Photos you have taken in the last month of which you are proud?

Love the images that pop up here.
Slightly over the month but I liked this one..it looks ‘urban wasteland’ but that’s far from the truth. It’s part of an abandoned conveyor belt that carried coal several miles from open cast to railhead here in the rural hills of East Ayrshire.

@johndoh you mean Ivan or the lighting in my composition? 😂 thank you though that’s a hell of a compliment ❤️
I am a bit of a fan of chiaroscuro lighting so this often features in my work.

^ That reminds me of the artist Vermeer.

Never seen a pic of Vermeer with a beard, perhaps you mean Van Gogh? 😉

Since I’m here.

Coincidentally, this image is a direct interpretation of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earing’, albeit a playful interpretation!

This is another of my friend Ivan, whom I’ve been photographing for about two years. We started the project together at the commencement of lock down and in response to that. He is vulnerable (so no laws were broken) and we partly conceived the project to enable him to have a human connection with someone (as otherwise he would have been completely isolated and that would most likely not have turned out well for him!)

Homage to Henri Cartier-Bresson – Dunnerdale not Paris

Oh trés bien mon ami!

Dirty and nasty even by my own low standards, but love the feeling of this.

One from last week from Birchen Edge in the Peak District. Lovely greeny blue light just before the sun rose and mist swirling around everywhere.

Untitled by James Coulson[/url], on Flickr

And this one I tried to link to Insta on previous page – Big Moor in late November on my phone. Pretty much the only snow we’ve had this year which is a real contrast to last winter:

Untitled by James Coulson[/url], on Flickr

Last weekend discovered some fen in Gloucs while riding home before dark.

West Wittering – shot on film. I’m not remotely a landscape photographer (I’m almost exclusively a portrait photographer) and I guess this otherwise dull images demonstrates that but I do like the textures and the painterly quality and it’s a useful exercise in learning how film records the light on the landscape.

I was out shooting sunrise last week on digital 5 mins from home. Another chap turned up who’d driven over an hour and was shooting on large format film. Tenner a pop to get developed!

Struck me that I was very much the fast food, instant gratification end of things!! Oh, and also that I hugely missed that anticipation of the box of slides being delivered by the postie a week later!!

Struck me that I was very much the fast food, instant gratification end of things!!

Potentially but you can still shoot digital using an analogue process, which is how I used to approach shooting portraits with my digital camera before I moved back to film. I used to use the smallest storage cards I could find (a 2GB compact flash cards would hold no more than 30 images on my camera, so it was like shooting 3 rolls of 120), tripod mount the camera, use a cable release and a light meter with full manual exposure but always shot at ISO 400. The analogue process really worked well but it lacked the ‘craft’ feel that true film offers.

I shoot 120 now on a 6×7 format (so ten frames per roll and a more moderate £2.20 per frame). Large format is a whole other ball game of patience, chance, error and surprises. I know a few (world renowned) portrait photographers who have tried to move from 120 to large format and found it a very challenging and deeply frustrating experience. For portraiture, I think 120 is a good compromise.

Of course, if you’ve ever seen the work of Richard Learoyd on his room size camera obscura and direct to positive print paper that measures in the metre square range, you’ll also know that especially for portraiture, bigger is most definitely better!

<img src="<img src=”https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51887787227_62b2a6b0cd_k.jpg&#8221; width=”2048″ height=”887″ alt=”Incoming Weather” /><script async src=”//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>” alt=”Incoming Weather” />

***Edit – gah – cannot get to display a Flickr hosted photo!

there you go scruff

Cheers – how did you manage that? Witchcraft?

Have a look at the work of Nicholas J R White – he’s a large format landscape photographer with a beautiful portfolio.

His Black Dots project was excellent: Black Dots

And Dust and the Vein is mesmerising: Dust and the Vein

But really all his work is sublime and worth enjoying

*deleted

Don’t really get the film vs digital thing. I learnt my ‘craft’ on film and still shoot 120/35/Instax from time to time, but digital gives me more freedom and lets me try out more stuff more quickly. I don’t ever feel one is more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than the other, and think that anyone who claims that isn’t really thinking straight. They’re just different.

But then I embrace a lot of the nasty side of digital imaging and processing.

Having said that, I do quite often shoot digital without an SD card in the camera to play on that old fear of running out of film.

I don’t ever feel one is more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than the other

I think it’s the process that is authentic but as I said, you can shoot an analogue like process on digital and so yes, one is not more real or more authentic.

I think the main reason people still shooting film are doing so is because they find it aesthetically more pleasing.

No argument on that. Again though, I find that view fascinating. I’ve come to a point where I’ve got interested in the ‘beauty’ of digital images when they get pushed to their limits with processing and artifacts start to appear. I guess a lot of others try to avoid those, but quite often I go hunting them out now. I think my Fine Art background is to blame.

I also think that most photographers love the ‘process’ and are not just in it for the outcome – how you achieve that outcome is important to us, and that for me is where film wins out slightly. But there is an analogous process to embrace in digital too if you want to.

These days I don’t have the time or facilities (nor all the skills in terms of darkroom work) to do in film what I can in digital…

Anyway, back to photos.

I’ve dug out my ‘proper’ camera in the last few weeks to drag myself away from the convenience of just shooting on my phone. Might return to film at some point, but the convenience of digital wins out at the moment.

These are from a selection of devices (and possibly over a month old, sorry) …

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZXiNDQOhiT/?utm_medium=share_sheet

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZaNq8XN7KL/?utm_medium=copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZhfKAsLpVo/?utm_medium=share_sheet

https://www.instagram.com/p/CaFpwyCI4j4/?utm_medium=share_sheet

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZCxzOTrqPp/?utm_medium=copy_link

https://www.instagram.com/p/CY2GlPZNBf2/?utm_medium=copy_link

*edit* apparently Instagram links don’t embed. D’oh. I’ll upload these somewhere else later…

Isle of May

These days I don’t have the time or facilities (nor all the skills in terms of darkroom work) to do in film what I can in digital…

This is where I have to confess that I process my negatives digitally (sort of obvious really as otherwise I wouldn’t be able to share them here, though I guess I could be scanning a hand made print). Most fine art photographers I know and follow, with a few notable exceptions, do the same. I would love to have the time and skill to create true, craft like handmade prints but also recognise that this is a skill set so deserving of special attention that most past masters of the photographic art (Avedon immediately springs to mind) would work with someone dedicated in this area rather than do it themselves (again there are exceptions, Don McCullin being a very obvious one).

BTW Colournoise, your username now has added meaning!

Snapped this, this morning when pup was sat on chair with the sun right on her.

That is lovely Mikkel!

BTW Colournoise, your username now has added meaning!

Heh! Hadn’t considered that. It actually comes from something else (quite closely related though).

Couple of trees from today.

The Eiger last week

What with working long hours, and generally not being able to get out at weekends so much at the moment, I’ve taken relatively few photos worth bothering with, but I took a bunch at the Big Thief gig on Sunday, and I’m pretty pleased with how many of them came out.
I like this one just because of the interaction between the band members.

I’ve posted this one already in the gigs thread, but I like this one as much just because I’ve got the whole band, which was a bit awkward because of the way they’re spread across the stage, Adrianne, the singer, was on the far right most of the time, but towards the end she wasn’t singing so moved across where I could get her in frame with the rest of the band.

Jarvis at the Octagon (a bit longer than a month ago, maybe Nov 21). Opportunistic burst on an IPhone 12.

Not a particularly great photo, but the BBC chose one of my riding selfies as one of their ‘on two wheels’ viewer images last week.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-60497480

Bit cheesy but was my first time visiting the area and always thought the images of the limestone pavements and Norber Erratics looked cool.

Nice

first time flying the DJI Mavic 2 pro…

A couple of very different ones from this mornings wanderings

Untitled by James Coulson[/url], on Flickr

Untitled by James Coulson[/url], on Flickr