A couple of weeks ago I spent a day at the Leicester Print Workshop learning the fundamentals of solar plate photo etching. The photos here show a print made shortly afterwards using my own press. This is much more prosaic and less stylish than the huge, gorgeous Harry Rochat press at the workshop but has given some excellent results. In fact I found the prints to be equally as good as those made on the big press. Surprisingly the Akua Intaglio water-based inks I use produced far superior, deeper blacks than the oil-based ink used on the course.

This is such a beautiful, tangible method of printing. The smell of the ink, the texture of the paper, the weight of the plate in the hand whilst inking and wiping, the turning of the press handle, the scope for altering the mood of the print by over or under inking. the sensitivity required to produce a correctly balanced print: all these elements make this a fascinating and viscerally engaging process.


The plate after removal of the print.


The resulting print on cartridge paper.


Detail of the print corner showing the tonality achievable from an aquatint=screened (but not half-toned) plate.

A favourite book photographed by a favourite 10x8 pinhole camera using a favourite medium - paper negative.

Paper negatives often surprise in the amount of detail and tone they are capable of reproducing. Of course, their inherent slowness also gives a beautifully extended exposure which allows one to not only render effects of movement and stillness but also to fully enjoy the moment of the creation of the photograph. Quite the opposite of the drive-by-shooting, hit-and-run type approach that the speed and ease of modern digital electronics can so easily engender. I had some concerns about the result I might get from this particular batch of paper which had been pre-flashed several months earlier and left unused. My normal, somewhat untechnical and fatalistic approach of experimentation and acceptance of total failure produced quite unexpectedly good tonal negatives! It has also answered a long-standing but untested doubt about how much paper can be pre-flashed in a preparation session. I feel happy now that making larger batches of negatives is viable.

Ilford Multigrade resin-coated satin paper preflashed.

Earlier this year I spent a week at the coast, the Welsh west coast which with each visit feels more like home. One warm, sunny evening I packed a sleeping bag and a stove and headed for a remote, inaccessible beach to spend the night alone under the starry Spring sky. It was necessary to pick the evening with care to fit with the rhythm of the tides which with an almost 6 metre range at that time of year left precious little beach between the surf and the cliff at its daily peak. The night I chose to make my home on the beach high tide came at around 11pm and, although I had checked the tide tables many times, I still waited a little nervously, watching the stars and listening to the alternate sibilance and bass of the incoming waves, half expecting an unusually large surge to swamp my tiny encampment.

Before nightfall I wandered up and down the undercliff seeking out driftwood and jetsam for a campfire but strangely for me I felt the disturbance of fire to be inappropriate on such a peaceful, sun-bathed evening. As I strolled across the smooth, hard sand at the edge of the surf it struck me that I would no more dream of lighting a fire here than I would in the nave of a great cathedral, that in some respect I was here on sufferance, a welcome guest; a guest with the responsibility of the pilgrim.

As the light faded, I lay on my back listening to the music of the ocean; the stereophonic symphony of deep booms from the sea cave to my right, and the higher, splashy, sweep of waves running up the sandy expanse to my left. A sound track to the dazzling vista of the Milky Way overhead with the familiar and reassuring constellations: Cassiopeia, The Great Bear, Auriga, Gemini. In my peripheral vision the soaring cliffs behind me framed the sky and stars and linked the just visible sea-horizon with the land mass I felt beneath my back. I lay there in an epi-centre of wonder at the vast, unfathomable beauty of the heavens, the land and the water.

I eventually drifted off to sleep, soothed by the sounds of the sea, to awake in the paleness of dawn, alone, or apparently so, on a new wave-smoothed beach. The sound track remained the same, just a little more distant now that the surf edge had retreated from the narrow strip of sand which separated the cliff from the high tide mark of flotsam, the sliver of earth which held me dry.

On rising, I noticed with a thrill of rising hackles that the beach had been recently crossed by a four-legged, clawed animal. It took a little while to work out that the prints were those of a fox and I cursed that I had not been awake to see this passing visitor. Nevertheless, amongst my store of beautiful, remembered mornings, there are few which equal the deep sense of belonging and harmony which this near meeting inspired.

Vivant!!! from TERRA de NINGÚ on Vimeo.

An excellent video of the exhibition opening night by Patri Rodriguez.

A couple of the best castings from yesterday. Much less formal and more uncontained than I envisaged, these initial attempts are encouraging. I need to find a way of casting them thinner or reducing their thickness once cast, maybe by filing (in order to make them lighter and less prominent). This will allow me then to fix them to an inlay on the book cover.

It is exciting and encouraging to see that type 55 instant film may once more be with us. The New 55 Project run by Bob Crowley is making great strides towards reproducing this sadly defunct film medium. What is more, initial tests are showing that it makes both a good print and an equally good negative. How many times have I sacrificed one for the other in the past and now having one's cake and eating is a distinct possibility!

More information and latest news at http://new55project.blogspot.com

Wistman's Wood is alive with twisted, mossy shapes, bearing testimony to the hardships of its ancient existence. The wood has a peace which is striking from the moment you set foot under the canopy. I have been there in winter storms and balmy summer heat and, whether arriving wet and frozen or sun-beaten and parched, a sense of safety, shelter and enduring calm fills me. It is a place where I feel both accepted and wholly accepting.

Crown Graphic, Xenar 135mm, Polaroid 55 4x5



Crown Graphic, Symmar 210mm, Polaroid 55 4x5

I felt so drawn to this frozen eddy of the River Monnow at the turn of the year. I kept returning, looking and watching and finally made two exposures from my last remaining box of Polaroid 55. Several days later in the darkroom, the initial pull and excitement of the scene simply evaporated and I wondered over and over why I had found the place, the atmosphere and the composition so stimulating. This post-exposure disappointment, this disorientation, is very familiar to me. I have endless boxes of negatives which languish unprinted, or maybe printed once or twice. Few of the negatives are badly exposed, all are close to the what I visualised at the time of exposure. Why then, I have always puzzled, should there be such a gap between the excitement of the moment of creation (the discovery) - and the emotion and momentum which moves one to propel raw material into a finished work (the revelation)?

The experience of the few days spent on the Welsh border and the following periods of uncertainty and frustration in the darkroom, which at the time left me non-plussed, have today, quite unexpectedly, blossomed into understanding and rediscovery of that time. I have reviewed both prints several times during the last months and felt in equal measure excited and confused by them. Each time I thought how strange it was not to understand my own work. Perhaps by virtue of having looked and looked, I suddenly twigged: the excitement was from knowing, though dumbly at the time, that here was a scene totemic of life at that moment; the disappointment came from not being able to give voice to this knowing.

These two images suddenly snapped into focus for me when I understood the eerie correspondences between the last eighteen months of shifting, emotionally cracked and blurred experience and the fundamental uncertainty of the key elements of the photographs: an eddy in a river, frozen but thawing; a rock apparently floating on water; underwater cracks more tree-like than the trees reflected on the surface; a confusion of focus; a tangle of shapes which now seems to follow a definite composition, now appears just tangled without understandable form. In a moment, I undertook the imaginative leap from seeing the images as a mediocre confusion of tones and lines to regarding them as a striking totem of life. Whether they are reflective of what had passed or predictive of what was to come is impossible to say. What is indisputable, and thrilling, is the illumination they have given me and the sense of understanding I feel now that they are no longer shrouded in confusion. Life seems to be changing for the better.

The exhibition Vivant! Alive! is running in Barcelona this month from 22nd September - 15th October 2011 at the Centro Civic Can Baste, Pg. Fabra i Puig 274, 08031 Barcelona, Spain

Trunks, sunshine and shade under the canopy.

Sometimes it is enjoyable to take a lensed camera out as a contrast to the slowness of pinhole photography. I found this print on a shelf in my darkroom four years after exposing it and only then realised its aesthetic qualities, qualities hidden to me at the time. Although the exposure time may have been quicker, the production time certainly was not.

Spring sunshine by the River Stour, Warwickshire (Polaroid 55 print, 150mm lens on Shen Hao 4x5).