Welcome to my end of year occasional newsletter. I hope you have all had a fulfilling and memorable 2010.

This was to be a Christmas newsletter, but due to circumstances outside my control it has moved to an end-of-year newsletter, so may I wish you a Happy New year!.
For an analogue (non digital) photographer I have been forcefully reminded over the last week or so just how much we have become reliant on computers.

Having spent many stressful headache-inducing hours listening to 'on hold' music interrupted by messages telling me how valued a customer I am, whilst waiting for various customer service advisors to explain to me why my internet service isn’t working properly and to 'go away' and contact someone else, I have been made uncomfortably aware how much I do depend on the digital world and how much control of many simple daily tasks - like the compilation of this newsletter - is ultimately in the hands of others. 
 

2010 has been a busy year. It also brought a surprise new series of workshops in London at Thames Valley University. These were particularly enjoyable for me as for years all my workshop requests have been outside of the UK and I had assumed that interest in darkroom work had dwindled away here. Nothing could be further from the truth it seems and the workshops all filled within days if not hours of being announced.

It was wonderful to see such enthusiasm and creativity and we all had a lot of fun and also learned a good deal.

Sadly TVU have now discontinued all external tuition so, despite a waiting list for them, these workshops have finished. I don't have the time to administer a personal workshop programme, but maybe there are others who would like to pick up the ball and organise the workshops here and keep the craft alive in the UK? 

 

'Iceland. An Uneasy Calm', an exhibition of limited edition prints of Iceland, was shown on both floors of the Meyer Gallery, Sydney Australia in September/October and will now move to Gold Street Gallery in the Melbourne area in February 2011.
My Iceland work is still growing and I am looking forward to returning to Iceland in a few days time for more winter work there and hopefully the Northern Lights. 
I hope to bring the show to the UK in due course and also have other plans for the work, which I hope to be able to tell you about later.
 

'Tree Works', an exhibition of toned lith and non-lith work, opened at Gold Street Gallery in October, initially for a month, but proved very popular and has now been extended until the end of January 2011, so if in the area please go and see it. 

 

I also enjoyed my workshops in Australia, despite the fact that the 12 year drought ended during all of my 2 month trip! Sadly the incessant rain continues and is now causing severe flooding problems over huge areas.
The workshops covered lith printing of course, but also 2-day toning workshops and a special 'Day at the Bleach' workshop. Seven in all over the month and I renewed some old friendships and made new ones. All the workshops were booked out over a year in advance and the apetite in Australia for photography and darkroom in particular is infectious and stimulating.  

 

'The (Master) Photographer's Toning Book':
I was very pleased to be able to arrange a personal reprint of this book 3 months ago to make it available again at the original price, rather than the hugely inflated second hand price that it has been commanding since it went out of print. I am really pleased to report that it has been so well received and has already sold more than half the print run in 3 months. This is gratifying for me, not only because of the personal productions cost involved but also because it shows there is still a healthy interest in the art and craft of silver gelatin print making. 

 

   "One of the best organised and most informative technical books on photography I have ever read." Unblinking Eye

The direct order link is http://www.silverprint.co.uk/ProductByGroup.asp?PrGrp=160 
And an insight into the book can be seen at www.masterphotographerstoningbook.com with a detailed description of the contents and some of the 365 images. I hope to expand it when/if time allows.

Please pass it on if you know of anyone to whom it might be of interest.

If you use the American title (without the word 'Master's') you will also get to the site.

 

Finally, below I have ...
 
           - advance news of the long awaited new fine-art silver gelatin paper from Ilford and my early testing results of it; 
           - another pre-release less than half price print offer for a limited number of limited edition prints of 'A Winter Garden';
           - and a reminder that 2011 is planned to be my final US workshops year and  what is available.
 

 

Print offer:

Special end-of-year pre-release limited edition print offer: 6 prints only offered.

My pre-release print offers are restricted to new prints, not yet made available for sale, restricted to a limited number and for a limited time only, in order to make some prints available and more affordable to people who perhaps are just beginning personal collections or just want a particular image that they like but might not afford from a gallery.

This is only my second pre-release print offer. The previous one was in the summer newsletter and offered three new prints from the Iceland work I was developing. It was a very popular offer and represented a huge saving of over 60% on their current gallery prices some months later. Clearly such offers cannot be repeated once a print has been put on the market.

This end-of-year offer is also for 6 prints only from a limited edition of 'A Winter Garden' as a 20"x16 toned silver gelatin print (including 2" borders).
The editions are of 25 prints in two sizes; 20x16" and 16x12".

The negative was exposed at the beginning of this year but the prints were not made until towards the end of this year. 
I like the image very much and used it for my Christmas card this year. You will have received it in my recent Christmas greetings letter. 

The prints are on warmtone fibre-based paper, carefully processed to archival standards and dual toned with selenium and thiocarbamide, which apart from the aesthetic effect bring maximum enhanced archival permanence.
The offer is restricted to 6 prints on a 'first come first served' basis. Each print is priced at just £250 + postage and packing. 
The prints will be shipped unmounted and protected in a melinex archival sleeve and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity and advice for care of your print.
Prints will be shipped in robust print boxes which provide excellent protection.

Details of these 6 prints and ordering facilities can be found here

PLEASE NOTE this offer is number and time limited to four weeks and will close at the end of January


 Product news:

I must stress that 1) these are my preliminary tests only and 2) the product has not yet been finally approved for launch, although I understand that feedback so far has been good. But here are my insights into what may come:
 

This product (currently still without a name) is very different to anything else in the Ilford range and its appeal will depend largely of what sort of work is being done.

 

Out of the box this is a thick, almost flat, finely textured, matt heavyweight art paper at 300gsm.  It does not look or feel like a typical silver gelatin paper and a slight curve and faint sheen give the clue to the emulsion side. Exposure is as for Multigrade Warmtone but I estimate about a tenth of a stop slower (paper speed not yet published).

 

In use, for straight B&W printing I think it is just beautiful and will really appeal to art photographers working in this genre. I suspect this is where it will really come into its own. The tones are rich and beautifully separated and the Dmax excellent for a matt paper.

 

It has many similarities to MGWT, a slightly warm emulsion on an ever-so lightly tinted base, which is just off-white. The surface texture and paper base are completely different to MGWT however. It accepts pencil and I imagine might be well suited to hand colouring, although I haven’t tested this. It dries commendably flat.

 

As far as toning goes, it responds well of course to sepia toning and gold over sepia is delightful. However, there is curiously little obvious response to direct selenium (Kodak or Ilford) or gold direct toners, which surprised me. Gold will produce a cooling of the image to neutral but no further as far as I could achieve. Different development might improve this response but given that the same thing occurs with lith, I suspect not.
This of course would be an advantage when toning is used for archival purposes without colour shift. I haven’t yet tested it with polysulphide toners.

 

Lith printing this paper is interesting. I found little or no infectious development ‘rush’ to the usual snatch point and progress of shadow tones was pretty linear in both LD20 and Moersch EasyLith and this limits the creative interpretation the paper can offer. It does yield an image in typical sandy coloured lith tones however, although control is mostly by exposure and contrast filtration and less by development timing. The image has a particular ‘old’ look which will suit some images more than others. Again, I found it peculiarly resistant to toning with selenium or gold, with colour shifts being very slight, which is most unusual for a lith print.

 

It does, however, respond beautifully to what I call ‘second pass lith development’ – bleach and lith redevelopment after conventional B&W processing. Here results are very similar to MGWT, a favourite of mine with this process, and the surface, texture and weight lend a good deal to the aesthetic feel of such images.