Building a Wooden Camera

One of the pleasures of living in a state of semi-retirement is having time to indulge in inessential but absorbing activities. This Summer's main time-absorber was building a wooden camera – still not quite complete, but well advanced on the state it was in when this picture was taken.

The project was mostly inspired by my students' enthusiasm for alternative and experimental ways of making photographs. Although they like their digital cameras, they also love doing practical things that involve physically interacting with materials. There is a tangible and tactile satisfaction in making things by hand that isn't gained through working solely with digital processes.

It's a subject that came into focus for me last year after reading Matthew Crawford's The Case for Working with Your Hands, which I blogged about at the time. At around the same time I was asked to teach practical and experimental course units that gave a wide scope for investigating the creative potential of alternative processes. We did a lot of experimental work with large format cameras, using improvised lenses and a variety of negative materials; we also worked with pinhole cameras and alternative print processes, particularly salt printing and cyanotypes. It was during this time I came across, quite by chance – or rather, by Amazon's predictive algorithms – an intriguing-looking book, Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, by Alan Greene.

 

While Matthew Crawford discusses the value of practical activity, Alan Greene gets straight down into hard-headed practical instruction. It is a book that inspires, but offers no shortcuts to the challenges it sets the reader. The only reward it offers is the opportunity to take photographs as eerily beautiful as those taken by the author himself. It is certainly not a book for a faint-hearted reader, as the densely-expressed instructions require a force of will to follow. The chapter on building a camera makes no allowances for improvisation, error or diversion, it is a matter of following the instructions exactly, step by step, not ever being quite sure which bit of the camera you're making, but with the satisfaction of seeing it gradually take shape in front of you.

Having said that, a UK-based reader like myself has to perform some mental gymnastics to turn the USA-orientated instructions into action. While our two nations are famously divided by a common language, we are also divided by different standard systems of measurement and by a variation in the materials that are readily available. Greene makes extensive use of basswood for example, a scarce and unreasonably expensive material here. Being determined myself to follow the underlying philosophy of the book, which is make the camera out of commonly available materials, I decided to use the nearest equivalents I could find in my local DIY stores, B&Q and Homebase.

The framing is made out of pine stripwood with the nearest metric cross-section measurements. It comes in 2.4m (9ft) lengths and is very cheap. Instead of Luan, I used 6mm exterior-grade plywood. A model aircraft shop was able to supply me with a more expensive 4mm light plywood which I'm using for darkslides.

The cumulative effect of these differences in imperial and metric dimensions has a knock-on effect on later stages of the build. For example, my negative holder, built up out of seven laminated layers of stripwood, is 4mm thicker than the author's example in the book. This necessitated me cutting out and replacing parts of the camera's internal framework that I'd innocently cut to the sizes given in the plans. Suffice to say, my copy of the book has been heavily annotated with points to note for future builds.

This has been a book and a project that I would recommend to anyone. Building the camera has been an instructive and satisfying experience that should provide lots of further fun, building lenses and recreating those early negative processes.

July Highlights

This is a preliminary note intended to precede new content that will be added tomorrow (1st August).

The posting will be largely concerned with a current London exhibition.

Busy Times

Looking out over the Atlantic, North Uist. Photo by A. Smith

Hell's Bells – What a Month! If Summer is meant to be a time for roller coaster rides, then June has lived up to expectations, despite the unseasonal weather. A busy month, work-wise, starting with a week in the Outer Hebrides, working on plans for reviving a documentary project; then two alternative processes workshops and ending with the diploma student show – the culmination of the most enjoyable teaching year of my entire career.

Lots of little highlights along the way – such as being reminded yet again of the time I photographed Hercules the Grizzly Bear, newly recaptured after three-weeks of freedom on Uist.

Taigh Chearsabhagh, the Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, are planning some kind of commemoration of this 1980 event and wanted to see my pics. It's a story worth telling, but I'll save it for a later post.

Some Large Format Experiments

In spare moments, while the fine weather has continued, I've been continuing my experiments with large format paper negatives. Developing them in film developer rather than regular paper developer has proved to be a very promising experiment. More about that in a later post, I hope.

Meanwhile, I've been tinkering with the cameras themselves. My old Linhof press camera is proving to be a useful test rig for trying out a few of my ramshackle assortment of discarded lenses.

One of the minor faults with the Linhof has been the broken ground glass screen, split right across from side to side and only held together by the spring clips in the camera back. It still works, but it's distracting to look at. The prompt to do something about it came when a student gave me a 12"x 16" piece of picture-frame glass left over from a studio shoot.

Having no better use for it, I cut some pieces to fit the back of a 5"x4" camera. I then got hold of some lapidary grit and decided to have a go at making my own ground glass screens. I found an excellent online explanation of how to do it by an American large format photographer, Dick Dokas.

His instructions were simplicity itself to follow, and  I was thrilled with what I was able to achieve in ten minutes or so of grinding the two pieces of glass you can see in the foreground of my photo. A light sprinkling of grinding powder and water produced a very fine bright translucent finish, similar to fine tracing film. I started off thinking I would use the cheap rubber suction dent-puller (seen in the background) to hold the top piece of glass, but that was completely unnecessary. Simple finger pressure on the top piece of glass was all it needed to keep it moving.

Another problem I've been pondering is how best to control exposure times with some of the lenses I've wanted to experiment with. Some have variable apertures, but none have shutters, so some sort of independent shutter mechanism is needed. Having studied the problem, the solution (I hope) arrived yesterday by post from the USA in the shape of a Packard Shutter, bought from an eBay seller in Floyd, Virginia.

My example is clearly a vintage item, though they're still manufactured by the Packard Shutter Company in California. It's clear that there is a dedicated army of Packard users among large format photographers (predominantly in the US) judging by enthusiast webpages and YouTube videos. In its present form, my shutter is operated pneumatically by a rubber bulb connected by tubing to the piston you can see on the right in the photo. I can see why these shutters have their fans, they're an elegant and simple way of controlling exposure and a classic example of nineteenth century technical innovation.

Reassessing the Educational Value of Photography

The value and meaning of photography as an activity has changed in recent years.

This has been largely due to the Digital Revolution, a term that will just as clearly define the present historical period as the term Industrial Revolution defined the 19th Century.

Until comparatively recently, photography was a very specific activity that used standardised materials and equipment in a manner that was tightly controlled by the technical limitations of those materials.

As a photographer, your role in making photographs was generally limited to operating a camera with a greater or lesser degree of proficiency. The outcome being a folder of finished prints provided for you by technicians.

The prints could be saved and stored, displayed or reproduced, but they generally had no other function than to be a record or memento of specific people, places or events.

Any other outcome for the image was also the province of technicians, using specialised equipment and materials beyond the means of most photographers.

It was unthinkable that personal (as opposed to commercial) photographs would be displayed, published or broadcast to an audience outside a personal network of contacts.

In saying this, I seem to be describing still images. My remarks apply equally to the even more dramatic changes in the field of moving images with the move away from cine film to the endlessly rewritable medium of digital video.

Photography is now much more than an Arts and Crafts/Design activity or the medium by which we are informed or entertained by old school media.

What do these changes to the way we use photographic images mean for society and education?

Anyone who carries a mobile phone is potentially able to instantly publish images or video at any time of the night or day.

Given this, it's surely not fanciful to suggest that photography has changed in that it has become a commonplace medium of public discourse, akin to the spoken or written word.

It has become an intrinsic part of the way we converse or express ourselves, and given its broadcastability, beyond the confines of face to face interaction.

As educators, we need to recognise and accommodate this changing role of photography. It can no longer be thought of as merely another craft specialism within the confines of art and design.

It demands to be seen as a fully academic subject that encompasses the study of it in terms of its role as both a language form and as a technology that is radically modifying the forms of public discourse.

Titan Pinhole Camera Test

It's beginning to seem as if pinhole cameras are becoming a regular theme in this blog.  There's no special reason except that I can't resist tinkering with stuff that's lying around and we've had this Ilford Titan camera in college for a while now. This week, it seemed like a good time to try it out while the students were busy finishing off their project work for the end of term.

As well as wanting to get a feel for it and see how it worked, I wanted to test out a theory I have about paper negatives. The photographic paper we tend to use in the darkroom nowadays is the ubiquitous resin-coated multigrade (variable contrast) paper. Indeed, there is now very little alternative since the mass market for specialist silver-based papers was killed off by digital photography.

However, I have always found that multigrade paper negatives shot in daylight have always been excessively contrasty. I put this down to the blue content of daylight acting as a multigrade filter and hardening the contrast. Using an orange filter to counteract the blue is of little help as it merely has the effect of introducing a safelight over the lens and excessively extending the exposure time.

For this experiment, I used a box of graded paper, which took a bit of effort to source as it's not commonly stocked by our suppliers. It was Ilford Ilfospeed Resin Coated, Grade 2 (glossy). Detail should record well on the smooth surface, bearing in mind that the image would be scanned later.

For  the test, I decided to use a sunny corner of the college car park. There were white and black surfaces and plenty of sunlit and shaded mid-tones and textures. As well as taking some basic shots to get an idea of suitable exposure times, I wanted to do a further experiment.

I wanted to see if there would be a significant difference if I processed the negatives in a film developer (such as ID11), rather than paper developer (we use Ilford Multigrade).

After some preliminary trials, this is what I got with a 24 second exposure in harsh sunlight. The negative was developed in paper developer for the usual one to two minutes.

This was taken a little later, in more or less the same light conditions. This time the negative was dish developed in ID11, diluted 1:1 with water. I developed it for about ten minutes with more or less constant agitation.

Although both prints are far from perfect, I think they provide an incentive to experiment further. There is clearly a much more subtle range of tones in the second image, noticeably in the dark shrubbery above the car and in the white notice pinned to the white door. Overall, I'm impressed by the sharpness of the image – it's pretty good for a pinhole camera. I have a feeling that the vignetting will be much reduced when an optimum exposure/development balance is found.

While I was preparing to write this post, I checked out an excellent video review of the camera on the Walker Cameras website. This is the company that developed the camera for Harman/Ilford, based on their experience on manufacturing mould-injected plastic large format field cameras. I totally agree with the reviewer's positive comments and was impressed by the images he produced on his day out in Broadstairs. It's a video well worth watching, even though Leon the reviewer misreads the roman numerals on his box of Multigrade paper. Oh the joys of extemporising to camera!

Lowry Reconsidered

Like a cat grown tired of being petted, winter finally extended her claws at the beginning of the month and nipped us with the first serious snow of the season.

Still, a couple of days later, Sunday lived up to its name and turned sunny and warm; the roads clear enough to set out to catch the last day of the LS Lowry exhibition at the University of Nottingham's Djanogly Art Gallery.

A Lowry-esque Scene: Sledging in University Park, Nottingham

I've always found Lowry's work hard to like, though it's a prejudice that's mellowed with the passage of time. Maybe it's a generational thing for those of us who grew up in the drab austerity of post-WW2 Britain. We wanted to move on and have the good things that the wages of full employment could give us: a life of opportunity, colour, music, sex and fashion. There was little sympathy for the unremittingly dystopian vision of Lowry's art, although it was a world that still existed, at least visually, well into the late 1960's. I remember being in a minibus full of students going to Manchester's Whitworth Gallery to see the Northern Young Contemporaries exhibition, singing Ewan MacColl's  "Dirty Old Town" as we drove through an urban scene that could have been designed by Lowry himself.

That was probably 1966/7, but sadly, the stereotype of the North of England as a land of decayed industrial cityscapes still exists among the ignorant today. Fragments of a hacked conference call between Scotland Yard and the FBI, released by Anonymous and published on the Guardian website earlier this month started almost straight away with a cockney-sounding London copper describing Sheffield as a 'Khasi' (army slang for lavatory). The man has clearly never been to the place if he can describe it in those terms. Coming from the inhabitant of a city once known as the "Great Wen", it seemed particularly ironic.

The Lake, 1937. Oil on Canvas

Lowry's paintings help perpetuate this lazy myth. Given that the reality that inspired his work has largely disappeared, his paintings should perhaps now be regarded as historical documents, symbolic but essentially fictional representations of a social scene that emerged in the Industrial Revolution and which faded at least a generation ago. While urban decay and deprivation are still with us, they now have characteristic forms that were not present when Lowry made his paintings.

I was prompted to see the show by a drawing reproduced in the exhibition publicity. Called "The Supper Bar", it is a busy street scene rendered in pencil outline with minimal use of tone to suggest chimney smoke and other atmospheric effects. My main interest was in his use of perspective. 

The buildings are rendered in terms of their height and width, with only about three places where depth is indicated. Like the figures in the foreground, the buildings are drawn to a more or less consistent scale, irrespective of distance from the viewer. Overall, pictorial depth is suggested by placing the nearest features at the bottom of the picture, rising to the most distant at the top.

The impression of compressed depth this gives is similar to the effect of photographing a distant scene through a long telephoto lens. A good example would be one of Andreas Feininger's early telephoto shots of New York. He was one of the first photographers to recognise and exploit this visual effect.

Although the eye level/horizon line seems to be level with the upper windows in the first row of buildings in Lowry's drawing, this may be because that is the centre of the picture. The position of a viewpoint is purely theoretical in fact because, like an orthographic engineering drawing, the absence of a third dimensions means there is no horizon at all.

The use of a high viewpoint combined with vernacular subject-matter suggests an affinity with the images in traditional Chinese and Japanese art and their distinctive use of axonometric projection as a form of perspective. Japonism was still highly influential in the early twentieth century and one may be certain that it was very familiar to Lowry. Echoes of Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) Japanese woodblock prints can be seen, I think, in a simple watercolour sketch such as "Estuary", below.

The Estuary, 1956-59. Watercolour on paper

Despite the prejudice against Lowry's work that I admitted to above, I found the exhibition a fascinating and rich source of ideas and themes that would repay more detailed study. A more detailed analysis begs to be made of the plotting and placing of the individual elements in his work; the grid like structure that fixes and holds fast the generally busy and chaotic subject matter. There is also the role of satire in his work in the context of early/mid twentieth century social change.

A Fight, c 1935. Oil on canvas

This painting, for example reminds me irresistibly of Joseph Lada's comical illustrations to Jaroslav Hasek's post-WW1 satire The Good Soldier Schweik, even down to the dark horizontal line of the kerb echoing Lada's use of a thick black line to represent the ground plane. This is one of those illustrations, printed on the cover of my battered 1946 US Penguin edition:

I feel it would be of great interest to evaluate Lowry's work in the context of social satire in the early/mid twentieth century, rather than categorise it as an aberration in the development of a modernist movement in the UK.

The work in the exhibition was drawn from the LS Lowry Collection at The Lowry, Salford, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. Another place to be added to the list of places that must be seen.

A Visit to Lindisfarne

It's always a pleasure to follow motorway signs to The North, and this time was no exception. As a family, we all chipped in to rent a holiday cottage just outside Bamburgh on the Northumbrian coast so that we could spend Christmas together: seven adults, two boys and a dog. 

The Farne Islands, home to St. Cuthbert and Grace Darling

Luckily, we had a week free of snow though the weather was mild and windy, giving us days that were bleak, dark and very short.

I always like to have some sort of project on the go for times like this, and this year it was to look at Lindisfarne/Holy Isle through the prism of Roman Polanski's 60's black comedy thriller Cul-de-Sac. It was a film that made a great impression on me when I first saw it back in 1966 at Lincoln Film Society, in the building in which I now work.

As well as tide tables off the Web, I got hold of the DVD from MovieMail. The night before our visit, the lads and I sat down to watch it. Not having seen it for decades, I was struck by its Samuel Beckettian quality — as a kind of riff on Waiting for Godot with bits of Pinter thrown in. Instead of Godot, the characters wait out the non-appearance of Mr Katelbach from Mablethorpe (a holiday town on the Lincolnshire coast). I was pleased to see this reading of it confirmed out by notes on the BFI website, where I found this nice production still.

The most striking thing, on visiting the place itself, was how Polanski played around with the geography, collapsing a landscape that stretched over several miles into a compact, claustrophobic stage set-like location.

Weather, tides and daylight hampered my attempts to get to grips with the island's essential character, so I came away with only a few photographs to post to Flickr. Another visit clearly beckons. Time and tourism have been very kind to the place and the run-down castle environs and decrepit sheds are much smartened, thanks to the ministrations of the National Trust.

A Note on the Passing of Time

Cyclical time is a fact of life for the inhabitants of Lindisfarne

            What we call the beginning is often the end
            And to make an end is to make a beginning.
            The end is where we start from.

TS Eliot: Four Quartets

Sometimes I think I should try to find a way of slowing down time – my personal, internalized sense of time, not the universal time of clocks and calendars. Of all the resources we have at our disposal, it's the one that can seem to vanish most rapidly and is the most irreplaceable.

It's generally agreed that time passes more quickly as you grow older, a phenomenon as real as it is alarming. A year, seen as a unit of time, once stretched comfortably into the distance both in front of you and behind you. Plenty of time to do so many things. Now, a year passes in what seems like a couple of months. Summer becomes Winter and reverts to Summer again in what seems like a few short weeks.

Two factors seem to be at work. One is the perceived duration of any given unit of time relative to the entirety of one's lived experience. The other is the gradual slowing down of the pace at which life is lived in later life as energy levels diminish with age.

While the first factor is purely a matter of historical record that can't be reconfigured, the second, because it is situated in the present and future, may be susceptible to manipulation. I recall Jacob Bronowski, back in the 1970's in the TV series The Ascent of Man, explaining Einstein's Theory of Relativity. A point Bronowski made, as I remember it, was that time appeared to travel at the speed of light — and that if you could travel at such a speed, time would effectively stand still.

Translated into everyday practical terms, that would seem to suggest that the more you can pack into any given unit of time, the more time becomes stretched to accommodate it. 

  

Lines from Quartet III: The Dry Salvages
 …the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'. 
. . .  

TS Eliot : Four Quartets

The Season Turns

Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, we are having to adjust to days being shorter than nights. It's always alarming to see how rapidly the hours of daylight shorten at this time of year, and it will be even more noticeable after tomorrow, when our UK clocks revert to GMT.

However, the dark nights bring pleasures of their own, as long as we have food and warmth and enough light to work by.

Late last night I went to put my dustbin out for collection. Although it was moonless, high in the sky above me was one bright star, far brighter than anything else in the sky. Because of light pollution from the town, nothing else was visible, though as my eyes adjusted to the dark a few other stars started to appear.

Curious to know why this one object should be so bright, I Googled for answers when I got back indoors. Astronomy Central's The Night Sky with Binoculars Tonight and the National Schools' Observatory's The Whole Sky at Ten O'Clock Tonight both confirmed it was not  a star I'd seen, but the planet Jupiter. 

Jupiter

Astronomy Central said that with good binoculars I should be able to see Jupiter's moons, but that advice didn't take into account an unsteady hand and less than perfect vision. My compromise was to stick my digital camera onto a tripod, point it in the general direction and click away at a few different exposure settings in the hope of getting some usable images. The two images posted above were among the most successful. The upper image clearly shows the spherical shape of the planet, while the lower one (taken with a longer lens and longer exposure) shows two of Jupiter's moons quite distinctly visible on the left. Neither image would satisfy an astronomer – but for me, getting any sort of image at all from my chance encounter was a positive result.

The Pinhole Camera: A Shoebox Reimagined

One of the ritual Autumnal activities for new students is building pinhole cameras. The studios become littered with the dismembered or reconstructed remains of a variety of cardboard and tin containers, their new function clearly indicated by the liberal application of black gaffer tape.

Though these simple devices generally make no attempt to look good, they can produce some surprisingly attractive images. How successful they are seems to be largely a matter of chance. Some carefully crafted creations seem to frustrate their makers' attempts to produce a decent image, while other cruder cameras produce a sharp image every time. Control over the size of the pinhole and the thickness of the material it's made in are critical factors.

Shoebox pinhole photo by Gemma S

 This year, I decided I wanted to have some objective standard of construction and performance to judge our home-made efforts by, so I decided to get hold of a commercially made camera. It was also going to be useful to have one that would take regular film rather than paper negatives. A clear favourite was one of the Zero Image series of cameras; made in Hong Kong and sold by Silverprint in London.

The model I chose was the 6x9 multi-format camera, which takes 120 roll film. It is a significantly expensive camera – a lot of money for not a lot of wood, but it is undeniably beautiful and carefully hand-made. It's an eye-catcher wherever it goes.

It comes nicely packaged, wrapped in tissue paper inside a simple card box with a few extras. The photos below give a better idea of what the camera is like and how it works.

The viewing frame in the foreground allows you to estimate the field of view of the camera's various negative formats from 6x4.5 to 6x9cm. There is also a lanyard, good instructions and a numbered certificate of authenticity.

The three round windows on the back of the camera are protected by a sliding cover. They enable you to see the frame markings on the back of the film as you wind on between exposures. The sliding cover carries a rotating exposure calculation dial and this model comes with the optional bubble level.

 

To load the camera, the top and back plates are removed and the film loaded in the usual manner. It's fairly simple and straightforward.

As I've had the camera less than a week, I haven't yet had a chance to use it myself, although I've loaded it with colour transparency film to use later. In the meantime, a second year student (Jody B) took it out for an hour and shot an old roll of FP4 with it.

Sadly, I hadn't read the instructions thoroughly and misinformed her that she should base her exposures on an aperture of f250 when it should have been f55.  However, reciprocity failure came to her aid and overexposure did no harm at all to the ancient film, as the above shot of the South transept of the cathedral shows.

Steep Hill, Lincoln. Fujichrome Provia100F film. Pic by Jody B

What I hadn't realised when I was buying the camera was that there was a difference between the Zone Plate and Pinhole versions. What I had inadvertently bought was a Zone Plate rather than a Pinhole camera. The effect of the Zone Plate is noticeable as the hazy, soft-focus glow in the above image. It's a charming enough effect, but not what I want in every shot. It's a pity that the Zone Plates and Pinhole can't be swapped as I'm reluctant to start trying to modify or hack the camera about just yet.

When the Rubber Hits the Road

For those of us who choose to work in education, September can be the strangest month. Not for us a sense of the year winding-down as we gather in a harvest or take stock of the year's achievements. Instead, it's the month when we have to hit the ground running; exchanging the calm reflection of the Summer vacation for the mad scramble of a new academic year.

It requires a mental shifting of gears that gets no easier as one gets older: a sea of new faces to remember, new management initiatives, projects and timetables to assimilate. If I try to visualise the experience, I see the scene in a Hollywood movie where people try to climb aboard a moving train – or it could be any scene where the characters struggle fruitlessly against inevitable failure. Well that's the theory, though this year I've felt at times as if I've been thrown from the train and landed face first.

Luckily, my part-time status insulates me against most of the sparks that fly as axes are sharpened and muscles are flexed.  It's a fault in me that I'm as quick to respond to provocation as anyone and enjoy a scrap, so it's no bad thing that my status keeps me mostly out of the ring.

Anyway, it was pointed out to me recently that I enjoy the exact mirror image of a normal workload, with a two-day working week and five-day weekend. I responded by saying that I'm grateful to have reached a point in my life where I can subsist on the limited income it gives me and don't have to barter whatever precious time I have left for money I have learned to live without.