Tuesday 28 April 2015

Peak District Summer and Winter in 2 Days!

The weather has been a bit mixed over the last few days. Warm sunny days early last week. Cold sunny days at the end of the week. Showers and cool Saturday while we were running a photo course. Sunny and cool Sunday and Monday, Sunday I was running a darkroom printing workshop. Today was cold with frequent snow showers as I walked to Buxton to run the Gallery in the Gardens, back to winter but it's almost May!

Here are a few photos from my phone so you can see what it's like.

Rushup Edge from Eccles Pike Monday 27th April

Old Roman Road to Buxton Tuesday 28th April

Combs Moss and Snow Tuesday 28th April

Kinderscout from the Whitehall Centre Tuesday 28th April


Friday 17 April 2015

Gloucester Photographs

We stayed with good friends Carol and Al near Gloucester after lecturing to Cheltenham Photographic Society last night.

Today was sunny so we went for a walk along Painswick Beacon and back down to Upton St Leonards. Took some pictures from the top and of the Blow memorial on the way down.

This afternoon we went in to Gloucester docks. Lots of possible shots but I limited myself to 3 films, 30 shots.

All taken on 400 Delta Ilford film without a tripod.

Still trying to decide whether to use 400 Delta handheld or FP4 with a tripod.

Will process these films to help me decide. More to follow.

Saturday 4 April 2015

New Images - Kitzbuhel

Here are some new images of Kitzbuhel from our trip there in early February this year. There are a few variations on some of these on my gallery website.

Kitzbuhel Churches

Kitzbuhel at Night

Kitzbuhel Hahnenkamm Ski Trail

Kitzbuhel Horn Ski Tracks

Kitzbuhel Horn Tree

Westendorf Ski Welt Area from Kitzbuhel Pengelstein

Westendorf Ski Welt Area 

Friday 3 April 2015

New Books Out Now - Snow Light and Land Light!

I'm now the author of 6 books, not counting my PhD thesis and Degree dissertation (very limited print runs for those)! My 2 newest books were delivered from Loop Printers in Sheffield on Tuesday, well half of them. Their van is too small to fit all 3000 copies on it.

This is the culmination of a project lasting over 10 months. I estimated that it would take 9 months, so it slipped by just one month. It had to fit in around shows, courses and making prints to fill orders, as well as making videos and writing articles for darkroomdave.com, etc. It needed lots of time scanning negatives, more than I expected as the images on my website up to October 2008 were scans from prints. These aren't good enough quality for my books and led to me re-scanning dozens of negatives. In fact I scanned getting on for 400 negatives to select the ones that we used. I can only scan negatives singly and edit one at a time so it was a huge amount of work. My bad back will take a while longer to recover from all those long hours in front of the computer!

Andy, of 10th Planet, has added them to my website Books page so that you can now buy them! We are selling them at £12 each, including UK shipping, instead of the £15 cover price. There is also an introductory bundle special offer of £20 for the 2 books together, again including UK shipping. Outside the UK we have to charge extra for the shipping. I will be adding them to my marketplace shop on Amazon UK over the next few days but they will be full price as Amazon take a hefty commission on every sale. You can also order through booksellers but these will be at full price as well as I don't use distributors, booksellers buy from us direct.


Both are the same dimensions as my previous 4 books, 24.5 x 27cm with 80 pages. Of course all images are in glorious black and white! There is the usual technical data on every image at the back of both books for those interested in the nuts of bolts of my photography.

Both books include images taken in the UK, Europe, USA and New Zealand.

Land Light has 119 images and an article on all my secrets on the equipment that I use, how I compose and take my photos, process the films, print in the darkroom, scan negatives and edit in Photoshop. There are quite a few coastal shots, waterfalls and a few castles liberally spread amongst the photographs. ISBN 978-0-9555627-4-7

Snow Light has 121 images and short articles on Winter Photography, Aerial Photography and one on my obsession to take a very specific photo in Colorado in Winter over a 9 year period. Lots of snowy images including lots taken while skiing, ski mountaineering, snowshoeing or while hiking through snowy landscapes in the winter. ISBN 978-0-9555627-3-0