Real and true [453]

Greetings from the shed...

Hello. Welcome back. This dispatch will cover analogue photography, a chocolate focused game, subversion, parasites, Apple Vision Pro, the latest e-vehicles, nipple censorship, LSD, how you can harvest mammalian DNA with a tree, and lots more.

---

#TheAction

Did a lot of driving this week in my Wife’s Volvo XC40 Recharge. On one trip I managed to gain an extra 70 miles in range by staying below 70mph and slipstreaming the tallest lorries. Removal lorries are best. It’s my new game. The car tells you off if it thinks you are too close for it to break safely.

We have the technology for cars to auto tailgate at speed and we probably should have a convoy mode across all models. But after reading Cory Doctorow’s story ‘Car Wars’, we’ll certainly need some kind of manual override.

And when not driving or writing I’ve been immersed in analogue photography. The intention was to shoot three test rolls of black and white film to see if my Leica M7 and my rediscovered Ricoh GR1v and GR1 could still perform.

Sadly, after finishing a roll in the M7 I loaded another roll incorrectly and took 24 amazing photos that were only saved in my mind. That has only happened once before. About 25 years ago. I swore never again. So I ended up with two finished rolls. One from the M7 and one from the GR1v. Read this if you want to get a feel for why many think the GR1v is the best compact film camera ever made.

Thanks to Gordon Tant who regularly devs film in his kitchen, he helped me develop mine using the chemicals he uses for his 120 film.

[All digital images] Top row: Some of the kit involved & me attempting to extract the film from a canister. Middle Row: Two rolls of Ilford HP5 & Gordon winding the film onto the spools in a dark bag. Bottom Row: Me & Gordon check the developed and fixed film with them hanging to dry in the loo.

After all this work comes the process of scanning and removing dust from the final scanned images. Twenty plus year ago I had full-time access to a darkroom and would always print via an enlager. Today even taking the easy option with a high resolution scanner (more on mine below) the start to finish process, that is photo-snapped-to-finished-picture-on-screen, is an incredible amount of work. Enjoyable and immersive though.

This more deliberate approach, needing discipline and patience. This contributes to a more tactile, artistic journey, where I end up with a deeper emotional connection to the final image. It feels real and true. It might not be at all practical for most workflows, but although I rushed through these test films, working this way is very rewarding.

The shot of my shed at the top of the page was taken on the Leica M7 and this selfie under a tree was snapped on the Ricoh GR1v with flash. A film scan can be over 200 Meg and look stunning. This image is compressed down to 2.4 Meg.

I’ll share some more test images below. As I was mostly snapping family I’ll drop it behind an annoying paywall so Google doesn’t scrape their images. Apologies for that. But if a few of you do find this eclectic collection of thoughts and resources useful in life and work, why not expense the cost of a subscription as a business cost? It’s like expensing one fancy coffee a month. Or… As it’s my birthday tomorrow (for real), I’ll think of any new subscriptions to this dispatch as a thoughtful gift from wonderful person. That could be you :-)