Pennine Lines w/c 14 October 2024
|| Warmer again || Hints of possibility ||
August Sample Page || 2025 Calendar
|| Focus On... ||
2025 Calendar
I’m going to cut to the chase here, not sugarcoating this one… I have a calendar to sell.
As I have mentioned in previous emails and on Instagram, I am excited to be able to unveil this one to you, the loyal subscribers to my weekly email. This is a calendar of my Peak landscape images from what I think of as my neck of the woods - the eastern gritstone edges and the central limestone. It's an area close to my heart and I know it’s a special place for a lot of you too, so I hope this collection of images does the place justice but also drops in a few surprises for you. The final selection of images will stay under wraps until the calendars ship, but what I can say is none of these images have been available for sale before in any form, and all twelve images for this are shot on 5x4” transparency film. This is something I mention a lot, so for the non-photographers out there who might not be down with the terminology, what exactly does this exactly mean?
Basically imagine a normal piece of 35mm film or a slide, the sort of thing you’ll be familiar with, if you’re familiar with film at all. Like if your dad or grandad used to get out an old slide carousel of Kodachromes from the 1970s and stick them in the projector set up in their front room back in the day. “Here’s your aunty Janice stood on the beach at Bridlington” - that sort of thing. Well the little bits of film there are 24x36mm (the same stuff they used to shoot Hollywood movies on, cinema film), the size now referred to as ‘full frame’ in the digital world. It’s about the size of a large postage stamp, and a bit of film of that size of any given type has a certain amount of film grain and can hold a certain amount of detail. So if that’s not enough detail you need to get a bigger bit of film. Enter what’s known as ‘Medium Format’ film, which is about 60mm wide, so it has two to four times as much detail and needs a bigger camera to shoot it. And if you want to go for more detail still, meaning sharper images, better tonality, and less film grain, then you go for what is known as ‘Large Format’, which is film 5x4” (127x100mm) or larger still, and of course needing a much bigger camera. So a piece of 5x4” film holds about 14 times the detail of a frame of 35mm film - that’s a lotta detail.
So what about “transparency film”? Well this means it’s like those old slides of you grandad’s, in that you can pick it up and hold it up to the light and see the image. It’s not a negative, it’s a positive image. It’s the type of film with just about the most rich and vivid yet faithful colour, and the finest grain, hence it’s long been the choice of serious landscape art photographers right up until, and indeed long after, the advent of digital imaging. Yet it is the hardest to shoot; it is very punishing of incorrect exposure, the contrast is way too high for a lot of situations, it’s slow (in my case ISO 50) and it’s the most expensive film to shoot and process. And that’s before the added complication that the stuff I shoot, Fuji Velvia, isn’t even manufactured any more in large format sizes.
Large format also necessitates using weird-ass Victorian-looking cameras. A photographer from the 1870s stepping out of a time machine wouldn’t be able to operate my digital camera, or even recognise it as a camera at all, but they’d be right at home with my 5x4” camera. It’s a slow and contemplative process, it takes a while to set up and take down, there’s no automation, no AI taking the wheel, no auto-anything, so you’re in charge of everything, AND you’ve got to load the film in individual sheets into holders before you go out, in complete darkness, without getting dust all over it. Oh and I forgot to mention that when you’re composing your image in the camera the view you get on the screen at the back is upside down. Understandably, this is not for everyone….it’s hard work, it’s slow and inconvenient, it’s time-consuming, you look like a complete nutter doing it and it’s soul-destroying and expensive if you cock it up.
However, in the right light, when you get the right subject and all the technical elements nailed down it’s just an incredible way to make images. I get the same visceral excitement viewing the images on the lightbox today as I did when I first started out with it all. If you’ve not seen it, there’s a bit more background on my whole approach to this in the second half of the Wedge video I was fortunate enough to appear in a couple of years back.
So, I hope a few of you lot buy some calendars and some prints in the run up to Christmas as it makes it a bit easier to justify the time I put into this - your support is very much appreciated. In order to make the calendar in particular work out for everyone - i.e. keeping the price manageable for you, and the margin worthwhile for me - I’m making this one available by pre-order only. I will close orders on 16th November to give us time for the print run and for muggins here to pack and ship them all to you in early December in good time for Christmas. There’s also a local pickup option for anyone local to Sheffield too, and just to get the ball rolling you email subscribers can have 15% off the calendars if you stick your order in this week, ending midnight on Friday. Use the code below at checkout, and you can see full details on the ordering page here. If you’ve read this far, thanks for your support and I hope this sorts out a few Christmas presents for the hard-to-buy-for relatives. Cheers.
Early-bird discount code for the 2025 Calendar, valid until midnight on Friday 18th Oct:
YOUSNOOZEYOULOSE
|| Recently Through The Lens ||
A little B-roll taster from a dawn shoot at Over Owler Tor
|| Fresh Prints ||
A couple of winter Stanage favourites from the Print Shop.
