The height of summer
The old park
Three years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine about my Brockwell Park project to tie in with an exhibition here in south London. It was the culmination of the previous three years spent photographing the park through the seasons with the aim (there has to be a grand aim) of demonstrating how seasonal changes transform parts of the London landscape as dramatically as they do the countryside.
After the rewarding experience of seeing the fruits of so many years’ worth of standing in soggy fields at dawn ignoring feelings of self-doubt displayed in clean and respectable surroundings, I resolved to move on to other, contrasting locations in London and cease to rely on Brockwell Park’s supreme advantage: proximity to my house. I began working on parks and nature reserves located multiple traffic jams away from Herne Hill – Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Wood, Dulwich Park, Crystal Palace Park, and some local allotments which I thought were particularly interesting. This has been, and continues to be, a rewarding set of subjects, perhaps ripe for a future article if a good enough excuse can be concocted.
The new technology
However, over these years Brockwell Park underwent a program of Lottery-funded restoration, changing the underlying landscape in some parts and creating new visual opportunities. The previously ramshackle and overgrown walled garden, though beautiful as it was before, became more clearly structured and aesthetically closer to the way it was in the park’s Victorian heyday. The main lake was tidied up and replanted, a new children’s play area was created and an outdoor performance area appeared in front of the hall. Some of these changes needed a little time to settle in, but I soon began to find new reasons to return to Brockwell Park.
The walled garden october
My other principal excuse (there has to be an excuse for standing around in soggy fields at dawn) was my protracted and wavering move to large format that finally came to fruition a little over a year ago. As I confidently explained in the first article, my use of medium format was justified by the fleeting nature of the light, the abundance of people and dogs who might through their thoughtless movement mar an expensive exposure, and also by the unstated reality of my not owning a large format camera. I did however find it frustrating tackling so many architectural subjects without camera movements and felt that the image quality, while good, could be even better.
For a short time during the winter I experimented with the stitched digital panorama, exploring the possibilities of new image shapes. It just about worked in a few cases, but I never enjoyed using digital cameras for landscape and I found the lack of one decisive moment to be something I couldn’t fully embrace, especially on windy days (if you’ve tried it you’ll understand). I also regretted that so many of the photographers whose work had inspired me clearly enjoyed and were themselves inspired by the large format process, and I began to feel that through the inconvenient progress of technology I’d been denied my own large format career.
June flowers in the low sun
I finally purchased a Shen Hao wooden field camera in the spirit of defiance (something which underpins many aspects of my daily life) and a Horseman 6×12 roll film back, which I thought would simultaneously satisfy my interest in that particular image shape, enable me to make my large format mistakes without too much expense, and also provide a contrasting field of view for when I did start using 5×4. I also ordered a Schneider 90mm Super Angulon lens of the less expensive non-XL type, which I thought would be a useful wide-angle on 5×4 but a little more restrained on 6x12cm.
I had a few doubts about using this new setup, but I’m pleased to say the struggle ceased after one or two trips and I realised that the backwards leap in technology might work quite well for me.
I realised that the backwards leap in technology might work quite well for me.
For readers interested in shoestring large format practice, I made the following adjustments to the HZX 45IIA camera after a few test pictures: There was some problematic flare from peripheral light which I ascribed to the glossy black paint on the rear standard’s wooden frame. I covered this surface (perpendicular to the film plane) in sticky black felt and then obtained a Lee bellows hood to trim down the light cone. I made a black plastic mask with a 1:2 ratio rectangular hole in it to achieve this more precisely for the 6×12 back, and fitted this to the front of the hood in such a way that it could be moved up and down, allowing for the use of rise and fall without vignetting. It was also easily removable for 5×4.
I made a similar mask for the ground glass, held in place by two sliding pins behind the spring clips and finally fitted a plastic fresnel lens (as sold in stationery shops for a pound or two) to the very dim screen, which with the wide angle lens was quite tricky to focus on. I also made a 6×12 viewing eyepiece showing the field of view for the 90mm lens using a set of concave and convex lenses set in plumbing tubes, which through appropriate masks fitted to the front would also show the full 5×4 field and the smaller fields of view for any longer lenses I might subsequently obtain. I did experiment with a Panasonic LX3 as a compositional aid, but found this to be too much of a distraction. Not only does it need to be turned on and off, but without using a separate grad for the digital camera the test exposures don’t remotely show the appropriate balance between land and sky that I’m aiming for in the final film images.
After a month or two sticking with my hitherto unwavered-from Velvia 50, I decided to try something completely different and bought a few rolls of Portra 160. I can’t remember what spurred me on to do this in the beginning, other than seeing other landscape photographers using it with success, but for all the new challenges in processing the images, it quickly became a revelation. I’ve never liked the compromises involved in using strong ND grads and with so many tall trees, irregular horizons and deep shadows dominating my park landscapes, the inevitable unnatural darkening effects increasingly annoyed me. Following the orthodoxy of nature photographers exclusively using transparency film (for reasons of historical reproduction practice as well as its visual characteristics I think), I’d always thought of negative’s latitude as a cover for exposure error rather than a considerable potential to deal with high contrast scenes. As I began to see how these new films could render the colours and tones of the real world, I began to look back on Velvia as being exaggerated and lurid. In any case my last box of it remains in the fridge and I’ve used nothing but Portra and Ektar ever since. The exposure, scanning technique and print preparation have all proved new arts to master (see below), but the best of the results have kept me motivated to persevere. I now see the combination of colour negative film and digital processing as potentially giving more natural results than Velvia does, at least in the kinds of environment that I find myself. At the same time the liberation from soft light has been exciting, and makes me feel that I can choose to depict whatever kind of weather and light interests me rather than being tied to short windows of opportunity when the world happens to be Velvia-friendly.
Late summer in the meadow
The new collaborators
Photographing Brockwell Park in large format from spring 2013, I slowly accumulated images I was happy with, returning to them frequently as I learnt new techniques in negative processing and came to better understand the film’s response to colour. The first autumn was quite productive as the equipment became more intuitive and the outdoor workflow more practiced (a very unromantic description for immortalising nature’s beauty with a box hewn from a walnut tree). As the winter progressed though, I began to doubt that any of my much-anticipated snowtographic opportunities would materialise. December came, and not a flake was to be seen, other than a small number of very expensive ones sold from the park ice cream van. At the same time a new factor began to loom into view, just as two small heads had surprisingly done so on a monochrome photograph taken in hospital. The need to speed up my photographic career while I had time was balanced by a niggling feeling that I ought to tidy up the house and make some room.
Winter morning at the Lake
The end of the winter brought beautiful foggy mornings when the carefree feeling of waiting outdoors had its last expression, and the subdued brilliance of the rising white sun was unlike any dawn I had hitherto witnessed here.
The end of the winter brought beautiful foggy mornings when the carefree feeling of waiting outdoors had its last expression, and the subdued brilliance of the rising white sun was unlike any dawn I had hitherto witnessed here. On an equally foggy evening on the outskirts of the majestic Richmond Park (and that’s another story) my twin daughters were born, decisively ending sleep’s long reign over the night, now a time for feeding, winding and changing nappies while the deep blue light of the sky wanes and waxes before wakeful eyes.
On our first day home after 3 weeks in hospital (the girls were born 3 weeks prematurely but in good health) I boldly made a loaf of sourdough bread, thus expressing my defiance of those advising me to cook and freeze soup months in advance as there wouldn’t be a moment in the day when I’d be able to cook. With a similar attitude I obtained a set of 5×4 film holders and with appropriate family negotiations won, returned to the eminently accessible Brockwell Park, safe in the knowledge that should synchronized vocal protests or excretion incidents befall my poor wife, I could be home again in minutes. I also realised that much as the new slow, expensive approach to photography seemed superficially inappropriate in the circumstances, it was in fact far more rewarding to succeed at than what might have been cobbled together through compromise. Better to return home with nothing exposed in beautiful, elegant large format than to spend time waiting to make images of meagre substance (not a criticism of anyone else’s small format images I should add, simply my own desire for a little creative resistance). Naturally when the opportunities did occur and I happened to be ready for them, the sense of satisfaction was considerably greater.
Crossing paths with approaching summer shower
For all the nappy changes I missed, all the emergency baths I escaped and all the washing up I postponed (I always do the washing up eventually) I have apologised. We’re a good team now and if they enjoyed nothing else from dad’s project, the girls loved being passed around at the private view.
The new exhibition
I was approached by Carnegie Library Gallery to put on a last-minute show, and with the idea of a second Brockwell Park exhibition having been floating around for some time, I finally agreed. Earlier experience with this venue had proved it to be a beautiful building that not enough people knew about, so this was with some caution. However the library’s excellent new manager managed to convince me that they’d made significant improvements in publicising events and that whatever I could do to plug the show would be reinforced on their well-followed social media pages. The gallery room had also been repainted, which I couldn’t ignore.
With only a few weeks to put on an entire show, I immediately set out to do some new work, hoping to add some large and colourful summer showpieces to the existing set of panoramic photographs. I extravagantly added a box of Kodak Ektar to the small stock of 5×4 Portra that I’d been slowly working through (a sudden change of heart, as up until an accidentally successful picture I thought it was a little awkward to use) and set out to be lucky with the weather. I think I was, and the rapidity with which I used it up was countered only by the miserable slowness with which I cleaned the dust off all the scans.
Red light on the poppy stalks
I decided to adopt the popular contemporary approach of printing the images with a border and hanging them unframed.
With so little time and money to mount the show as well as the difficulty of framing the panoramic images (no ready-made frames seem to exist in the 1:2 aspect ratio, other than one Nielsen model that was too large) I decided to adopt the popular contemporary approach of printing the images with a border and hanging them unframed. I’d already printed many of the panoramic photographs for local events (one of my reasons for accepting the show) and had these mounted on board and displayed in plastic retail sleeves (cellophane envelopes) for display in a print rack. As the gallery is full of small children with jammy hands, I decided to hang these prints as they were and hope the plastic wouldn’t interfere with viewing too much. I printed six of the newer 5×4 photographs on 20×24” paper with borders, and found much better quality archival print display sleeves for these. I hung them all on the gallery hanging system (vertical hanging rods with sliding hooks on them, to which I attached bulldog clips) without any other support. The rods moved horizontally on metal rails near the ceiling, or used to before the smart new paint job, and much of my time hanging the show was spent pounding the tops of the rods with a telegraph pole-length window-opening hook, a process reminiscent of a furious pole vaulter vainly attempting to dislodge the bar after a rival’s successful attempt.
Gallery
Gallery
One other eccentric refinement to my printing workflow which I managed to develop just before the show was a paper treatment to enable me to write on the prints with ink or paint. In my window-mounting days I’d always titled and signed the mountboard with calligraphic lettering (using a chisel-cut pencil), but found that this didn’t work on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag. The pencil made little impact and any ink would bleed hopelessly. Having tried tens of different mixtures of ink, paint and glue (sometimes with added Tipex), I finally spoke to a digital printing specialist at my local printing facility, and he recommended trying a UV protection polymer print spray (Lyson/Marrutt Print Guard). I tried spraying an offcut and was amazed to find that this treatment worked very well – the paper surface was sufficiently sealed to allow me to use a proper copperplate nib, whose sharp points I had expected to score the soft paper and lift fibres. Cautious about drawing attention away from the images with stark black lettering, I mixed up a very light grey gouache to match the tone of the pencil I’d previously used. I’m quite pleased with the results, despite the risk of spoiling expensive prints and the extra time it takes to spray them with three or four coats. It seems like something that could add to the individual appeal of digital prints, which I sometimes worry are a little too easily reproducible once the files are prepared.
Print lettering
Exhibition progress
The private view went fairly well despite being held on a Monday night. There were a few cases of people chatting in groups and ignoring the pictures, but the main source of distraction, the two beautiful babies, did lead to some people staying later than they would otherwise have done. At the end of the show, the venture was moderately in profit (not bad considering the loss that my previous show sustained in the same venue) and if no more of the prints had sold than the two or three in the private view, there was also my range of affordable Brockwell Park greetings cards that the library have been kindly selling. In fact I’ve had quite a few print orders following on from the show, so in retrospect the entire venture was definitely financially worthwhile. Furthermore there’s one bottle of white wine remaining after the opening. It’s of a vinegary quality, but as fatherhood prevents me from drinking it anyway, it simply serves to make it look as if I have a better-stocked drinks corner-of-cupboard. There’s also a bag of crisps I’m saving for a special occasion.
Printing practice
A few terse notes on the printing process that may fascinate or bore: All the negatives were scanned using a Hasselblad Flextight scanner which I hire at my local lab for a very reasonable rate. The files were saved in the .fff “raw” format which I process as positives in the Flexcolor program at home (simply setting the contrast to avoid any clipping and reducing automatic sharpening). The method for inverting the images is mostly as formulated and described by Tim in this magazine, but rather than just relying on RGB curves to set the colour balance I also use Selective Color to adjust specific hues where I find the film’s characteristics to be too unnatural. In particular I always adjust the greens, removing cyan, adding magenta and usually black to reduce luminance. I sometimes have to add a further Hue/Saturation layer to reduce blue/green saturation and spend quite a lot of time staring at leaves out the window. I tend to look at images individually to decide which “Portra” or “Ektar” characteristics I like and which I’d prefer to be closer to nature.
The beauty of the unlocked garden
As a lot of the images feature cloudy skies, I try to separate sky from land in order to give it a separate contrast curve and compensate for any flatness in the lighter tones (which can be disappointing to a former transparency user). I usually make a contrast curve layer for the land and then make a rough polygonal selection along the border with the sky. I then feather this selection and delete that part of the layer. Without deselecting, I open up a new curves layer which automatically covers the remaining part of the image (the sky) with a perfect match. I make my contrast curve for the relevant sky tones, and when there’s little overlap between sky and land tones I can also adjust the bottom part of the curve to avoid the feathered part of the sky curve darkening the land. After this I normally need to make small adjustments to the overlap area using further curves layers, but on the whole it seems to work and even if I used a grad for the exposure, all the tonal information in the land is there to be used somehow.
New vista august evening
I often add a penultimate solid mid grey layer, which through appropriate blending (set to affect the darker tones, then to “color” mode) reduces the shadow saturation in a fairly easy way. The final layer is a straight curves layer (no points) which I use with the eyedropper to check black and white points – I aim for the black point to be in the region of 10-15 points above zero, as this seems to give the best balance of deep blacks and shadow detail in the print (at least with the specific printers, inks and paper at my printing lab). I save the final printing files as 16 bit TIFFs, resize, sharpen the Lab luminosity channel with Smart Sharpen and add borders. Finally I have my lab print the files on Photo Rag using relative colorimetric rendering intent (which seems to give better tonal separation in the highlights) and carry the prints from the spacious and clean lab to my small workspace at home, very near to the domain of jam, turmeric, oil and baby poo.
Field notes
All images: Shen Hao HZX 45IIA wood field camera with Schneider 90mm Super Angulon. Kodak Portra 160 (most of the panoramic images) and Ektar 100 (most of the 5×4 format photographs). All Ektar images were made using a Lee 0.3 ND hard grad on the skies (a recent upgrade from the cheap Hitech set I’ve had for a while – much more neutral, although I’m disappointed with how soft the transition is). Exposures determined using a Pentax Spotmeter.
The fountain in fog
Max A Rush
www.maxarush.com
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