Things we’ll miss about being at college
We’ll miss:
- the black and white developing cells, with the deep tanks full of the all right chemicals kept at the all right temperatures, and the darkroom with its zippy machine printer and deep zinc sinks, drying cabinets and that huge lightbox.
(who said a P&S couldn’t do DOF?)
We won’t miss:
- the digital ‘darkroom’ with its dazzling flourescent lights and those beachballing, beachballing, beachballing iMacs, and the scanners with their speciality vertical line-creation feature. We especially won’t miss equipment we were never allowed to use.
We’ll miss:
- every single instance that a technician or instructor spent that bit of extra time beyond the call of duty mixing chemicals, adjusting reflectors, flagging lights, checking bulbs, testing batteries, cleaning lenses, loading and unloading dark slides. You know who you are and you’ll never be forgotten.
We won’t miss:
- the bod who wants a full time contract so that they can leave early at 4pm. Does every single organisation have one of those? Perhaps.
We’ll miss:
- Judith’s ready smile and her perfect Fair Trade coffee.
We won’t miss:
- Nestle and Cocacola machines. Why does every single educational institution have those damnable things? Everywhere? Some students have been known to get them turfed out, and there was at least one NSU effort to get rid of them altogether. Ah well.
What will you miss?
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Trading in and saying goodbye
We don’t often talk about equipment on this site. It’s not that camera type or whatever isn’t important. The school of thought that goes along the lines that it’s the photographer that matters is quite true, of course, but the right tool in the right hands is the key. Whether that’s a £10 Holga or a 50p charity shop buy, simply finding what those tools might be for you, an individual photographer, is probably half the battle.
Two cameras went at the end of last week, at the beginning of what will be the start of a major equipment cull. The Linhof Technica simply wasn’t being used enough, but there are some fine 6×9 black and white lith prints drying to attest to the loveliness of its camera movements. If you’re interested, contact Paul Cordes at Classic Photographics. It’s a truly lovely kit: roll film with plate camera actions.
The Xpan is much missed, but is actually gone once and forever to a very happy buyer. The results of a year in 2.71 is going to be completed on these pages when all have been scanned. Other cameras are going to be sold (or given away), and listed on these pages.
The slide show linked above is the first Roll of film from the new 35mm camera in full time use from now on. The Kodakcolor VR Plus was 50p per roll in Aldi, and is still in date to Sept 09. Developed at Asda in Hartlepool for something like £0.97p. Be good to know what you folks think. Duplicates were taken out, but apart from that, this is the complete roll, testing for sharpness, contrast handling, you know.
Popularity: 12% [?]
New (old) 35mm camera(s)
Sharp as a tack, as the old guard used to say. More to come, obviously. There are a couple of rolls of Ilford HP5 hanging in a drying cabinet as well as the rest of this Roll 1, a 50p Kodak 200 ISO something-or-other that came out rather well.
The photograph here was to test sharpness: it’s of one of the exhibits in the Rye Hill Graphics course final show. There’s some really great work to see, most obsessed with death or Python or both. Marvellous.
Not quite so sharp are the results from a digital and a film camera, same manufacturer, both compacts. More on this to follow, since it’s something photographers get asked about an awful lot.
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