Blur Magazine SP03 Honoured to be featured!

I am really delighted to be featured in the Pinhole section of the current issue of Blur Magazine 30. I would like to thank Mauricio Sapata for giving me a call and this wonderful opportunity. Blur Magazine is a beautiful online publication consistently high in the production and choice of photographers. I am honoured to be included.

Work in Square Magazine SP03

I am really pleased to tell you that I have work in Square Magazine SP03 March 2013, many thanks to Christophe Dillinger for the inclusion in this wonderful edition.
These are just some quick screen grabs!

Right hand page is mine, it was made a while back while concentrating on a project called 'Transcience' about the figure in the landscape.

Facing Up to a project

More experiments from the summer. I was doing rather a lot of lumen prints and while at a festival had been looking at all the tents around me and I was chatting with friends.

I had been looking at someone quite intently for some time and then I looked away and stared at the side of the bell tent, I had a 'vision' an afterimage so clear that since we had been discussing the Turin shroud and how the oils etc may have created the image on the cloth it seemed only fitting that I would try and recreate this apparition as a lumen print. 

I don't have particularly oily skin but seeing as it was high summer and we were slathered in sun cream I thought this would act as a suitable barrier.

The second image has just been auto corrected in PS to bring out the image more nothing else was done. I do actually like the original image and I was quite pleased with the way the face appeared.

So I used grade 1 Ilford paper and got my subjects to start on one side of their face and roll the paper to the other, much like the cloth would be if draped over a face. These were then put out into the sun for four hours under glass. My subject for the first image had a moustache and beard and this can clearly be seen on the paper.  The dark areas are where the sun has managed to reach the surface of the paper and it started to change quite quickly. 

 The first image was not as strong as hoped for but this was also of a child and quite small on the paper, once it was corrected it was only slightly more visible.

I did however discover that sun cream and emulsion doesn't do great things to your skin, it was a bit like kissing a battery and so I didn't redo the childs face!

                                         

This is an image of my face, it was rolled and so looks enormous,  the image was stronger before it was fixed but I managed to pull out some of the contrasts when corrected. I like the ghostly image though. It is just easier to see the results in the corrected ones.

The last images of this series from the festival are again mine but I shall endeavour to capture more from willing subjects!

                                           

This last image I think has really worked, though not necessarily very complimentary, it clearly has form.

Deceased Experiment Unexpectedly Terminated!

Over the summer I started doing a number of experiments using the process of Lumen Printing.I have been doing Lumens for some time and also doing small workshops but this summer I got the opportunity to do some experiments for myself. One of them was a rather spontaneous affair. I was presented one day with a mouse, a dead one, our cat is young and doesn't quite get the hunter thing and so has only just started using his 'skills'


This poor little corpse had been placed in quite a ceremonious way in the centre of a circular patch of earth in our garden(post paddling pool)

Well, what was I supposed to do with this gift, It seemed only fitting and appropriate that it joined the selection of flowers and moths and other ephemera being Lumen Printed in the garden. The little body was laid out on a sheet of BW Ilford Ilfospeed grade 1 paper and a sheet of glass laid upon it's delicate little form, much like the lid on a coffin made for Snow White!

The first image was set out for a day, I don't really know why I just didn't do the normal few hours but I think the sky was a little dull. Subsequent images varied form a day to actually being left for ten of them as I forgot and went on Holiday. It did not seem to do that one any harm.

Each time the mouse was moved it was carefully slid across onto another piece of paper so as not to damage it, though after the second day it was more like a popsicle on its very stiff tale than I would have imagined.

My original intent was to record the whole process of decomposition from day one, until it became skeletal and the print would have just had a selection of bones surrounded by flora, unfortunately this has been cut short by the intervention of some rather desperate and inconsiderate animal with a serious lack of discerning taste buds. One morning I came out to find that after almost four weeks or so of work the contact frames that had been lying out in the sun had all been turned over and the photo paper was strewn all over the garden. It wasn't the wind, as no interest had been paid to the other prints as they were not containing rather smelly decaying 'meat' believe me I searched around for them but they had gone.

I was a little dismayed as the body was reducing and it would have been great to see the intact skeleton but maybe this is too macabre. I was so focused on producing the prints and creating a series, anyway I have ten images of this mouse.

I had also been 'given' another to work with but that too had gone and so it was back to the flora and fauna and insect world for me until I am graced with another one from my mad cat.

Fun With Ficcus!

Patience can be a virtue sometimes, especially when you are waiting for a particular image to develop and develop it does, very very slowly. I was cutting back the plant jungle in my front garden one morning during the summer and looking down I could see the beautiful remains of the leaves on the concrete and surrounding these were black stains. These stains were from the Ficcus plant, which was hanging over the wall and above the pavement.This got me thinking that if the concrete was a suitable substrate for the juice and it seemed pretty difficult to remove with water then what would it be like if it was on paper!

 I removed some of the berries which form in interesting bunches. The berries were hard and black, difficult to crush under ones fingers and so I used a pestle and mortar and started pulping them. It takes some time to get a bunch of these berries crushed enough, they are rich in colour but need to have a liquid added in order to carry that colour.

I used rainwater which was there in front of me, lazy I know but I wanted to keep it as natural as possible. I made enough to push through a small sieve and remove any of the grittier bits that were from the husks and the seeds.

I suppose I got enough liquid to cover approximately an A4 piece a couple of times. I coated an A6 watercolour paper from a Windsor and Newton pad and did this twice allowing the first layer to dry in the dark and then I let the second layer dry in the dark as well.

 I made a digital negative from a Sprocket Rocket picture of a Tree that I had used before and the contrast was quite high on this so the image is quite graphic. This was quite a dense image and I used OHP transparency paper for the substrate.I only used one layer as the black seemed opaque enough.

 Now here comes the long part. Once in the contact frame, it was placed outside for about a week and then the weather wasn't so favourable, so it got moved around indoors wherever the sun was shining through the large french windows, until it made it up to the studio where it sat in front of the doors there for at least another three weeks sunbathing!

 In all I think it was in the frame exposing for about eight weeks. I did check halfway through this period and there didn't seem to be that much definition so I left it. I'm quite happy with the results and I do wonder what they would have been like if we had had more of a sun filled summer in the U.K. but I don't mind waiting. I'm going to try a different paper this time and see what that is like.

Black and White Photography magazine!

It's still just about August so I suppose I can legitimately talk about the inclusion of my work in this months (August) edition of Black and White Photography magazine. I was asked a while back to supply images to support an article on the Pinhole Blender 120 made by Chris Peregoy. I have been using the blender, both the large and small versions for some time and Chris had seen some of my work via Flickr and I'm grateful that he considered it of sufficient standard to be used to represent the camera.

The images I sent in were amongst the earlier ones I have taken with the 120. The larger 120 format has three pinholes situated around the cylinder and it was with a combination of these that I made the images. The softness that you get from the curved film plane means that the blending is subtle and the images can be quite abstract if you so wish. Employing unusual juxtapositions within one image. I had made a number of images in the series that these were taken from and they were based around a local nature reserve. The used image is called Dandelion.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kycamlewis/7713423372/

Thoughts on the pinhole workshop

It's July and the sun is just peeking through the leaden clouds, the U.K hasn't seen much of the glowing orb this summer and while it has been hiding away I have been busy preparing for shows. Across April and May I had an exhibition at Alhambra Home and Garden, the private view went very well and I sold work and had a lot of interest to the point where I was 'subjected' to an impromptu filming session and had to answer questions about my work, there is nothing like that for making you think on your feet. On Saturday 28th April,in advance of World Pinhole Photography Day on the 29th I did a Pinhole Workshop for adults, it was an intimate affair using the small back room of the gallery space and we certainly had a laugh while making cylinder pinhole cams from card. I am reviewing my expectations about manual dexterity and the way adults use power tools as a result!I still haven't seen the results but I am hoping they used their cams which despite gluing issues went together well enough to get an image and do some initial experimentation.I intend to do some more with adults, there seems to be a lot of interest and I think it will be good to keep the momentum going. There are also The Alhambra show eventually came down after a nice two to three week extension. During this time I think someone used the books that I had on show as a catalogue and decided to order from one of them. I hadn't considered them for that purpose but I may do in future.