THE MAKING OF A PHOTOGRAPH
02nd May 2020
The making of a photograph –
Wall, Cut Huts, Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion 2004
Although a somewhat self-indulgent exercise I spend a lot of my time in reverie and of that time recalling photographic experiences of particular images taken. These thoughts can vary. Like many others I have walked to a great many different locations, all obviously unique and differing to some degree. I have specific memories that I return to such as my first visit to Aberglasney in Llangathen or the pungent wild garlic walking towards Llwyn Ynn service quarters near Llanfair-Dyffryn or the beautifully located remote farmhouse of Blaen Myherin near Devil’s Bridge.
I took relatively good images of the aforementioned but the image I return to, time and time again and if I could be bold enough to consider one of my favourites, is an abstraction I took of a wall inside a building near an abandoned cub-scout hut on the edge of Devil’s Bridge in Ceredigion.
There's an array of abandoned buildings scattered over an acre or so mostly consisting of small wooden huts with rusty metal beds inside sleeping four or so people. Some huts are larger, all have glass missing from their windows, doors hanging of their hinges – I have not visited for almost five years so I image further decay is evident.
The larger building at the entrance has a hall, the roof intact but a wall had a collapsed letting the rain in and rotting the wooden floor. There’s colourful graffiti all around, colourful and bright by sight, not by language. Pass through the hall and down a hallway and there are other smaller rooms, toilets, storeroom and kitchen and then right at the end is what was once a large mobile home. There are ferns growing inside, the floor almost gone completely, the walls are warped, wallpaper is peeling, empty shelves are drooping.
It was in this part, in 2004, I spied the peeled wallpaper as seen in the image above. I knew as soon as I saw the wall that I would be making an exposure. This is often a case when I come across such a wall. If is has a composition of sorts, elements within the frame that once cropped by eye and then camera form as a whole. But before all this can be achieved, or indeed visualised, there’s a number of factors and processes I must go through.
The colour image above was taken with a small 35mm compact camera. What is perhaps not apparent is that flash was used in this image. The room this was taken in was very dim. As you can see there are windows facing the camera but what is not obvious is that these were the only in windows in this part of the building. The opposite wall was mostly made up of wall and had one window but any light was minimum due to foliage growing against it – rhododendron if my memory serves me well.
The windows facing the camera caused an issue with flare. I had wanted to take a wider view of the wallpaper than the one I finished taking but if I used a wide lens or pulled the camera further away I could see that the final image would more than likely be the victim of flare.
I used a 150mm lens in this composition. I cannot recall which lens it was, most likely a Schneider Symmar-S, a perfectly acceptable choice. I also knew very quickly that it wold take a long exposure because the room was so dim and that this would not allow me the luxury of taking more than one image, two at the very most. I had to get everything right the first time; with that I mean the composition and the actual exposure itself. Focusing was difficult. I used a dark-cloth and loupe and once I was satisfied with the composition and critical focusing I then made an exposure reading with my light meter. My light meter read 16 minutes at F22. I knew I would have to double this time at least due to reciprocity failure – to put simply this means the sensitivity of the film is impaired when long exposures are used, especially true with night-time photography or low-light photography. As a general rule of thumb I normally double the time (16 minutes x 16 minutes = 32 minutes and then add a little extra for good measure).
I am not a scientific photographer. Once, when I first attended college in 1993, I believed should know everything there was to know about the characteristics of each film chemical, each film, each paper. There was a multitude of choice and I even dabbled briefly with mixing my own chemicals. So much of it was trial and error and I only had books, not the internet, for reference. Instead of worrying about chemical formulas I decided I’d be better of spending my time using one film type, one developer type, one paper type. To keep things simple and to use what worked for me. For years I used the same film Agfa APX100 and developed it in Agfa Rodinal and printed it on Ilford fibre based multi-contrast paper.
(Agfa film is now discontinued in sheet film format so I now use Kodak Tmax100 or Ilford FP4).
I decided upon a 45 minute exposure and when viewing the negative now I can see that I probably should have used a slightly longer time – 1 stop extra – which would have meant doubling the time to 1 hour 30 minutes. Alternatively I could have reduced the aperture from F32 to F22 (or even F16) but this would have more than likely caused areas of the image to be out of focus. When photographing close-up’s with any camera but more so with large format the depth of focus is narrow, perhaps everything within a one inch degree of critical focusing. This means everything beyond this 1 inch and every before this 1 inch span would render as out of focus. The wallpaper was not completely flat. It has elements which had peeled and were closer to the camera. It is then my job to focus on such a point where, once I stopped the lens down to F32 would mean everything would be in focus.
As it happens I used 45 minute exposure at F32. It was not perfectly correct but I am able to make a decent print from the negative. If the truth is told I had already spent a far few hours at the site and after a 45 minutes wait I was possibly impatient to wait another 45 minutes.
My memory is perhaps not as good as it should be. I did in actual fact take two photographs of the wall. I have two negatives. the second image shows a slightly tighter crop and when comparing the two I think the tighter cropped image is the weaker. See examples below...
Wall, Cut Huts, Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion 2004
And what of the image itself? It shows tiny fragments of wallpaper, sodden and torn and forming chaotic edges. It speaks of time passing and the fragility of what we consider solid things; buildings, institutions, ourselves. It speaks of the weather, the present and coming seasons, each as disruptive as the next. The winter brings with it rain and frost, the summer growth and abundance. They all have their part to play when it comes to overwhelming an abandoned building. The photograph shows texture, of familiar materials, worn down and decayed, surely an eyesore than a thing of beauty. It questions what we consider normal, if your everyday lives are as controlled as we think they are. If our civilised manner and lifestyle is as rock solid as we believe them to be.
There have been a few revisits to this wall, years apart and I really did not know what I expected to find. In 2005, only a year later I found the peeled wallpaper lost, not even a soggy mess on the ground. The wall behind had some patterned paint marks, made by whom, and when and why? I still take an image but I do not consider it as photographing an abstraction, it’s more chasing a memory, or paying homage. By 2015 the mobile caravan had collapsed completely. There was no wall to visit, no wall to photograph and with this an element of sadness.
End result....
Alternatives 2004 - 2006...
Wall, Cut Huts, Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion 2004
Although a somewhat self-indulgent exercise I spend a lot of my time in reverie and of that time recalling photographic experiences of particular images taken. These thoughts can vary. Like many others I have walked to a great many different locations, all obviously unique and differing to some degree. I have specific memories that I return to such as my first visit to Aberglasney in Llangathen or the pungent wild garlic walking towards Llwyn Ynn service quarters near Llanfair-Dyffryn or the beautifully located remote farmhouse of Blaen Myherin near Devil’s Bridge.
I took relatively good images of the aforementioned but the image I return to, time and time again and if I could be bold enough to consider one of my favourites, is an abstraction I took of a wall inside a building near an abandoned cub-scout hut on the edge of Devil’s Bridge in Ceredigion.
There's an array of abandoned buildings scattered over an acre or so mostly consisting of small wooden huts with rusty metal beds inside sleeping four or so people. Some huts are larger, all have glass missing from their windows, doors hanging of their hinges – I have not visited for almost five years so I image further decay is evident.
The larger building at the entrance has a hall, the roof intact but a wall had a collapsed letting the rain in and rotting the wooden floor. There’s colourful graffiti all around, colourful and bright by sight, not by language. Pass through the hall and down a hallway and there are other smaller rooms, toilets, storeroom and kitchen and then right at the end is what was once a large mobile home. There are ferns growing inside, the floor almost gone completely, the walls are warped, wallpaper is peeling, empty shelves are drooping.
It was in this part, in 2004, I spied the peeled wallpaper as seen in the image above. I knew as soon as I saw the wall that I would be making an exposure. This is often a case when I come across such a wall. If is has a composition of sorts, elements within the frame that once cropped by eye and then camera form as a whole. But before all this can be achieved, or indeed visualised, there’s a number of factors and processes I must go through.
The colour image above was taken with a small 35mm compact camera. What is perhaps not apparent is that flash was used in this image. The room this was taken in was very dim. As you can see there are windows facing the camera but what is not obvious is that these were the only in windows in this part of the building. The opposite wall was mostly made up of wall and had one window but any light was minimum due to foliage growing against it – rhododendron if my memory serves me well.
The windows facing the camera caused an issue with flare. I had wanted to take a wider view of the wallpaper than the one I finished taking but if I used a wide lens or pulled the camera further away I could see that the final image would more than likely be the victim of flare.
I used a 150mm lens in this composition. I cannot recall which lens it was, most likely a Schneider Symmar-S, a perfectly acceptable choice. I also knew very quickly that it wold take a long exposure because the room was so dim and that this would not allow me the luxury of taking more than one image, two at the very most. I had to get everything right the first time; with that I mean the composition and the actual exposure itself. Focusing was difficult. I used a dark-cloth and loupe and once I was satisfied with the composition and critical focusing I then made an exposure reading with my light meter. My light meter read 16 minutes at F22. I knew I would have to double this time at least due to reciprocity failure – to put simply this means the sensitivity of the film is impaired when long exposures are used, especially true with night-time photography or low-light photography. As a general rule of thumb I normally double the time (16 minutes x 16 minutes = 32 minutes and then add a little extra for good measure).
I am not a scientific photographer. Once, when I first attended college in 1993, I believed should know everything there was to know about the characteristics of each film chemical, each film, each paper. There was a multitude of choice and I even dabbled briefly with mixing my own chemicals. So much of it was trial and error and I only had books, not the internet, for reference. Instead of worrying about chemical formulas I decided I’d be better of spending my time using one film type, one developer type, one paper type. To keep things simple and to use what worked for me. For years I used the same film Agfa APX100 and developed it in Agfa Rodinal and printed it on Ilford fibre based multi-contrast paper.
(Agfa film is now discontinued in sheet film format so I now use Kodak Tmax100 or Ilford FP4).
I decided upon a 45 minute exposure and when viewing the negative now I can see that I probably should have used a slightly longer time – 1 stop extra – which would have meant doubling the time to 1 hour 30 minutes. Alternatively I could have reduced the aperture from F32 to F22 (or even F16) but this would have more than likely caused areas of the image to be out of focus. When photographing close-up’s with any camera but more so with large format the depth of focus is narrow, perhaps everything within a one inch degree of critical focusing. This means everything beyond this 1 inch and every before this 1 inch span would render as out of focus. The wallpaper was not completely flat. It has elements which had peeled and were closer to the camera. It is then my job to focus on such a point where, once I stopped the lens down to F32 would mean everything would be in focus.
As it happens I used 45 minute exposure at F32. It was not perfectly correct but I am able to make a decent print from the negative. If the truth is told I had already spent a far few hours at the site and after a 45 minutes wait I was possibly impatient to wait another 45 minutes.
My memory is perhaps not as good as it should be. I did in actual fact take two photographs of the wall. I have two negatives. the second image shows a slightly tighter crop and when comparing the two I think the tighter cropped image is the weaker. See examples below...
Wall, Cut Huts, Devil’s Bridge, Ceredigion 2004
And what of the image itself? It shows tiny fragments of wallpaper, sodden and torn and forming chaotic edges. It speaks of time passing and the fragility of what we consider solid things; buildings, institutions, ourselves. It speaks of the weather, the present and coming seasons, each as disruptive as the next. The winter brings with it rain and frost, the summer growth and abundance. They all have their part to play when it comes to overwhelming an abandoned building. The photograph shows texture, of familiar materials, worn down and decayed, surely an eyesore than a thing of beauty. It questions what we consider normal, if your everyday lives are as controlled as we think they are. If our civilised manner and lifestyle is as rock solid as we believe them to be.
There have been a few revisits to this wall, years apart and I really did not know what I expected to find. In 2005, only a year later I found the peeled wallpaper lost, not even a soggy mess on the ground. The wall behind had some patterned paint marks, made by whom, and when and why? I still take an image but I do not consider it as photographing an abstraction, it’s more chasing a memory, or paying homage. By 2015 the mobile caravan had collapsed completely. There was no wall to visit, no wall to photograph and with this an element of sadness.
End result....
Alternatives 2004 - 2006...