Bark

On exploring a new theme – or was it exploring my craft?

I have talked about Skipwith as a place to escape to and work whenever I could grab a few minutes for photography. Post-2012 both Mulgrave and Skipwith became that retreat – somewhere to get out with a camera without much pre-planning and make an image or two. Rightly or wrongly I had declared Mulgrave as a body of work finished so although I made the occasional trip, it no longer had that sense of artistic adventure that it had in 2011-14.

I did however start experimenting with digital close-up work. It made sense – the light fall-off using 5×4 and film was complex to meter and required faultless technique and regular practice. I stumbled into enjoying time spent working a theme of birch bark with my Sony A7R and Skipwith was the perfect place to experiment.

I started to experiment with different tools and techniques. The previous weekend I had brought my Nikon 85PC tilt-shift lens out of retirement – a lens I had bought in 2005 and rarely used since I discovered 5×4 – and I used it here. Back in January I experimented with connecting the Sony using a Graflok back to my Linhof Technikardan 45S to use my 120mm Large Format era Nikon macro lens. Around this time I also picked up a Mirex adapter to play with to connect the Sony to old Hasselblad lenses. Later that summer I even experimented with image stacking and stitching using the early but limited software available for both techniques. I was inching my way towards the Cambo Actus.

Fixing the objects being photographed but varying the vision, subject and craft really helped develop some of the skills and insights that I was able to exploit in the 2020s. I felt down and frustrated with my photography from 2015 until around the 2022-2024 period. It would have been easy to give up but fortunately I didn’t. I kept at it, acquiring skills, experiences and waited out the root cause of the problems – lack of time. The time spent on such work in the mid-2010s paid dividends later.