplanned events during December but also to do with a full on first semester of my final year at UCS. Something had to give and I was back at my desk quite quickly whilst I nursed a still extremely sore rash on my right ankle caused by a Burdock spur on 17th November. That and the seriously inclement weather saw me facing a rather long ‘To do’ list, all of which are signed off now.

So, 5500 words written up on research, a financial year end signed off by the accountant, a re-designed and re-worked website and 236 medium format and large format negatives developed by a pro lab and scanned and processed by me. Add to that the tear down of the very successful Lux Locus Christmas show and I have been far from idle. Throw  in a stomach bug and a new hair cut to the mix and it all adds up to a busy start to 2014.

So, the website. Tutors were not too impressed with my site as it was ‘not one thing or another’. There lies a dilemma. My site is built using The Turning Gate plugins for Lightroom. I decided on the use of these plugins from a commercial perspective. I was shooting many events for the university and I do not like work dragging on so I set myself a target of web publishing within 3 hours of a shoot finishing. I can say that I met this target consistently since buying into TTG products so target met. However, a criticism was there was too much in the way of imagery on my site so I waited until the Christmas break to sit down and look at the CE3 engines that I had bought in the early autumn. The result is a visually similar site as it fits with my branding and business cards etc. (so why change) and a split in the galleries from the top level into Commercial and artistic practice. In order to make publishing easier, I am now using the TTG Publisher plugin. This took a while to get my head around and it meant I had to reload images to the web but that is no bad thing. I can now see the benefit of Publisher as often seeing the images on-line I can see a colour cast  in the grid presentation that never noticed in the macro retouching windows. The plugin is smart enough to mark images previously uploaded for re-publishing should I make any ‘Develop’ or ‘Library’ changes locally. Once the degree is over with I really must start learning how to use PHP plugins to make the whole experience slicker going forward. For now though, apart from minor presentation issues I am running with what we have live.

C41 processing at UCS last semester resulted in dark patches on negatives, predominantly on 220 film. I liked using 220 for convenience, plus the 220 back for my Bronica was a third of the price of 120 backs so even with the outrageous 8 pence extra per negative cost imposed by Kodak, it was going to take a while to break even with the cost of a 120 back. I previously published an example of an early evening shot at Felixstowe docks that exhibited this problem. A tutor confirmed with Metroimaging in London that is was indeed a chemistry issue so I was given 3 rolls of 120 Portra NC and VC to test with sending a film to 2 different pro-labs and one to UCS for comparison. I was told to bracket exposures so 4 images per roll! I decided to re-use Redwood in Colchester as I had used them during the summer and at great expense, but worth it for degree project work I have had 16 large format negatives developed and 18 rolls of 120. Apart from some leaking double dark slides that I was unaware of all the negatives have come back in pristine condition. I got the C41 test back from UCS yesterday and I am not sure. I reckon the colour cast is there but as the shots are ground shots it is difficult to tell. The last roll will go to Metro to develop. Really, I should be testing 3 220 rolls but that seems like an awful lot of chanced images should a roll come out with staining. These two images show the staining. It is possible with a great deal of effort in Photoshop CS6 to eradicate it but I should not have to do that. These scans are straight off the scanner without dust removal or any form of processing apart from the Silverfast defaults for the film.

Edgelands

This is the working title of my degree show project and these are a few images from my working edit. Every day I got to these locations the vegetation is different , the light is different, everything is different. The same place is never the same place twice. These negatives were processed by Redwood in Colchester. Compare them to the ones above and you can see a difference. Yes, these are processed image so no dust marks etc.

Most of my work in this series is about beauty in the landscape that is not ‘chocolate box’ pretty but things many of us pass by and do not notice.