The Wood At Night

A little movie I made of a very short story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu0L3Hp9JDY




The book in the film: The Magic Wood by Henry Treece

The season of misty dawns is upon us

and I like it.

Every bear that ever there was

is in the woods because because ...

The Scene of the Crime

I had a right faff with the film from the Holga. It's Ilford HP5 Plus 400 and its THICK. It really did not want to go on to the spirals at all. I fought with it in the dark bag for about 30 minutes then I got totally fed up and performed the dread sin of unzipping the bag in a daylit room. Still couldn't get the film to load on to the spiral properly so I ended up with it sort of scrunched on. Bah. I developed it anyway but it's light leaky and some bubbles got trapped where it was scrunched. Still, it's okay in a Jack the Ripper Woz 'Ere sort of way.

Flash Club

Liminal spaces

A few test shots I did today for a 'liminal spaces' I'll be working on over the next year.

Industrial and commercial parks intrigue me because most of them seem to hover between industry and the encroachments of the scraggier, more tenacious ends of nature. Amidst the access roads, warehouses, prefab units and lorry parks there are empty or derelict lots and strips of nowhere land where weeds and small wildlife thrive. They're a precursor of what will happen when one day humanity loses its grip and nature rolls over our abandoned structures and deserts of tarmac and concrete. It's Life After People, and at the edges of our world it's already happening.

Shadow writing

This technique for creating photographic images without a camera was pioneered by Wedgwood and Davy as early as the 1790s. It's believed that Wedgwood and Davy failed to find any means of fixing the images they made, which meant that the continued reaction of the chemicals to light eventually erased the images entirely. However, there's some evidence that images they produced did in fact survive until the late 19th Century - which would mean that they achieved a fix after all.

But it's W.H. Fox Talbot who is most associated with this method of producing photographic images. He called his process "sciagraphy" or "shadow writing" and used saline solutions both to photosensitize paper and to fix the images he produced.

Imagine a world before photography. The only pictures most people would ever see were paintings - largely the preserve of institutions and of the wealthy - and print illustrations. Those with the resources could commission portrait painters but most people had no images of their loved ones, no snapshots of their childhood, no visual record whatsoever of their experiences.

That chemistry and sunlight could capture images of real objects must have seemed a lot like magic, even to a scientist like Talbot.

It still seems like magic today.