UK on Sam Smith

Edgeland Nottingham

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently looking through all the photos I took during my 4 years living in Nottingham to see if I could come up with some kind of series out of them. After cutting it down to all the black & white images that turned out reasonably I had just over 200 photos so I needed to come up with some more specific ideas. One theme I tend to shoot a lot is where nature meets the built environment, which lead me to put together this series. I got the title, and some inspiration, from Robin Friend’s Bastard Countryside (watch this video for a good introduction).

This series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M, CF 60mm and 150mm lenses, and Ilford HP5+ at EI 800 and developed in HC-110 1+49 for 11 minutes, except for image 13, which was shot on Ilford FP4+ at EI 400 and developed in HC-110 1+49 for 16 minutes.

In Feburary 2019 I started shooting a series with a similar theme in a small nature reserve in Nottingham on Fuji Pro 400H, but I’ve never been able to get acceptable scans from the 2 rolls I shot. If I do manage to get something useful from them I might put together a part 2 to this project.

Campus Lights Updates and Out-takes

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 5 months since I posted my project Campus Lights. Sadly I didn’t manage to make any progress with getting anything changed on campus, the person I’d emailed didn’t get back to me and my exams & dissertation took precedence so I didn’t pursue it any further.

I did manage to write a slightly extended version of the article for Emulsive, for which I also swapped out a couple of photos. I consider this to be the final version of the project and I am very happy with how it turned out.

Also reddit user ISUOnFilm created their own version of the project which I think turned out really well.

Replacement for Campus Lights 10 in Emulsive version

Replacement for Campus Lights 24 in Emulsive version

The following 3 photos are ones that I took for the project, didn’t make it into the final cut but I still wanted to share.

Campus Lights Out-take 1

Campus Lights Out-take 2

Campus Lights Out-take 3

Overall I am very pleased with how the project turned out and with how it was received. My main goal with projects going forward is to try something longer term, and I hope to revisit the topic of light pollution at some point.

Campus Lights

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As an astronomy student and hobbyist, light pollution has sort of become my environmental issue of choice. Not only is it an annoyance to astronomers, but also damaging to wildlife as well as our health and is a large energy sink. I have taken particular notice of the amount of light pollution on my university’s campus lately as I am back living on campus after 2 years of living elsewhere, and my dissertation involves using the telescope on the roof of the physics building. This is a university that seems to boast about being green but seems to ignore this aspect of the environment.

All of the photos in this series were taken between 11pm and 2am, outside of those times of the year when things stay open through the night (around exams and big deadlines) and mostly away from the residential areas, so this should show the darkest the university gets within term time.

I have been in contact with a relevant member of staff about the situation and they seemed to be very receptive to this and I am awaiting an update. My main goal with this project is to raise some awareness for this issue while also documenting what the campus looks like before it hopefully gets darker.

This series was shot on my Hasselblad 500C/M with 150mm CF lens and Rollei CR200 film, developed by Palm Labs in Birmingham and scanned with my Epson 4180.

References

Subways

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the remnants of a failed attempt at a photo project looking at Birmingham’s pedestrian subways. I never really thought it was a very good idea for a project but I decided to give it a go anyway because I wanted to try shooting a project and it was the best idea that I had, also the subways are the sort of thing that I usually like to shoot anyway.

Everything in this series was shot with my Hasselblad 500C/M and Zeiss 60mm Distagon CF with Ilford HP5+ rated at 800 and developed with Kodak HC-110 at a dilution of 1+49 for 11 minutes. This is what I shoot most of the time anyway but I thought that the pushed HP5+ would work well for the sort of gritty feel of the subways. I shot 3 separate rolls of film on 3 different days in May of 2018. I have chosen 12 of the 23 pictures that I took that I feel fit the scope of the project.

The intention behind the project was to capture the feeling of the subways, which I think I was at least partially successful in doing. I think photos 2, 8 and 9 capture some of the dread and uncertainty I, at least used to, feel when entering one of these. At some point when hunting these things down I began to realise how quickly they were disappearing, a couple that I photographed were fenced off and one that I visited had been totally filled in. I was then also trying to document some of these before they were also demolished. The main thing that I failed to capture was a human aspect of the subways, although I’m not sure that photographing people walking through these areas or homeless people sleeping in them would be more compelling than what I have.

I gave up on the project mostly just because I’d lost interest in it. I visited almost all of the subways that I managed to find, some a few times, and despite only shooting 23 images I was starting to feel like there wasn’t really any new compositions left since they’re all quite visually similar.