The iphone view of the pool. The two conical shapes on the horizon are the Bass Rock island on the left and North Berwick Law on the southern shore of the estuary. Both are volcanic plugs. The rounded one in the centre is, I think, Traprain Law in East Lothian.Yes, straight from the "Don't do as I do, do as I say" department of the Online Darkroom comes a tale of what might have been that ..read more

Long term readers will know that I’m not normally a big fan of “one lens” photography, preferring a few focal lengths when I’m out and about.With a Rollei TLR you don’t really have an option which is probably the main reason my 2.8F, lovely though it is, doesn’t see a lot of use. A few weeks ago, however, we drove down to Balsall Common, not far from Coventry, for a few days to see our daughter ..read more

I've been feeling for a while now that I needed something to give me some extra motivation and get me heading out the door with a camera. For the last several months - probably most of the year to be honest - the only photography I've done is when I'm out with Phil on one of our monthly-ish photo trips to a place of interest in Tayside or Fife.When you've photographed most of the landscapes ..read more

 No more HP5 mottling after this post - promise. I thought I’d use it to answer a reader who asked why I kept on using the defective 120 rolls if I knew they had issues. That’s a fair question suggesting, as it does, that I might be suffering from one of the signs of madness - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.The problem was that the mottling wasn’t always ..read more

Following on from my previous post about mottled HP5, here’s another example of the fault. The question is, can I use it to my advantage?The pictures are from the very last roll of the defective film I had and, believe it or not, are from 6x9 negative scans. They’re possibly the roughest MF shots you’ve seen for a long time. However, I was looking at them and wondering if the mottling has maybe ..read more

Credit where credit’s due. I bought ten rolls of 120 HP5 a few years back but found quite a bit of mottling (see below) in many smooth toned areas such as skies. It was so bad that I used about half the rolls and put the rest away. Spending time and money driving around looking for pics only to come back with something that was largely unusable was pretty pointless. Not every frame was spoiled ..read more

Just half a mile from the famous Glamis Castle in Angus where the Queen Mother spent her childhood is a small dam that was built to provide power to the village that gives the castle it's name. It's an unprepossessing affair, just a simple stone-built dam holding back the Glen Ogilvie Burn.For our family, however, it was a regular haunt, a popular destination for a drive in the countryside and an ..read more

A squall over the North Sea. There's a little bit of dramatic licence in the print but not too much. All of the images in this post, except the Mamiya Press shots at the bottom, are scans of prints made on Ilford's MGV resin coated paper. It's very good stuff.Over the last few years, a strange thing has happened to me. I genuinely think I prefer the look of 35mm prints to those from medium format ..read more

Readers who stop by both this blog and that of my pal, Phil Rogers, must be wondering why Phil has written about a few photo days out we've enjoyed together over the last couple of months but nothing has yet appeared on these hallowed pages.The reason is fairly straightforward - I've not had anything to write about until recently. My choice of weapons on our first outings was Nikon 35mm gear and ..read more

Shelter, MonifiethI suspect we're all guilty from time to time of obsessing about grain and sharpness in a print but how much attention do we give to balance? Good printers are aware of the need for harmonious tonality all the time. Eddie Ephraums was one of those who used to view his prints upside down and in a mirror to see if any imbalance in a specific area was pulling the image in the wrong ..read more