Photography in the garage

Excuse the rubbish photos of the photos, but there's not a lot of natural light in the garage I've been black and white processing in, which is good, because I've been using it as a darkroom.

Yesterday I spent the day building a pinhole camera from a kit that my ex-collegues bought me for my birthday last year, I then processed the photos as negatives onto photographic paper and made some positives from them by laying the 'negatives' front to front with a new piece of photographic paper and exposing to the light again.

The pinhole camera is made of a material similar to MDF and is not perfect, it lets in a bit of light, so tomorrow I'm off to a timber yard to get some proper wood and make a more solid, light safe, pretty pinhole camera.

Gakkenflex

I've been messing around with a new camera lately.

I recently found a kit camera which I bought from eBay 3 years ago: The Gakkenflex.

After struggling to build it from Japanese instructions (not impossible, there were pictures, I just lack patience) I gave up. Recently though, a friend mentioned that they had English instructions and so I borrowed them and finally built it.

The above double exposure was accidental, but in the end, a happy mistake.

Above: Selsey Beach

Dave McKean: A Retrospective at the Willis Museum

Yesterday a friend and I went to see the Dave McKean exhibition, which was on at a local museum in Basingstoke. It was a good exhibition with a great range in types of work by McKean, including mixed media, digital, book covers and movie posters.

 The work I enjoyed most was the mixed media work, an array of interesting materials were combined including slate, resin and bronze dust, in the side panels of the above piece. It definitely made me feel like being more experimental with the materials I use.

 

 McKean uses a dark palette, selecting bring colours sparingly, it gives and overall dark post apocalyptic feel at times.

 

The comic book work was great, so well executed and yet it looked so effortless.

 

It was interesting to see the range of work and how well it complimented each other, showing that a multi disciplinary practice can work well.