Photography sometimes attracts people with a very high opinion of their own expertise, and a predilection for bossing others about. Listen to some of them, and you will be amazed that silver halide photography ever succeeded at all, given that it is so difficult, complicated, and expensive*.
Except it isn’t.”                                              
Roger Hicks

* ok, it is expensive!

This site houses some of the photographs I make that pass at some point through a traditional – some say analogue/analog – wet process. Nowadays, the development of film and conventional printing of negatives onto light-sensitive paper is considered ‘alternative’ at best and just ‘old-fashioned’ by many.
I treat this site as diary of my activity in this area, to remind me how I process and print and what chemicals I use. Sometimes the images posted will be successes, sometimes not so successful. Some may end up in the wastebasket – what Tim Rudman calls ‘the learning bin’.

Although I have a semi-permanent darkroom, I tend to have short bursts of activity in it – followed by long gaps before the next printing session. Bear with me if you decide to view this site, sometimes it doesn’t change for months then all of a sudden…

Photographs here may be straightforward silver-gelatin prints from film negatives, others may be toned or alternatively-processed prints made by contact printing ink-jet negatives derived from digital image files*. One thing is for sure, each finished image has spent part of its gestation period bathed in chemical solutions.

Once upon a time, all photography was done this way.

Thanks for stopping by.

Roy Hammans

Note: My main site at www.the-golden-fleece.co.uk contains a lot more of my photographs (primarily digital), plus material on the photographers Edwin Smith, Raymond Moore and Tony Ray-Jones, as well as articles on Creative Camera magazine and The Cambridge Darkroom.
It also is the home of The Creative Camera Archive, a searchable index of every issue of the magazine.

*For a description of the process I use to create digital negatives, please see the article on my main site, although it’s a bit dated now.


Comments

About — 2 Comments

  1. Thanks Garry, a very interesting link. I will add it to the Edwin Smith section on my site, which is currently undergoing reconstruction.

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