Having given me the cover back in October the wonderful team at B+W Photography magazine have very kindly done a larger spread on my work which has given me added motivation to go out and create a larger body of work based around a narrative. I hope to start this shortly but in the mean time have a look at the full article by clicking on View below.
Tintype
A Fickle Mistress
I am working a lot with Collodion at the moment, the UV is strong, the sky is blue and it is not to hot. The more I learn about Collodion the harder it gets. When I first started out with the process I loved all of the swirls and whirls and in a way I still do but I want to master the process, not have the process master me. Here is a perfect example, a strong image but there is heavy fog on the right in the shadow area and now I have to go off and try and work out what is causing this and once I work that out I then have to learn how to correct it. Collodion is a fickle mistress but as is the way with mistresses there is never a dull moment.
Read MoreSascha and Kai.
A recent shot from the weekend.
Sascha and Kai
This is a recent photograph taken using the Wet Plate Collodion process of a friends two children Sascha and Kai. About five years ago I saw an image by an American photographer called Joni Sternbach, it was from a series she had produced called Surfland. I literally fell in love with her images and after two months of reading up on the process I took the plunge and flew to Manchester where I spent a weekend taking a Wet Plate Collodion workshop with John Brewer. After this I was totally hooked and began the long process of gathering all of the necessary equipment and chemicals that are needed to produce Collodion images. This took months and when I was nearly ready to start shooting I went off to Laycock Abbey which was once the home of Henry Fox Talbot , one of the founding fathers of photography. Here I was fortunate to take a course with Mark Osterman and his wife France Scully Osterman. Mark is Photographic Process Historian at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. France is an educator and artist and also a guest scholar at George Eastman House and it was such a pleasure to learn from them. After three fascinating days I returned to France with a new car, a new camera and a boot load of chemicals and started my own journey into the magical world of Wet Plate Collodion.