Praktica Update

The idea of resurrecting the Praktica has been niggling away at me. So, I tracked down a replacement for the PX625 battery, courtesy of Maplin. And the exposure meter still works, so the idea lives on - the next step is to get hold of a roll of film and make some exposures. There's a Kodak shop in Keynsham - no, really - so Tri-X may not be out of the question.

More of this soon, I expect. 

In Clover

We have an L-shaped lawn that runs across the front - East - side of the house and round the North side. The lawn at the front is relatively new, laid when we remodeled the garden after our son was born. The side lawn is older, essentially untouched since we moved in.

A couple of years ago, I decided I was going to improve the quality of the side lawn, which was full of clover, moss and weeds. So, I instituted a regime of regular cutting and feeding and I bought an electric lawn rake. And the lawn responded to all this TLC and I got rid of most of the moss and clover.

Last year of course, it all went backwards. Regular trips to Liverpool meant that the garden was neglected. But this year, I was going to recover the situation, until my lawn rake broke and I managed to electrocute myself trying to fix it.

Anyway, the clover is back, with a vengeance. Above is an example, the image made in a rush because I was just about to mow the lawn again. This meant that I broke my usual rule and made the image when the sun was out, which is how I achieved the high contrast that I like about it.

Dad's Gone to Iceland

We've just returned from another weekend at my father's house in Liverpool - probably one of the last as the building work going on there is nearing completion. However, I made this image on the previous visit in early June. 

I don't know what it is with builders, but as soon as they move in your garden turns into a building site, no matter what they're actually doing, inside or out. These Icelandic poppies are growing everywhere amongst the other weeds and long grass at the back of the house. 

Anyway, I managed to take five minutes out to take this picture. I didn't bother to take my tripod with me so I had to shoot hand-held, hence the shallow depth of field. And I couldn't make it into an acceptable monochrome image, despite concerted efforts, so I present it here in all its full-colour glory.  Nevertheless, I'm reasonably pleased with the result.

Return of the Osteospermum

As promised, a return to posting my garden photography.

I was fairly happy with the image of an osteospermum that I posted a few weeks ago. However I didn't have a satisfactory image of a whole flower, so one evening I decided to return to the subject.

Anyway, you may remember that I mentioned that the osteospermum grow in pots on the west side of the house. When I got round there, the sun had already set, or at least dropped behind the White Horse (ah, the romance of it!) and the flowers had closed.

I made a few images anyway, the one above being the most successful. I still don't have the image I was after, so I'll probably have another go round this before the end of the season. 

Praktica-L Photography Part II

One thing that I omitted to mention in my last post, is that there was a roll of film in the camera when I found it, which I extracted and took for processing. I had absolutely no memory of what might be on the film, so there was a fair degree of anticipation in waiting for the results, which came back on Thursday. So, what did I find?

Well, the film stock had aged badly with significant colour shift. Also, only twelve of the twenty-four frames had been exposed. Of those, one was an out-of-focus shot looking out of the window of my bedroom at my parent's house - the sort that you take when you're winding the film on at the start of the roll; There was an image of my parents in a formal garden somewhere; Several images of a family party, probably to celebrate the birth of one of my cousin's children; And three images of some friends at Holt's Field, one of which is presented above.

(By coincidence, Holt's Field is behind Sudley House, which I've written about in some of my previous posts.)

I've resisted the temptation to improve the image, so that you can see that my assertions regarding the poor standard of my photography at the time are true. I've managed to get the exposure right, but the focus is a bit soft, the framing is all to cock and the depth of field was probably left to chance and ended up being a bit deep for a portrait. 

Anyway, the internal evidence suggests that these images where all made around twenty-five years ago. But the scary thing is that I've still no memory of making any of them. It makes you realise how much of your life disappears, forgotten into nothingness. 

Do any of the people in the photographs remember then being taken any more than the photographer? I expect not.

This photograph also illustrates the immense subjective emotional charge of photographs. To most viewers this is just a photograph of three blokes sitting on a wall, failing to enjoy the experience of being photographed. To me, its a window into a long forgotten summer afternoon many years ago.

Anyway, enough maudlin navel gazing, normal service will be resumed with my next post.

Praktica-L Photography

We're still sorting through stuff that's come back from my Dad's house. Amongst everything, I found my old film camera. It was bought around 1981 or 1982, when we had a bit of money left over from my grandparent's estate. We changed the family car, getting rid of the old Ford Escort Mk I estate and replacing it with a Morris Ital (Big mistake. Huge), and bought ourselves some luxuries. I can't remember what my Mother got as part of this spending spree, but my Dad bought an Olympus OM10 and I was given a Praktica MTL3.

The Praktica was made in East Germany - by the feel of the thing, in a factory that made tractors for the rest of the year. It's agricultural in a good way though - Don McCullin's Nikon F1 famously stopped a bullet, the Praktica feels like it could stop an artillery shell.

The camera is - almost - entirely mechanical. Only the light meter requires electrical power, which is provided by a single PX625 battery. As far as I can make out, it is in working order and I do have the urge to lay my hands on a roll of Tri-X and try it out. However, this is probably the engineer rather than the photographer in me doing the thinking.

At this point, its customary to say that I learned everything that I know about photography whilst using this camera. And I could say that, but it would be untrue. The sad fact is that I made very few decent images - and no good ones - with the Praktica. 

I put this down to a number of factors - for instance the whole business of acquiring a skill was that much harder in the days before the internet - but ultimately the immediacy and creative control of digital imaging are the things that have made the difference for me. Waiting for a bunch of disappointing images to come back from the lab sapped my enthusiasm pretty quickly. My Dad didn't persist with his Olympus, either.

Anyway, having found the thing, I had the urge to make some images of it, so out came the light tent and the results are above. I was aiming for a 'product shot' vibe - I think that I had some vague idea that there was some humour to be had in presenting an object with it origins in a factory in the Eastern Bloc in the manner of modern consumer iconography. And there's the whole post-modern thing about photographing a camera.

In the same vein, I love the fact that there is a screw head just below the 'MLT' model ident - I can't imagine a marketing department allowing that in this day and age.

The other thing that I notice is how plain the back of the camera is, compared to a modern dSLR. However, the overall look is ironically very similar to the Olympus OM-D.

As a parting shot, I would note that I couldn't have made this image with the Praktica, which is the crucial difference between then and now from my perspective.

Always the Wallflower

Another image from the spring garden, this time a wallflower. We always seem to choose to grow really leggy plants which are the devil's own job to shoot in even the slightest breeze.

I don't know if I've said this before, but I don't shoot cut flowers. Every image that appears in this blog is taken in situ in the garden. This gives me the maximum choice of subject, but limits the time available for photography to late evening - most of the garden is in full sun all day - and reasonable weather - which is to say calm and dry. And I often find myself climbing about in the flower beds getting scratched half to death. 

Shooting pot plants is so much simpler, as the last three posts demonstrate.