Why film? Why fiddle with loading a roll which will only take 36 shots, and then process it carefully in developer, stop bath and fixer before even viewing tiny negatives of the images you hope you’ve captured? Why spend hours in a darkroom under dim red light projecting the images, framing them, exposing paper, sloshing it in developer for as much as forty minutes as an image slowly appears, fixing and washing it and only then turning on the light and seeing what you’ve got? So many images don’t quite work, or the exposure is wrong, the shadows too dark, the highlights too light. Another one into the bin.

Unlike the photorealism a phone serves up, film – particularly black and white – captures and emphasises form and texture. A black and white image isn’t an accurate record of the scene you captured. The light that falls on the film smashes into silver crystals and changes  them. Many tiny crystals wait for the developing chemicals to freeze, transform and grow them. In a way it’s a chemical version of the style of the French Pointilliste painters of the Impressionist era who wanted to create images from many small dots of colour. All the photographer does is try to manage and control these crystals in their work. The way the film is developed determines how many and how big those crystalline dots are, and of course the black on the film represents the white of the light that fell on it, so the film is negative.

The photographer has other choices when the photographic enlarger projects the image onto paper, itself coated with silver crystals. How long is the exposure, what kind of paper and how does it react, what chemistry brings the hidden image to life, how dark, how light, what contrast? All of this is just painting with tiny silver crystal dots. I made life harder for myself by using a rather weird developing process called ‘Lith’ which enhances the contrast, grain, and adds toning into the images. A music system is an essential item during the long, slow processing sessions.

The camera, a beat up Nikon FE and the lenses that go with it, is my own, my companion since the ‘80s. Halfway through the project it jammed and I thought its days were numbered, but a well reputed repair shop in Stoke fixed it . . . for nothing. The fellowship of old-school photographers. The gear to print the images, a massive De Vere 504 enlarger, the tanks, trays, even much of the photographic paper were provided by a friend who had moved on from this medium. I can’t say how grateful I am for all of that, which transformed what I was able to create. That said, the work is my own and is nowhere near her standard.

Why bother? I think it’s precisely because the medium is slow, painstaking and absorbing that it is fundamentally different in character, and results, from working with digital. I like how it slowed me down and allowed me to express my sense of the forest.

BACK TO OAK AND OWL