I have at last worked out what the problem with the new lens that has dogged this project has been caused by.  Aghh!

Having checked (I thought) everything, I could only surmise that the problem lay with the new 210mm lens itself.  The good people who supplied the lens, though, have conducted a number of tests on it and confirmed that it is in perfect working order.  I have otherwise checked the camera and am happy with it.  I am also confident in my ability to take reliable light meter readings and expose the film properly:  why should my efforts work for my 150mm lens but not the 210mm?  What though is the one thing I did not check thoroughly?  The lens board!

This is the one other new piece of kit that I needed for the new lens but to which I did not pay much attention.  For anyone unfamiliar with large format cameras, lenses are attached to the front frame by a square plate, which is, by and large, of a standard size.  In the centre is a hole, through which the front and back elements of the lens and shutter, are screwed together.  The diameter of the holes in the centres of these plates are also standard sizes (known as Copal 0 to 3).  Each lens will conform to one of the sizes within this range, so a particular Copal lens board is needed for any given lens.  My Rodenstock 150mm is Copal 0, the smallest size.  The Schneider 210mm is Copal 1, the next size up.  I therefore needed a new board for this new lens. The board I bought for the 150mm lens is metal, and absolutely light-proof.  The new board is acrylic.  It looks opaque.  When I checked the interior of the camera for possible light leaks nothing showed.  The people who supplied, and have confirmed the quality of my 210mm lens, wondered whether the problem might be a light-bleed on a double-dark slide.  This struck me as inherently unlikely as I have not had a similar problem with anything shot on the smaller lens.  Nevertheless, I did start to wonder yesterday whether there might be an issue with the new lens board.  In particular, when I refitted it to the camera I noticed it was a little loose and rattled.  The design of the front frame is though such that this alone is not an issue and does not let any extraneous light in, as I confirmed with judicious application of torchlight.  Having nothing else left to do, almost out of idle curiosity, I turned the torch directly onto the lens board itself.  And there was the answer, the light was shining straight through.  Problem identified!

A phone call to the makers of my camera confirmed that they have only just become aware of the problem and a new board, with a suitably light-proof coating, is on its way to me, together with a fresh box of film to make up for all the frames wasted.  Which is what I regard as good service.

I am not going to reshoot this project again (yet again – I have just had to go out to one of my sites for the umpteenth time to photograph it again as I unfortunately discovered that the last frame I took there a few days ago has been affected by a bit of light-bleed; I suspect the double-dark slide got nudged very slightly out of position, probably when I putting the slide into the changing bag before transferring the film into my developing tank, just enough to over-expose one side of the negative and just enough to be noticeable, and render it unusable).  I am happy with what I have achieved with the old lens and cannot really afford yet more time on this assignment.  I do though now have the excuse, and impetus, to find something else to do, probably not connected with this course, to experiment and see just what this new lens can do.  I have high hopes!

And what is to be learned from this episode?  One thing is of course the reminder that shooting film is a very different prospect from shooting digitally.  Digital cameras do much, if not necessarily everything for you (compare my Canon DSLR and my Leica, which are a bit like chalk and cheese), and “light hygiene” is not really an issue.  With film on the other hand, you have to go right back to basics for just about everything and light hygiene is absolutely paramount.  Shooting film requires so much more care and attention, all the more so if you develop your own negatives and print from them.  For some time I have been of the view that far from being “Luddite”, using film is a useful way of learning, relearning, reinforcing, the basics of photography that are in danger of being lost in an otherwise monolithically digital world where the camera does so much of the legwork for you (though even the very best cameras will not make you a good photographer if you do not know how to use what is, after all, just another tool).  I would not necessarily advocate making it compulsory as part of the course to spend some time using film (as I believe some schools have in the past) but I certainly agree with the OCA recommendation that if at all possible students should get some experience of large and medium format cameras (I am conscious that I still need to  spend more time with my old Hasselblad).  Despite the recent frustrations, hopefully now resolved, I certainly feel that it has been a worthwhile experience getting to grips, even if still only at a fairly elementary level, with film photography and that this will inform future work with digital cameras.

The tribulations continue!  Having sorted out the issues with developing the film I have now discovered another problem which is causing me to rethink (again) my approach to this assignment – the new lens.

I have only had the lens that I have chosen for this job, the Schneider 210mm, for about a month and this is the only project that I have used it on so far.  Though the lens looks to be in very good condition, with nice clean, clear optics, it is simply not producing good pictures.  Image quality is poor, the picture is very grainy and foggy, completely unusable.  In contrast, my older Rodenstock 150mm lens, which I used for one picture on the shoot last week (exactly the same film and developed with those taken with the 210mm) has worked perfectly producing a photo with good grain and detail, nice contrast.

In light of this I am going to have to go back and reshoot (for the third time!) using just the 150mm.  This is inevitably going to mean rethinking camera angles and positions, and I might have to crop pout some extraneous background in Photoshop, but needs must.  Otherwise I would simply have to abandon this part of the project and do something else.  Already, as an exercise if nothing else, I have created a set of black and white images in 4×5 format from some of my original colour digital images, which if nothing else offer me something of a fall-back position, to offer an indication of what the more artistically driven and influenced set would look like.  I would though rather not have to use them as it feels a bit like cheating so I will persevere with the film.  At least I am used to and comfortable with the 150mm lens, and have confidence in it.  I just have to find yet more time to get a further shoot done, and put up with still more attention (some unwelcome) that a big camera on a tripod, and the spectacle of me covered by a heavy, dark focusing cloth (under which it can get amazingly hot!)  inevitably attracts.

At my tutor’s suggestion I have had a look at an old television programme called Return Journey (which dates back to 1981 but is available on YouTube).  This focuses on three photographers:  Humphrey Spender and the work he did in Bolton (“Worktown”) for Mass Observation, Derek Smith, and Jimmy Forsyth.  The question with which I approached this programme was what, if anything, does it have to say about the thesis I proposed for the Assignment 4 essay.  The short answer is, I think, not a lot, but nevertheless it raises some interesting points that are relevant.

Mass Observation, and Spender’s work for the scheme, was expressly anthropological in nature (the programme begins with a somewhat tongue in cheek description of the discovery of that exotic race the Northern Working Class was discovered and needed to be investigated and documented which unfortunately does not disguise what comes across as a sometimes fundamentally patronising streak in Mass Observation, worthy though the scheme certainly was) recording how people lived.  It was not so concerned with where they lived, with portraying the environment they inhabited, except to the extent that environment influenced the way the people lived.  It was not a visual description of Bolton, or any other generic northern working town, in the same way that Klein described New York.

Smith’s work does not take me much further forward.  His story was more to do with his return to Newcastle after studying in London, his ceasing to work as a photographer, becoming involved instead with Amber Films and the Side Gallery (some interesting shots of the old interior of the gallery as I remember it in the mid-1980s).

Forsyth of course spent much of his life on Tyneside and all of his work was done there.  It is his that is perhaps the most relevant to the question that I was exploring.  Rather than include examples of his work here I am instead putting a link below to the Amber archive of his work, which includes some really nice examples of what he did.  Does he fit my thesis?  I have to say I do not think so.  He was in many ways a classic street photographer, taking pictures of the people, places, things, that he saw around the Scotswood Road.  I do not feel that he was making a photographic portrait of his adopted city through the medium and subject matter of its people in anything like the way Klein did.  If anything, although not formally so, I feel he was again acting in more of an anthropological way, even if he would not necessarily have seen it that way.  He simply set out to record the area and its people as the old fabric of this part of the city was gradually, but inexorably, destroyed.  Not just the physical environment (hardly anything of the old Scotswood survives) but, more importantly, the communities that lived there who were dispersed or housed in new high-rise blocks (most of which have also since fallen prey to the wrecking ball).  Yes of course his work does describe the city through its people to some extent but that does not appear to have been his intention.  Perhaps therefore, albeit in a negative way, his work might be seen as support for the argument that I mooted that one of the key elements in determining the effect of such bodies of work is the intention of the photographer.  Klein wanted to depict New York “in a new way” but that was not also Forsyth’s aim.

So what do I get from this programme, apart from the simple pleasure of seeing really good work in an interesting and well made documentary?  Above all I suppose it is more questions.  It certainly does not close the open question that I ended my speculation on.  It certainly highlights for me the slippery and unreliable, and ultimately unhelpful, categories and genres into which we try to force so much photographic work.  Here the boundaries are so blurred as to be almost meaningless.  At the same time this work is anthropological, typological, social documentary, topographical, portraiture, etcetera, etcetera.  It all depends on the purpose of the work, the intentions of the photographer, and how that work is used subsequently by editors, curators, critics.    What this particularly brings back to mind is something that Paul Hill said in his lecture (on YouTube, again; link below):

“Landscape photography is not about the land.  Like all photography genres it is about the medium – and the maker – not the subject matter …”

Although there is a danger of this being used as a Humpty-Dumptyish credo (“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”) this is something with which I very much agree.  To the extent there is any firm conclusion to be drawn from the issues that I considered in the essay, this perhaps is it.

Carroll, L, (ed. Gardner, M), (1966).  The Annotated Alice.  London:  Penguin

Scotswood Road

Whilst the feedback from my tutor on Assignments 3 and 4 has been very positive, indeed throughout this course, I have nevertheless been thinking about whether there is still anything that I need to reflect upon and address.

So far as Assignment 3 is concerned I think there are two points, both of which I have already addressed to an extent elsewhere.  The first relates to presentation of the work.  At the time I produced the work I did not give this much thought.  Since then I have of course gone on to use the final set for the print on demand exercise and have had actually had the book made up.  For the purposes of presentation for assessment I do not now think there is anything more that I need to do with this work and I could simply put the book forward in the vent of physical submission.  Whether OCA reverts to this of course remains to be seen.

The other point relates to the development of a personal voice, which was something my tutor and I discussed at some length.  This is something that I wrote about specifically at the time (https://markrobinsonocalandscape.photo.blog/2020/04/29/further-musings-on-development-of-a-voice-body-of-work/).  I have since continued to think about this issue but I am not sure I have got very much further forward with it.  The issue is, I feel, that whilst I do seem to be finding a particular voice of my own, it is at the moment, inevitably, very much tied to the nature of the work required by this module.  I have found an aspect of landscape photography that especially interests me and that has produced a recurring theme throughout that I have done so far.  Whether I will want to continue in a similar vein once this module has been completed, whether it will feed through into what I do for the next module, or whether I will explore this further in my personal projects (not that I have much time for them at the moment!), I cannot yet tell.  For now I have to recognise that I am still developing and there are plenty of other avenues yet to explore.

This actually strikes me as a good thing and that development and change are to be welcomed and embraced.  And this leads me to my second general point from the feedback.  In previous modules it has been a case of completing an assignment and moving on to the next.  To an extent that is perhaps a result of the nature of the earlier modules and the way they have been constructed.  The present LPE module comes across to me as more integrated, at least thematically linked and consistent.  As a result, each step calls for a reassessment of what has gone before.  This, as my tutor has observed, is what I have been doing by going back to look again at the work done for earlier assignments and reconsidering it in the light of more recent work and developments in my thinking and experience.  It has felt important to me to consider how earlier work might be developed or readdressed, so that the assignments have become for me, to an extent, not fixed but dynamic pieces of work.  This is why I have gone back to each of the first three assignments and done more work on them, in particular with a view to means and modes of presentation.  This is probably also what is behind my decision for Assignment 5 to produce two distinct sets of images exploring different ideas about landscape photography.

So far as Assignment 4 is concerned, I do not think there is much more that I can add for now.  I still very regard this as an introductory piece, a first look into my chosen subject that in some ways raises more questions than it answers.  It would really benefit from expansion and development but I do not see that as a realistic prospect within the confines of the current course.  I suspect though that in the future I am going to think more about those further questions as I can see that they might well be relevant to work that I do in the future.  Whilst the essay in its current form does not necessarily, at least at face value, fit within the continuum of the work for the previous three assignments, and what I am doing for the next two, I do nevertheless see what the work on the essay has done is affect might broader thinking about landscape and the role of photography as a means of expressing my ideas of landscape.

On a few other points that have arisen out of the tutorial: I did look at Chris Steele Perkins Japanese work in connection with Assignment 2, but I will look at it again with a view to working out how best to present the work for Assignment 6.  Shibata’s influence on what I am doing for Assignment 5 is something I have already addressed in writing about research for that project.  Otherwise, I will follow up the Mass Observation and Jimmy Forsyth suggestions soon.

My wife copied one of my postcard pictures (the station) to a friend of hers who is a journalist – writer and film-maker – as she visited by train from the South West just before the lock-down started.  She commented that the picture would make a good jigsaw.  I had not thought of this before but that might actually fit the sort of aesthetic I have been looking for and is another interesting example of how images of places can carry extra significance, this time acquiring an element of diversion and entertainment.  I quite enjoy jigsaw puzzles from time to time so this might actually work.  I have already found on a quick internet search a couple of companies that will turn photographs into puzzles.  They are not at all expensive so I might just give one a go. I am quite amused by the prospect of including a jigsaw in a submission for formal assessment in due course:  it would not be practical, I fear, to have the full set made into puzzles and unfortunately the assessors would not have enough time to be able to sit down and complete the puzzle!  Nevertheless, I do not think it is too off-the-wall an idea.

I remember from when I was quite small that my grandparents had lots of things that had on them “postcard” views of places that they had been on holiday.   The possibilities for portrayal of any locality are legion: decorative crockery, tea-towels, place mats and coasters, and more besides.