This last year I’ve a new routine. One morning every month I sit in quiet coffee shop, some rural retreat, a stately home, maybe posh garden centre. Tucked in the corner away from the blue rinsed ladies enjoying their cream teas, I go to work on my iPad, plotting my strategy to sort the mess out that is my artistic aspirations. This week things have started to get out of hand, it was time for another large latte and a big think.
Working full time and trying to balance a passion for film photography is a struggle. Recently I’ve fully concluded that the Photographic Print is my medium, not a digital image on screen to share online. Realising this has made my darkroom printing workflow to go up a few notches in time and effort. Very quickly things have started to fall apart. What used to work, no longer does. At the back of my mind is that I’m making RC prints. You see, RC prints are the fucking easy ones to make, they take 30 seconds to wash. FB prints which most fine art photographers use take 30mins to wash. I don’t even want to start thinking about Alt printing processes yet that require exponential levels of skill, patience and money.
On my last shoot, one weekend I took the images, the next weekend I developed the film, the weekend after I printed the contact sheets and did a first hit at some 8x10 prints. The following weekend I made the final prints and the next weekend I tried some toning. Finally on the fifth weekend I scanned the images for a digital record and to keep some form of online presence. That is 5 weeks for one shoot! What is worse is there is a lot more printing stuff I want to try that could easily take the next 3 weekends. Things are getting out of hand.
Trying to get a grip on the situation, doing some photography related activities after work is becoming essential. It is a weird situation when the hobby I love, but I’m too mentally exhausted to contemplate doing it after work. Modern distracted life contributes, spending a block of uninterrupted time doing anything feels a challenge.
There are also a few practical considerations, if I was to do one or two prints a night, that’s a whole load of chemicals being spent making 1 or 2 prints when they could have processed dozens. Prints also require a fair amount of mental effort, a commodity lacking after 9 hours in the office.
Developing film however is a trifle boring and quite straightforward, it makes sense to do that after work. I’ve also found getting the darkroom tidy, supplies checked, and printing notes updated ready for the weekends printing is a nice weekday task. Recently Ive been trying to put aside 1 hour every second day to such tasks.
This weekend I spent a solid day in the darkroom just printing, I’m knackered. I feel a little burnt out and detached from the world, which leads to the next issue, some images have not hit the spot of my highest or hoped ability, this is normal. They’re good enough to put online and the models might like them. I’m simply printing too many images because it’s nice to get as many usable images as possible from each shoot. To be engaged mentally I really need to be spending all my effort on only the absolute best negative. I cannot be spending hours extra on images that pale in comparison to the real gems from the shoot.
This Greatest hits mindset does actually go a little against the advice in many art books. In order to do the great work, you need to go through mundane work, learn from it, play with it in editing and use the bad work towards making micro steps towards those great hits. Quantity and routine also trump natural talent, printing serval images from each shoot is almost certainly going to make me a better printer than only printing one image out per shoot. Clearly there needs a balance to be struck.
Paradoxically more shoots might lead to a less stressful, more engaging and less demanding situation. The limiting factor to always printing awesome work I’m in love with is having a back catalogue of great negatives to work with. I need more shoots to build up a reserve of great negatives. I want to spend 1 block of time in the darkroom and come out with one drop dead gorgeous image. There is a subtle mind shift from the need to process all shoots as efficiently as possible after a shoot, to instead simply building up a huge catalogue of great negatives that can be printed on rainy days or any day I feel creative.
The final hurdle to getting more awesome negatives I simply cannot wait to print is making sure I stick to my own themes. This is far more challenging than it would seem. There’s little point in printing out the ‘pretty portrait in a cardigan’ image when your theme was about something entirely different. The reality is themes are difficult to stick too, interesting ideas are hard and often do not survive the transition to reality. Working with a model when the ideas do not flow is a little stressful, pressuring even. In future I need to learn never to abandon the theme, always try and if it is not forthcoming to not give in to doing nice portraits. There’s probably more to learn from a failed image that was attempting to hit the theme than simply doing a nice portrait with a “theme’y vibe”
In the world of internet modelling photography there is a minor social taboo, models love to see the images and most photographers upload all the shots that are of suitable quality. This situation is so normalized it appears that something fucked up if a photographer uploads nothing. I’ll be the renegade where I might not upload any image taken despite multiple shoots. I’ll have a weird situation of having some perfectly nice images the model would really appreciate, just stuck in a film negative storage sheet in a folder, never printed or scanned. A possible solution would be to provide the model with a contact sheet and give them the option of having any image they want scanned and edited for free modelling time on future shoots.
After my coffee I feel ive come out with a whole new outlook on future shoots. Book more models, keep the theme alive and keep the shoot momentum going. The printing momentum needs to be somewhat detached and saved for rainy days, never to be treated as a marathon to print everything out again.
If im to reach my goals I need to keep things fun and inspiring. Doing more shoots, experimenting more, building that catalogue of great negatives is going to be more pleasurable than dogmatically shooting and then printing out absolutely everything before the next shoots considered.
