Photoblog on danfoy.com

I take photographs all the time, but you wouldn't know it from looking at this site. For the past 6 months or so I've been reserving the blog for more substantial, wordier posts, and I've been posing my images to Facebook, and occasionally to various accounts on sites such as Flickr and 500px, whilst the galleries on here become more and more outdated.

So, I spent the majority of yesterday coding a photoblog section for my site. I'm proud to say that I managed the whole thing without needing to resort to plugins, which may have broken compatibility down the line, and the process was useful upskilling for another attempt at fixing some long-standing backend issues on another blog that I'm a part of.

I'll be posting a mixture of new and old material, at least initially, to build up the section. At the moment the posts themselves are formatted similarly to the normal blog, but I'll be changing the images to appear larger by default on a future update.

Click here to visit the photoblog.

Nosebleed gallery, film, and simplified processing

WordPress 3.5 was released a fortnight ago, and along with it a new gallery system. The new system works significantly better with tablets than the old Fancybox system that I was using. Fantastic! Check out this new gallery for a demonstration (click on images to view them in the new full-screen gallery view).

A couple of weeks ago, after a day spent revisiting old negatives and fawning over prints, it struck me that I was becoming a little disillusioned with digital.

When you shoot and print colour film, you’re remarkably limited in the degree to which you can affect the tonality of the final image. You might choose to ‘pull’ your film for a saturation boost, or ‘push’ it for a stop or two of extra speed at the cost of some contrast and colour accuracy, but, realistically speaking, the only real choice you have is the film you choose to shoot on.

Even the choice of film is severely limited. Kodak film will soon be unavailable, bringing the wonderful age of the beautiful and popular Portra (and the less popular Ektar) to an end. The time when you could choose from Neutral and Vivid versions of popular emulsions has already passed, with both Kodak and Fuji opting for single versions of their pro films that are optimised for scanning, not printing.

And yet, despite this lack of choice, this lack of control over the final output, I find ‘analogue’ prints from film much more satisfying than digital prints. This isn’t be being a film snob; it goes against everything I usually value in my gear.  Adobe Lightroom (and Adobe’s ACR engine that powers it) is an incredible tool, and it’s indispensable for the sort of optimisation needed for paid jobs, but for everyday photographs I take for my own enjoyment I find myself obsessing over getting the most out of the file.  It can take the joy out of editing. Scanning in negatives doesn’t provide a satisfying middle ground. There’s a difference between obsessing over the colour balance of a print in the darkroom, and pulling details out of the shadows in Lightroom.

2013 will be a year of printing colour film, whilst it’s still around.  It will also be a year of simplified editing; all the images at the top of this image are untouched spare for – gasp – preset filters based on Kodak Portra.  Maybe all those filter apps for smartphones are on to something.

The Attenborough Short Photobook experiment

ePhotobook sleeve featuring Kat

Kat in our new home (in Nottingham, not Attenborough)

My partner Kat and I recently moved into our first non-student home together, in Nottingham.  I’m from Derby, which is a half hour drive away, and Kat is from Wellingborough, which is around an hour on the train.  Nottingham was an obvious choice for a couple of reasons: it’s the city in which we studied together, it’s a great city in its own right, and it’s also where the highest concentration of our friends live.

There are essentially two ways to surround yourselves with photographs in a new home: prints, and albums.  I love both, but they function very differently.

Photographs are important, and I like them to be printed large so that they become a dominating feature of the space.  The problem is that printing and framing large photographs can be prohibitively expensive, so care must be taken in deciding which photographs (out of literally thousands) to commit to printing.  In contrast, the main problem with photobooks is having enough images available to commit to the expense of printing and binding, without the images becoming incohesive.

Deciding on how to display photographs in our new home got me thinking about the benefits of presenting images in book format.  My favourite photobook is American Power by Mitch Epstein, which Kat – in a small, isolated example of what an amazing girlfriend she is – bought me for Valentines day last year.  American Power is 144 pages long, and requires a decent (but well-rewarded) investment in time to properly enjoy.  It is beautifully printed on thick paper stock, hardbound, and lovely.  It is expensive to print books like this, especially as a consumer and as a one-off.

It no longer has to be this way, however.  I use Adobe Lightroom to catalog and process my photographs, and version 4 of Lightroom introduced the ability to produce elegant photobooks for publishing either through Blurb’s printing service, or – significantly – as a PDF or series of JPEG files.  I decided to try this out by creating a short photobook based on yesterday’s trip to Attenborough Nature Reserve with Kat.  Think of this as a self-contained section in a family photo album.  The same principals should transfer nicely to short photographic projects.

Unfortunately the PDFs exported from Lightroom split each double page spread into separate pages.  To get around this, I exported the book as separate JPEG files, and then recreated the book in InDesign CS3.  The book I created, which is presented as double 10×8″ spreads, is embedded below.  However, I recommend you download a copy in PDF format, for better quality.

Producing books in this way is quick and costs nothing, which means publishing photographic projects in book format no longer necessitates said projects being as epic a commitment as American Power.  Expect more eBook mini-projects in the near future.

Post Graduation

On 20 July, Kat and I graduated from BA (Hons) Photography at Nottingham Trent University, alongside our housemate Erik (who took the photo to the right) and everyone else that we’ve studied with during our three years at NTU.

As I’m sure is the case for the majority of recent graduates, it was a day of mixed emotions: happiness to have achieved what we have and excitement for the next adventure, but deep sadness for having to leave the university environment and mindset, the resources available, the structure for learning that being on a degree course provides.

In truth, the end of our time as students really seemed to end on 4 July, when (ironically for the day that Americans celebrate for independence) the lease on our student house expired, and Kat and I squeezed a whole house worth of possessions into a single bedroom at my childhood home. Just a temporary solution until we find stable- and permanent-enough work to make moving back to our own place in Nottingham a realistic prospect.

In the meantime, we’re both working part-time at our student jobs. Kat has transferred to a Sainsburys in Derby, and I’m working three day weeks at PC World in Derby. My role as ‘Digital Imagaing Specialist’ has been something of a superficial title for a while now, and so I’ve spent the past fortnight training at Fonehouse and Dixons Retail‘s head offices, in London and Hemel Hempstead respectively, for a position at a proof of concept in-house mobile phone shop within my current store. As a proof of concept (separate from Dixons’ current Phones4U shop-in-shops), the phone shop is only being integrated into three stores for the time being, with the possibility of it being extended to a further seven before Christmas as a pilot scheme if the proof of concept stores work as anticipated.

The benefit of this is that I’ll have enough money to live off for the immediate future, while having the rest of the week free to pursue photography-related endeavours, and hopefully find some way to move back to Nottingam within the next couple of months.

It’s an exciting time to be a photographer, especially with recent developments in photographic technology, and the ubiquity of increasingly powerful cameras integrated into smartphones bringing the medium to a huge new audience, democratising the medium. You only have to look at Instagram’s insane popularity (considering its young age), and the value Facebook placed on the company when it acquired it recently, to gauge to degree to which consumer photography is exploding. The next big question is how and where, as a photography graduate, do I fit in?

Now at Free Range 2012

Kat posing with herself in front of my work

Thanks to everyone who came down to our private view for Release @ Free Range 2012 last night.  The evening was a great success and an honour to be a part of, despite some initial issues with my video feed and the NTU-owned-and-configured equipment I was using.

My friend and housemate Erik Niemz in front of his work ‘Preservations’

If you’ve an interest in contemporary photography and haven’t been to Free Range yet, I can guarantee that you’ll agree it’s worth having a look around.  Aside from a selection from our own degree shows at NTU, there are a number of other universities exhibiting in the same block.  I was particularly impressed by the University of the West of England’s exhibition, entitled Pitch, but there really is something there for everyone (although you’ll definitely enjoy Free Range a lot more if you have at least some familiarity with either fashion photography or photography within contemporary art).

NTU are at Free Range until Tuesday 26 June.  Free Range is held at The Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick lane, London, E1 6QL.

My degree results in: Second Class, First Division

Students on Nottingham Trent Univeristy’s BA (Hons) Photography course got their results yesterday. I got a 2:1.

For those of you unfamiliar with the university marking system, a 2:1 is essentially the same as a ‘B’ on the ‘A-F’ scale. The system works as follows:

At the BA (Hons) Photography degree course at NTU, your grade is calculated entirely from the two modules of the final year: the dissertation, and the degree show.  Although this means that the marks you achieved in the first two years are essentially irrelevant (as long as you pass), this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gives you plenty of time in the first two years to experiment and make your mistakes.

The degree show and dissertation modules are weighted 80:40 respectively.  I achieved a First for my dissertation and a 2:1 for my degree show, which gave me a 2:1 overall.

All that remains now is to show my work at the Free Range show in London, and, of course, the formality of receiving my degree.