A Change of Pace

As summer came to an end, I took a few weeks off from the camera to rethink and reassess my photography goals.

Towards the end of summer, I started to feel a little bit stagnated with my photography and felt like I needed to make some changes if I was to keep growing, evolving, and, most importantly, enjoying the time I spent out with my camera.

Feeling like I needed a new direction I have decided that for the foreseeable future, I'll be putting the more street and documentary style photography on the back burner and be making more of an effort to get out into the UK landscape and photograph more of our islands’ wilder spaces.

This represents something of a coming full circle moment for me as this sort of style or genre of traditional landscape photography is where I started around 2012.

Back then my photographic inspirations were large format landscape photographers such as Peter Dombrovskis, David Muench, David Ward, Charlie Waite and especially Joe Cornish. Having always wanted to photograph landscapes using film and especially large format transparency film, now seems like the perfect chance to fulfil that ambition.

I do have some experience shooting 5x4 black and white film when a few years ago I made a series of lith prints made in the darkroom contact printed from large format negatives on to darkroom fibre based papers so the large format camera is not completely alien to me. I still feel however that a steep learning curve awaits me as I have never shot any slide film at all and certainly not in large format

Kit wise I have rather hastily put together a basic large format kit consisting off a Horseman 45l, Fujinon SW 90mm f8 and a Schneider Symmar S 150mm f5.6 and a Benro C3780TN tripod plus all the extra bits and bobs needed such as wide angle bellows, film holders, cable releases, darkcloth etc.

The film stock I plan on shooting the most of is Kodak E100 5x4 sheet film which represents a significant financial commitment for the hobbyist photographer especially as I will be initially sending the film to a lab for processing and scanning untill I can develop my own scanning process at home. With this in mind shooting in a disciplined way will be the order of the day a far cry from the run and gun small format style of street phototography that I have been used to but a that's the whole point of this change of direction I suppose.

After a couple of trips out into the Yorkshire Dales, I'm now nervously waiting for my first few sheets to be processed and returned from the lab. I already know that those sheets of film hold nothing remarkable image-wise but if I have a reasonably sharp, half-decent exposure with no light leaks or any other nasty surprises then I'll be happy and consider it a good start.

I'll keep you posted.