And this is the beautiful camera. It's a 5x4 plate camera. It's actually called an ebony.
Although it's a very traditional old design, it's a brand new camera. On this lens you've
got the aperture and the shutter speed. So this is the aperture which is basically the
size of the hole or how much light goes through alongside the shutter speed. So how quickly
the shutter stays open. You find the scene that you're looking at and then you basically look
through this glass plate here. To focus you move either the front or the rear standard.
The film basically slots in here. Once the film is actually in the camera I can't see through
the lens anymore. So you basically have to memorize where the actual frame is.
In some ways it kind of helps because people are not sure when you're taking the picture.
There's this thing about people are so used to if a photographer looking through the lens at them.
There's here there's a kind of ambiguity as to whether at what point I'm actually taking the
picture. Particularly because I'm holding the shutter release and often holding behind
the tripod. So there's a kind of I can just take the picture without people really knowing.
Because it's quite a slow process it means that you think much more about the composition.
I mean it's about five pounds every time I take a picture. So it's an expensive process.
Because of that and because of the the slowness of it it just means that you take a lot more
care and thought in crafting the image. So for me it's really about crafting a photograph,
crafting something that I want people to kind of really look at and study
rather than just the kind of snapshot aesthetic if you like. No so it's not like digital where
I have any clue as to what I've got until I've actually had it processed in the lab.
And then the so the lab will process the film and then they'll produce little contact sheets.
So on each contact sheet there'll be four frames of five four film. So this film is five by four
inches which is basically that size of negative. And what that means is that when you're blowing
up the print there's a lot less loss of quality than if you were blowing up from a smaller
35mm frame size.
Bring the file to here to the lab where we then do some kind of test prints. So these are just
small 10 by 8 test prints just to give us a sense of the colors. And then we'll tweak the colors
so that we're getting the right tones, the right color balance, the right contrast.
And then from once we've got it right on a 10 by 8 we then do a series of these test strips
just checking for sharpness, checking for contrast etc. And then from that we then do the final print.
Bradford is revealed.
The situation is better.
Yeah.
That bloke's forgotten his bike.
And where possible this will be the final print but sometimes
there are things that you spot in the in the picture which you hadn't noticed on the screens
kind of subtlety so then there might be some you know some retouching or some issue with
the contrast of the color so we might have to tweak another version. Once I sign the print off
it goes through to be mounted onto Dibond which is a it's a bit like it's a composite of aluminium
and I think plastic which basically makes sure that the print is rigid because they're quite
large prints of 50 by 40 inches and then from there they'll be framed. We've had real oak wood
frames made by local wood merchants because I really wanted the quite earthy feel to the frame
so rather than having laminate frames the whole thing is a piece of solid wood. Now we're doing
all the other elements of the frame and they'll be constructed here and that's so that's the kind
of final process.
