Here are some photos what I took where I was on the lookout for nits…..

Lighting Check At The Senate House Cambridge

This was with available light, not much of it

Contact print of a Prince and Friends

This is a rough contact of a photo taken on the same day as the one above – problem here was the huge abundance of natural light (the room was like a greenhouse and it was a sunny day) – having the people bang against the wall with too much contrast – so I had to increase light with masses of flash to balance it and then try to get luminescence – not an easy day. I am looking forward to printing this, the negative is sharp.

Posters on Wall - Brick Lane
London

I like the composition of walls with posters on – but to give them more than a flat quality they need some luminescence, so I tried reflecting some nits onto this, but ran out of arms.

1 nit = 1candela/sq m

Some recent TV series have taken people from ‘today’ and they find themselves in the same life and occupation, but twenty five years ago.

For me it is more like the Woody Allen film ‘Sleeper’, for 25 years I have been immersed in bringing up my family in France and renovating and building monumental medieval ruins to make a home and business – you can see the results of these efforts in Villa Roquette. The many years of photography and filming I did in the UK has been displaced by cement mixing and bricklaying.

So this week I feel I have landed in a parallel universe.

Picking up where I left off in photography is a wondrous experience – nothing is the same, yet nothing has changed. What I mean is, the materials, equipment and processes I was immersed in, taught and practiced for 25 years has either vanished or seems to be relegated to museums, but the values, discussions and images are exactly those I was familiar with.

In 1981 I asked, when will digital photography equal the quality, price and portability of photographs made with chemistry – I had worked with digital backs on large format studio cameras and a little with the first Mavica camera. But then came to live in France, stopped and spent my time putting stuff into cement mixers;

This week has been like waking up from a long sleep – I can now go back to planning the photographic workshops I intended to run in 1991. So to do this I have dusted off my archives and equipment (literally) and have been studying. Apart from learning one new word – Bokeh – nothing much is new – plenty of changes – Kodachome and Portriga have vanished, along with thousands of other products – Ilford is a silver shadow of it’s past glory and Polaroid have the slowest website in the world and not a mention of ‘Polaroids’, they still offer instant images though.

Of course digital photography is now the standard – a small to medium format digital camera can produce results as good (and in most cases better for purpose) than an equivalent chemical dinosaur.

However the teaching of photography and the sciences and physics are all the same (except for the us of the word bokeh in a circular confusing way) – chemistry is no longer relevant ) – yet – there does seem to be a hankering after silver/gelatin images, not just in my latent memory.

I am writing up course notes for my new series of photographic workshops – I started this with a completely clean sheet and have not referred to the teaching notes I had for students I taught over 30 years ago – I found, that after only one day, I am hardly mentioning silver/gelatin at all and it is clear to me that I will be teaching how to achieve a good print from an ink printer fed digital information.

But – I realise that I have a great deal to share and to teach others in my Emmaus experience. In seeing the light through cmos rather than halides, I am closer to a vision undiluted by a quarter of a century of jargon, yet disciplined by a preceding 25 years of darkroom practice.

I can’t wait to see what the next week brings me in the discovery of my old craft – Brobdingnag or Yahoo – ?

Instead of silver bullets I use silver salts to make images. I am sorting boxes of prints, which I like to call my archives, a lot has been lost as I moved around the world – I know several boxes of my exhibition material were put into a garage sale in Virginia USA years ago – I would love to see them again – some galleries, a lot of magazines and a few agents have kept my work and lost it or kept themselves warm with it.

Luckily I still have most of my negatives, but nearly everything before 1979 was lost in a fire at my home in Cambridge – probably a good thing. Here is one of my earliest surviving photographs, there is a story behind it, we had an emergency and were diverted to Ankara – I misheard what was announced – they said don’t get of the plane – so I got off and the Turkish guard posed for this snap, he asked me to post him a copy, I lost his address so, if you are that guard, email me and I will send it on.