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Polaroid Fun

Posted on September 24, 2020September 24, 2020 by Sam Catchpole in Experimentation

We live in a world of digital photography and instant gratification when it comes to seeing the results of your photographic endeavors, not to mention a plethora of very easy ways to alter just about everything about the photo. I love this technology and the freedom it gives to take far more pictures than is really sensible, but I am and always have been a lover of film photography.

I got my first camera when I was 4 and progressed to a film SLR when I was 15. I still have it and it still works 🙂 it looks a lot like that one. My love of photography grew from this little entirely manual camera and I loved it. The only thing I didn’t love was waiting for the film to come back from the chemists…

In the 80s and 90s there was only one solution to all this waiting for photos.

The Polaroid camera.

I always wanted one. I loved the idea of getting my photo developed instantly (well sort of instantly, it takes about 15 mins) but my parents made the point that the photos were not as good as the ones from my SLR and that Polaroids and polaroid film was expensive. They were right of course, so I didn’t get one.

Until last year!

I decided I was going to rush headlong into the world of instant(ish) photography, and fulfil my teenaged self’s dreams (well, passing fancy anyway if not actually dreams). So, some ebay searching and £15 later I ended up with that lovely 1980s red Polaroid 645 CL up there which not only matches my 1980s campervan but also my camping mug! In a fit of Ebay browsing and purchasing, I now own 6 Polaroid cameras. Not all of which I intend to keep…probably…

I am impressed with the way the cameras work, once I learned that you have to clean the rollers on an extremely regular basis…
I have also learned that the original polaroid film, now all expired, does not work very well at all. Luckily for me there is a company called Polaroid Originals, who have bought out the polaroid company and are making new film that works with the original cameras!

I have been playing with these extensively, both colour and black and white and I love the results. Well most of the results, it is still important to have the right conditions 😀 it s doing this sort of thing that makes you realise just how forgiving digital cameras are. Especially if you shoot in RAW!

I am still working out what the right conditions for Polaroids are, and when to slide the little lighter/darker lever around, but I am happy to say I am getting more hits than misses these days…

The exhibition that never was…

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Sam Catchpole in Photography exhibition

Also known as North by Westy, it was going to be brilliant, but instead the poor photos got locked up in the gallery for 4 months with no one looking at them!

Poor photos, I felt so sad for them!

A bit sad for me too, and Trevor, my fellow photographer and joint exhibitor. There is something brilliant about seeing your work framed and hanging in a gallery for the world to see. After all, part of the point of taking photos is showing them to people.

The theme for this exhibition was a little different to the first one, but me being me, it did have a degree of crossover. This exhibition was based on pictures taken during trip we took in two little red VW camper vans around the north coast of Scotland. As it happens some of the Beauty in the Mundane photos were taken on this trip and were already framed and ready to go so I used those, plus some more that ranged from abstract and esoteric, to my take on landscapes.

We split the exhibition 50/50 with 15 photos from me and 15 photos from Trevor. We picked photos which were vastly different in nature, but also complimentary. I added in some smaller photos and some lino cuts / cyanotype prints which had been inspired by the trip and all in all we had a pretty coherent and well laid out exhibition…

At least it was well laid out and coherent after we had drunk coffee and moved little pictures around on pretend walls!

It was hard work but it was done, it was set up and ready to go. Ready to be shown to our adoring public and launch us in to the spotlight. Or possibly just to be seen by the good people of Horsham on the way to the theater and the cinema. Our gallery was inside the Capitol Theater in Horsham, and the date of our set up was 16th March 2020.

The date and location are particularly important to this story…

2020 is the year of the global Coronavirus pandemic.

On the 17th March 2020 the Cinemas and Theaters across the UK closed their doors for an (as of then) undefined amount of time. On the 23rd March 2020 the country went into complete lockdown.

So, despite the all of our best intentions, the venue for our exhibition closed its doors the day after we put the exhibition up and 5 days later noone was allowed out of the house (much).

Our pictures hung there lonely and abandoned for approximately 4 months. Making it one of the longest running and least viewed exhibitions in the history of the venue! Luckily for the venue and the country, the Theater has now reopened, but our pictures were taken down before anyone got to see them other than a small number of the Capitol staff.

We have been given an revised date, so you never know the pictures may get another chance…

Watch this space

Prints, photographs and pottery… — Creative Endeavours

Posted on August 22, 2019 by Sam Catchpole in Uncategorized

I have been posting for a little while now about my experiments in printmaking. I have been practicing Lino cutting, cyanotyping and gelli plate printing. I decided it was high time I did something with all the prints that I was collating. Ok…not all of them, some of the experiments weren’t so great but some […]

via Prints, photographs and pottery… — Creative Endeavours

Cyanotype Printing

Posted on August 5, 2019 by Sam Catchpole in Experimentation

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide.

(Wikipedia)

Cyanotyping is a process I have wanted to try for a long time; I am always trying to make interesting images out of my photographs using alternative processes. I have tried acrylic image transfer and I have made lino cuts and prints based on my photos, . This is a much more direct way of making photos and photo prints, using photosensitive paper and items (either photo negatives or any random items) directly on to the paper to mask its exposure to light. I have wanted try this for so long that I have had the chemicals, dry, un-mixed, in my kitchen cupboard for so long that i am wondering if they have gone off…

I decided it was time to get my act together and actually go somewhere where there was someone who knew how to do this thing and was willing to teach me! So, on Saturday I went on a Cyanotype Printing Masterclass at the Surrey Art School. It was run by the lovely Ellie, a photography and print specialist and founder of the school.

It was a fantastic course in an absolutely stunning location, the studio is absolutely lovely and Ellie was extremely knowledgeable and friendly. She took us through the whole process from coating the paper to placing your items, exposing them in the sun and rinsing the prints off. She had also pre-coated some paper for us to use, coating your paper in bright sunshine doesn’t work that well…it is photosensitive after all :-D. We also got some spare coated paper and unmixed chemicals to take home so we can keep practicing!

This was my first attempt, I learned pretty soon that the shaft bit on the feather was too thick and was lifting the rest of the feather away from the surface of the paper.

If things are sitting up above the paper like this, the light can get underneath and the edges will be fuzzy…as you can see 🙂

This is a good lesson to learn 🙂 and that is the whole point of going on this sort of course, you learn what to do but also make mistakes and therefore learn what not to do.

I am obsessed with feathers at the moment and discovered that peacock feathers work really well for this process. I also took some of my own photos what I printed on to acetate. I completely forget to make negatives of them first so the resulting prints are negative themselves, but I like them, they look like blueprints 😀

Beauty in the Mundane: The book!

Posted on October 25, 2018 by Sam Catchpole in Photography exhibition

Slightly later than anticipated, I have put together a book of the photos which featured my recent photography exhibition.

Click on it and you will get a preview of it and you can even become the proud owner of a lovely shiny copy of your very own!

Photography exhibition glamorous opening event!

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Sam Catchpole in Photography exhibition

Well… fairly glamorous…

Well…there was Prosecco and I wore a top hat…

Whatever it was it was awesome!

I invited friends because this sort of event is better with people you like, and to be honest I really wanted to show it to them because they are my friends and i am proud of it! Even the lovely Lucy from PorterGirl came from Cambridge which was amazing!

I (optimistically I thought) ordered prosecco, orange juice and nibbles for 30 people…and invited lots of my friends 🙂

It turned out that this was just about the right amount of refreshments 🙂

There were of course people who were otherwise engaged on that day but I was genuinely quite overwhelmed by the amount of people who showed up to support me 🙂

I had people travel from far and wide (Cambridge and Kent and Reading) to see it I had people get back early from being away for the weekend to see it…it was amazing!! I had so many lovely people that I am assuming it wasn’t all just for the free Prosecco 🙂

My favourite comment so far is a friend of mine who said:

“I never thought I would like a picture of rusty railings so much”

This, is exactly the point of the exhibition 😀

Debut photography exhibition is go!!

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Sam Catchpole in Uncategorized

Creative Endeavours

A little while ago I told you that I had landed myself a space to have a photography exhibition in and that I was rushing about trying to get things organised!

Well, I can now, officially, say I am an exhibited artist. Or more accurately and exhibited photographer.

All the months of planning and uncertainty about planning and desperately emailing/texting people in a panic about planning, has definitely paid off!!

On the morning of Monday 6th August 2018 I (well we as none of this would have happened without my husband!!) turned up at the Capitol

With 39 framed photos all wrapped up snugly in bubble wrap, a set of layout plans made on cut to scale scale pieces of paper with mini photos attached and a whole lot of sundry items such as tape measures and such…

The first mildly annoying thing was when we discovered that the entire…

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August photo challenge day 1

Posted on August 2, 2018 by Sam Catchpole in Uncategorized

A fun photo challenge I am doing, not serious just in the spirit of getting out there and finding hidden pictures! These will probably be taken with my phone quickly but you never know that can sometimes result in some surprisingly good photos 😁

Creative Endeavours

I mentioned not so long ago that I have a photography exhibition coming up in 5 days time (eeeek). I realised when I write that post that I haven’t really mentioned photography much on this blog despite the fact that it is pretty much my favourite thing to do in the world!!

So as it is the start of August, and I decided that a month with a photography exhibition should really be about photography so I set myself the challenge to take at least 5 photos each day and post them here 🙂

Today’s theme was “around the house” not least because I decided to do this challenge quite late on in the day 😀 as I took the picture and edited them it occurred to me that I don’t live in a very typical house…