Emily and the invisible chair

I did a job for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine last week. Here's my assistant for the day, lovely Emily, sitting on thin air.

Sian Evans' tools

Today I took a portrait of jewellery designer and maker Sian Evans in her studio. http://www.sejewellery.com/ .She has an amazing amount of odd and beutiful specialist tools. Here is a small selection:

I will post some of the portraits soon.

Solarplate

For the last few months I have been so lucky to have access to the printmaking workshop at Camberwell College through a scheme called Artists' Access to Art Colleges.
I have been working on improving my technique in making solarplate prints. Solarplate is similar to photo etching but uses a polymer instead of metal and there is no need for acids to process the plate.
I am making a limited edition artist's book of a series of glass plate negatives found around 20 years ago in an old printing house in the ex GDR. I have always wanted to do something with them and have finally found the right format.
Here are two test prints, a positive and a negative solarplate print of one of the glass plates:

Morning light

This is a polaroid I took recently during set up for a portrait. Sadly with someone in the shot it didn't look right anymore... But I like it like this.

Fogged

I took a portrait of friend, singer and performer Gemma Storr last week. I shot it mainly digitally but at the end of the session I took a few shots with my 5x4. To add to the weird colours created by using coloured gels I used film I knew to be old and fogged for these large format shots. Interesting what happens when the film gets partially exposed. One sheet became almost entirely monochrome.

Etching

I was in Berlin recently learning a bit about etching at Eva Pietzker's great workshop Druckstelle. My main interest was and still is photo etching, for which there are various techniques. Photo etching was only a small part of the workshop I took part in however and the more satisfying and interesting prints I produced were nothing to do with photography. The investigation into photo etching will continue... but in the meantime here are my two favourite prints produced during the week in Berlin.

New Camera

I am very lucky to have come into possession of a beautiful arca swiss 5x4 camera recently. I played with it a bit for the first time today. I took some polaroids and exposed two sheets of film. For now here are the polaroids; complete with bellows casting shadows... I am learning: