Taking the air

Ah there she is herself, taking the air on Portstewart Prom:

On Cooltone RC paper.  Some-one tried to add a bit of vignetting and as you can see make a right hames of it.  Eejit.  He should have left it well alone...some people never learn, eh?

Al fresco dining in The Liberties

Portstewart Prom (the place where people come to promenade in the late afternoon) was buzzing the other evening.  And rightly so, as the weather was most clement.  People were out in force and quite a number were having their fish and chips al fresco:

I know - shadows!  I was a bit far away with the rangefinder so had to crank up the enlarger a bit.

Tonight is the Big Night for the Prom - it's North West 200 week, where those mad eejits race around the roads in their motorbikes, doing 200+mph.  John McGuinness crashed today during practice and broke his leg - that would be John McGuinness with over 20 wins in the Isle of Man TT races, second only to the late great Joey Dunlop.  Mr McGuinness is 45 years old, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, Friday is the day before the big race day and 'tis customary for visitors (of which there are a great number) to descend on Portstewart Prom for the craic and to see the fireworks.  I'm not a great one for crowds but I might dander down and see what gives.  Who knows, I might even load some fresh-ish HP5+ into a camera just for the occasion.  

If you really want An Irish Republic

It has, believe it or not, taken me two days to produce this masterpiece:

My old Uni friend Simon, his partner Catherine and I took the train to Derry-Londonderry last Saturday and after the obligatory visit to the Guildhall to see the exhibition about the 17th Century Plantation of Ulster and the similarly obligatory walk around the Walls (which Simon and I first did about 35 years ago) we dandered up the town before getting the train back to Coleraine.  Towards the top of Shipquay St is the War Memorial and I snapped Simon as he leant over the railings in a pensive sort of mood.  I liked the Sinn Fein election posters against the backdrop of the 1927 War Memorial - kind of tells you all you need to know about this part of the world, really.

Anyway, due to shooting into the sun the subject brightness range was immense and the first straight print had no tone whatsoever in the sky.  That print went in the bin.  I tried a simple burn in and it looked awful so after a bit of thought I figured out that perhaps this was a negative that might benefit from pre-flashing.  I'd never done it before so read all I could about it in a short space of time - like here, from Ilford.  If you are into darkroom printing then you probably already know about the toe and the shoulder of the negative-density exposure curve.  Pre-flashing gets over the inertia of the paper, gets up past the toe and gives you a chance to get a little more tone into the paper for negatives where the highlight detail might normally be lost.  But don't take my word for it  - do your own research, as they say.

So I did a pre-flash test print - wound the enlarger up high, closed down the lens and set filtration to 00.  As a result I reckoned that for my situation, using Ilford Warmtone RC I could get away with about 4s before tone started to show on the paper.  So I pre-flashed a few sheets.  I did wonder how long the paper would hold it's 'pre-flash' for and the only mention I could get of it was from Roger Hicks, who reckoned a few hours to a day.  Good enough, anyway.

My first attempts were moderately successful - I got tone and detail in the sky but lost a lot of sparkle in the rest of the print:

So I regrouped and read some more and someone somewhere said that when pre-flashing it was appropriate to increase the contrast in the rest of the print and decrease the exposure.  Makes sense I guess when you think about it since you're effectively fogging the print a little...I think.  Anyway, this afternoon I took a deep breath and ventured forth again into the darkroom to try just that and yes, pretty much it worked.

I ended up pre-flashing at grade 0, printing at higher contrast/lower exposure than suggested (grade 4), burning in the sky at grades 2 and also grade 4, an additional burn-in at grade 4 for the top half of the print and lower-left (Simon's jacket) and a 9s dodge around Simon's face.   Whew.  After all that we get the result shown at the top of the page and shown here again just 'cos:

It's been a 2-day self-taught workshop with one negative and while 24 hours ago I never wanted to see that negative again now I think Yes, I can deal with it.  I'm happy.

A Professor Calls

Me old mate Simon and his partner were over last weekend.   I met Simon on my very first day at Bath University, way, way back in 1981 - he had the room next to mine.  That's only what, 36 years ago.  Nothing, really.

Ideally there'd be a stunning Irish backdrop out the window, but no, I managed to catch some random building with scaffolding.  Ah well.  This isn't the best shot in the world but it's natural and I like it.  Kentmere VC paper.

Simon studied Pharmacy, I was reading Maths.  Not that I read enough, really.  But still, can't go back now, eh?  Interestingly we both ended up in academia, although he was a bit more successful than I was.  Nowadays he runs a big research lab somewhere in Glasgow and spends shed-loads of £s designing anti-cancer drugs, while I just annoy everyone around me by pointing old cameras at them and muttering about f-stops and shutter speeds.  

It was good to catch up with him and his partner Catherine.  You might see some more prints of our couple of days together sometime soon, when I get around to it.  It is hard to be in the darkroom these days, when the sun is out and the air is warm.  Goodness knows that doesn't happen very often around The Liberties, so you have to make the most of it when it does.  Top up the Vitamin D and stuff - good to protect against osteoporosis, innit.  They tell me there's an osteoporosis epidemic coming, they do ('they' would be the medical people I have occasion to hang about with on a regular basis).  Y'see the media have everyone running scared of skin cancer, and so people slap on the old Factor 30 at the slightest hint of sunshine.  Thing is, I'm told, you need your 30mins of sunshine every day during the summer in order to absorb enough Vit D to last you the rest of the year.  Or else you're in trouble - or will be, down the line.

Brooke Park, Derry

We were in Derry/Londonderry the other day, visiting my mother-in-law.   Missy and I went for a dander about in nearby Brooke Park and very nice it was too.  Brooke Park, by the way, has just undergone a major re-vamp, although where the £5.6 million went I'm not entirely sure - although there was a swanky new cafe in the middle of it, all concrete and glass and what have you which I'm sure swallowed a large chunk of it.

I know, I know - that old underexposure gremlin raising its ugly head again.  That's because I was back using the rangefinder after a long lay-off in favour of the Square-shooter.  First-world problems, I know.  Looking down towards St Eugene's Cathedral.

Brooke Park.  Interesting history - like most places in Derry, to be honest.  In the centre of Brooke Park was a building created in 1839 using the legacy from a Donegal Businessman Mr John Gwyn, who left a small fortune (£40,000) for the provision for orphaned boys (Mr Gwyn being orphaned at an early age).  So I do the swanky new cafe a disservice, since it is on the site of the original Gywn Institute (and with the original cornerstone and a 'time-capsule' embedded in its foundations, apparently).   Gywns' Institute, by the way, has been a children's home (1840-1901), museum, library, pathological laboratory, welfare food centre and civil defence assembly point before being firebombed during "The Troubles" and subsequently demolished.  But it lives again, in the form of the cafe.  I wish I'd taken a photograph of it now.  It's just to the right of the bench in the snap above...

It seems that the actual park came after Gwyn's Institute and opened in 1901, offering 'a place of outdoor recreation for the citizens of Londonderry and to be a place where in particular the working man could enjoy on the Sabbath day his pipe and a pleasant walk or rest after the labours of a severe week's toil'.  A grand Victorian park, then.  Such was the legacy of a certain James Hood Brooke, a Presbyterian philanthropist. Mr Brooke died in 1865 and directed the trustees of his will to procure lands for a public space - specifically stating that the space should remain open on Sundays.  I suspect that was fairly radical for the times and typical of those Presbyterian dissenters.  The monies weren't sufficient for the lands on the Gywn estate and The Honourable The Irish Society agreed to stump up the difference, provided that once the lands were laid out they would be transferred to the Londonderry Corporation and forever maintained by them in perpetuity in accordance with the provisions of the Public Parks (Ireland) Act.  So it's a People's Park - and Mr Brooke is surely content with that, wherever he is.

Christ Church, at the lower end of Brooke Park - just opposite St Eugene's Cathedral. c1830.

On the western slopes of Derry/Londonderry, Brooke Park is all up and down.  A pleasant space, though, in-between the very busy Northland Road and less busy Rosemount Avenue.   Next time I'll take some better snaps - I hope!  Actually next time I've promised Missy that we will go into Christ Church and St Eugene's Cathedral.  All being well it will be recorded on some Ilford film and reproduced here for the legions of readers of this blog.  Indeed.

Me and trees

I seem to take a lot of photographs of trees.  I like their natural beauty, the seeming randomness of the branches and just the sheer size these things can grow to.  And the age they can grow to - some, they reckon, are several thousand years old.  What a tale they could tell, eh? Another reason I think is that where I grew up there were a lot of them - a very strong, early memory for me is standing in the garden of my parents' house of an early autumn evening, light fading, strong wind blowing.  The noise of the wind in the leaves was captivating - I seem to remember standing there for a long time, fascinated by it all.  Early autumn is still one of my favourite times of the year.

Anyway, here's one of those tree-things I snapped up in Derry/Londonderry's Brooke Park, a short walk from my mother-in-law's house:

M6, HP5+ on Ilford Cooltone. 8"x10" print.

Hard Times

Times are hard in the McNeill household - just look at the clothes my poor daughter has to go about in:

Downhill Forest - sitting on a cycle ramp which someone has knocked together in the middle of the forest, as you do. 6x6 neg, 50mm lens, probably f/4.  Ilford Warmtone (I think) and sepia toned.

We walked around the other side of the ramp and I snapped her up again.  I twiddled the settings and the print has a bit more life about it that the first one: