Jono Shields

learning all the things

How to do street photography?

11 Jun 2019

Street Photography. It’s not that scary.

And just like every other aspect of photography you can make it your own.

You can focus on the environment.

Or on people.

You can set up your composition and wait.

Or you can walk and shoot.

You can get up close and personal.

Or you can shoot from afar.

You can talk to your subjects and ask for them to pose for you.

Or you can take your photos discretely

There is one rule though. And this is important…

HAVE FUN!

Let's Develop Film and hope it doesn't go terribly wrong

06 Feb 2019

Lately photography (especially analog stuff) has taken a bit of a back seat.

This week I decided to take the next step in the process and have a crack at developing my own film.

What follows is possibly the worst first attempt in the history of photography.

I decided the best idea was to develop a roll that I had accidentally exposed by opening the back of the camera without knowing how much film had been exposed. I considered it basically ruined. So why not experiment with it.

So here I am developing a roll of Kodak Colorplus in my kitchen using Caffenol (a homebrewed b&w development agent made from ingredients you can get at the supermarket).

The recipe I used is straight out of the Caffenol Bible.

54g/l Washing Soda (it says water free, but I couldn’t get my hands on any, instead they recommend 2.7x this amount for washing soda crystals)
16g/l Vitamin C (I used chewable orange flavoured tablets - not recommended)
1g/l Potassium Bromide (I used iodised salt because I saw someone else use it in a youtube video)
40g/l Instant Coffee Powder

The ingredients above are for 1 litre. So I used half the amount to make a batch of 500ml for my development tank.
They also recommend to make the solution in two parts, one for the soda and another for the coffee. This is so that you can see when both are completely dissolved (the darkness of the coffee powder makes it really hard to see the soda).
The bible recommends a 15 minute develop time, 10 inversions in the first minute, 3 every minute after.
Then stop and fix normally. I just rinsed with water for my stop bath (I saw others do this). And I used Ilford Rapid Fixer at a ration of 1+4 to fix the film.
Then lots of rinsing and hanging up in my shower to dry.

The results?

Well, it turns out that the film only had 3 frames on it. And there was very little transparency (they were very opaque), this made it very difficult to scan. Not that I have a scanner - I have an mirrorless camera with a 30 year old macro lens that is quite dirty.

Here are two of the three pictures…

Yeah. We hella cute.

Overall I am really happy with the results, especially considering how many mistakes I made. Very keen to have another try with some black & white film that has been exposed properly :D

Getting into Portraits with the Pentax 6x7

23 Oct 2018

A beige coloured cat hissing at me

We went to Stanley Bay in the evening to catch the sun setting behind the harbour bridge and as I was setting up this cat appeared.

It would not stop hissing at me. It was seriously pissed off for some reason. And then when I got closer to take a photo it hissed loudly and started coming towards me.

I wussed out and ran away, but managed to get this shot.

A clenched fist on the chest

I am enjoying the level of detail that I can get out of these medium format shots. I feel like when taking portraits especially there is a whole other feeling that you get with medium format.

Portrait of a girl in a Ponch (black and white)

Also, when I take images of landscapes sometimes I feel like that extra detail doesn’t add much.

So I find that I need to be more careful when shooting landscapes with this camera (samples below).

Muriwai Gannet Colony, an outcrop over the ocean with nesting seabirds

A boathouse under a tree nestled between the rocks

Silhouette of a man against the setting sun

Early Morning Photography

01 Oct 2018

I’m a morning a person. Every day while I have been in Christchurch for the last two weeks I have been up at dawn, exploring the city in the hours that I can before I have to go to work.

1950's Old Pickup truck