black and white photography by rob gardiner.

An old Routemaster bus chugging along Piccadilly, in fact it is the #9 bus enroute to Hammersmith.

There is no Photoshop involved in the photograph. I shot a Polaroid photo using a beaten up old SX-70 and then went at it with a wooden skewer, moving the chemicals around until it looked like I wanted.

The National Gallery in London is situated at Trafalgar Square. This is a Polaroid Manipulation of a photograph of it (someday I really ought to do a ‘What is an SX-70 Polaroid Manipulation’ page so that I don’t have to keep describing it.)

This is what happens when you take an extreme approach to SX-70 Polaroid Manipulations. Not necessarily the prettiest ‘photograph’, but as anyone who has to take the Tube each day would agree, it often feels like this.

St Martin-in-the-Fields church sits adjacent to Trafalgar Square in London. This is a Polaroid photograph I took of it with a cheap SX-70 camera, then manipulated it with a wooden skewer to get the painterly effect. Photoshop didn’t have much to do with it, except for resizing.

For anyone who has been following my photography, it might come as a surprise to see these photos. I generally work in black and white, and almost never make any adjustments to those photos. To be completely honest, I don’t know what has driven me into trying this out. They are fun to do and very quick, which is an advantage since I’ve been far too busy lately to devote as much time to my black and white photographs as I would normally do. There is also an element of rebellion. Using an archaic (circa 1970s) $10 camera to do manipulations with a $0.01 piece of wood is oddly satisfying in this world where people buy $1,000 cameras and use $500 software to do the similar things. Doing these polaroid manipulations does stoke the creative fire, and I expect to be posting some more black and white stuff very soon.