black and white photography by rob gardiner.

Bit of a naff photo this one, really, but another photograph to add to my bucket of B-grade celebrity encounters. Earlier this week I bumped into Harvey Weinstein, the super media mogul behind Miramax studios, at the UK premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11.

A faulty boiler is preventing me from developing film. It is entirely
possible to develop film in 55f water, but a mantra of film processing
is that you should maintain a routine of ways when possible, keeping
the constants of temperature and time as similar each time as possible.
(for me, tri-x shot at iso 320, chemicals at 70f, 14 mins in pmk pyro
agitating every 15 seconds, 6 mins in non-alkaline fixer agitating
every 30 seconds, back in the pmk pyro for 4 mins agitating every 30
seconds, each of these steps having 6 full water fill and empty cycles
between, then a 28 min wash under water, and a final dunk into
photoflo).

So out onto the streets with the 4x5 pinhole and polaroid 55s I
went, having made the decision that I would reseal the polaroid
envelopes in the field and process at home. I headed for the London
Eye, once again for reasons of knowing what to expect in terms of
results. But an unexpected thunderstorm (which I should have expected)
made it a short lived adventure. No beginner’s luck as two of the three
frames were destroyed. The last frame you see here, perfectly exposed
and awfully framed. Next time I’ll be lugging around a litre or two of
water and checking the results on site.

The weather in London tends to turn on you just when you do not want it
to. Fans of Wimbledon are well used to late June downpours, but the
windy squalls of the past two weeks are not exactly conducive to
photography either. I’ve recently started playing with some Polaroid
type 55 pos/neg film exposed in a 4"x5" pinhole camera. It takes some
getting used to, especially when using a defective Polaroid 545 holder.
The negative (iso 25) is rated at a different speed to the positive
(iso 100), so a good positive print means an underexposed negative. And
the negative itself is not as forgiving on poor exposure as Tri-X. The
negative must be washed in sodium sulphite and is very easy to scratch.
As evidenced in this photo, I’m still having the emulsion lift off
occasionally. The drying process introduces the practical problem of
dust since the negative is so huge (similar in actual size to what you
see onscreen here). Maybe it is better that the weather has been so
nasty, allowing me to nut all this out in the mundane confines of an
empty hallway. I have not yet worked out how I will manage this ‘in the
field’, the choice is to not peel-apart the film on location and risk a
poor result, or to incur the messy cost of sloshing chemicals on the
streets of paranoid fortress London. But fingers crossed, I should be
able to take some ‘real’ photos soon.

Abbey Rd. Click the photograph for a larger image.