Mark's Blog

For a little while now I've hankered after a film camera that I can use for black & white photography of the family and general 'going out for a walk' type images.  My friend David Breen (http://www.triplekitephotography.co.uk) whetted my appetite after visiting him recently and he showed me his wonderful images taken from an old camera (the name of which escapes me), that he bought 2nd hand recently. Taking the bull by the horns, initially he simply loaded film into the camera and hoped for the best.... with great results! Images from black and white film have a charm all of themselves with their grainy finish and superb tonal range. It was whilst using twitter that I spotted a tweet that mentioned a brand new medium format lomography camera being introduced - namely the Belair brand. These appear to be a slightly more refined version of lomography camera but what took my eye was the...

Around three weeks ago I was running a two day workshop with Joe Cornish at Paddy's Hole - a small, quaint yet run down fishing harbour at the mouth of the River Tees. During the workshop one of the participant's batteries went flat and he didn't have a spare. I therefore offered to lend him my Panasonic Lumix G1 as we still had another couple of hours to go before last light. Delighted at this, we set it up on my tripod where we were located on the outer collar of the harbour, which is made up of sharp craggy rocks. We decided to take a breather and whilst I was talking to Joe and another participant, the wind got up and blew the camera and tripod over. The result of which was a shattered screen, torn rubber eyepiece and badly disjointed tripod socket. A total write off it seemed... or...

Now that I am the proud owner of the fabulous Epson 4900 printer I’ve been thinking of all those new opportunities around experimenting with fine art papers. I particularly enjoy viewing monochrome images on fine art paper due, I think, to the way it renders those grey tones in a much more delicate way than other materials. In the past weeks I’ve consciously kept my eye open for images that lend themselves to the monochrome treatment in order to display them at some point in the future at the Staircase Gallery. This is no mean feat particularly when you’re out looking for autumn colours at this time of year. But it is achievable with practice. Much like I had the same problem a few years ago when I started making close-up images when really I was looking for the bigger vista. One of my favourite monochrome photographers has to be the...