Swinging Tyre over the River Bollin by Neil Alexander
As part of my final A-level project for this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time round one of my old play areas as a kid. The River Bollin meanders from the hillsides on the edge of Macclesfield Forest, through deepest darkest Cheshire, crosses the Manchester Ship Cancal near the Lymm viaduct and gets swallowed up by the Mersey shortly afterwards. As a youngster, it was a great playground. Whether it was bike rides around the valley, mammoth bridge building with the Scouts or just pottering around with an OM10, this place holds a lot of memories for me. So it was I decided to venture back there and make some photographs.
On this particular morning, there were a few clouds in the sky pre-dawn, but it looked as if I’d be set up for some nice dawn light over the particular location I’d chosen. I played with a few compositions, and tried different exposures and then waited for the sun to rise, which it promptly did. Followed closely by really dense morning mist! I’d set up a composition on a fallen tree about 50 yards down the stream. By 5 minutes after sunrise, and long before the sun had got up over the far embankment I could barely see my own hand, never mind my proposed composition.
So I decided to try to do something with what little I could see. I moved a little farther back up the stream and chose this shot instead of a tyre on a rope hanging from a branch over the river. I wanted to try and soften the water with a long exposure, but I also wanted a really shallow depth of field. To add to my woes (I had already waded too far into the river, and the water had breached the top of my wellies – I hate soggy socks!) & as I appeared to have misplaced my 77mm ND filter, I realised I was going to have to use the 72mm ND400 on a 77mm wide Tamron 70-200mm F2.8lens. Now I’ve tried this before and it works, you just have to make sure that the lens is pointing upwards slightly and rest the smaller filter up against the lens front inside the lens hood, and you may have to crop out a tiny bit at each corner. (The hood for this lens is really long, so there may be a few light leaks from the smaller filter, but generally I haven’t noticed any) The problem I had was that the tyre wasn’t far off the top of the water so to get my camera pointing upwards it was practically in the river itself! Thank heavens I had my little Nikon View Angler thingy as composing would’ve required a snorkel.
Anyway processed in SilverEfex Pro. Exposure was 1 sec at F2.8 ISO200.
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For the final part of this year’s Photography A-level I’m working towards at the moment, I have been given the theme “Rhythms and Cycles”. I have chosen to make a series of photographs of the the River Bollin. I wanted to show the cycle of water from the rain falling around the start of a river, along its course to where it meets with the sea. I chose the Bollin as I grew up with the Bollin Valley almost as a second back yard, so revisiting it 30 years later felt appropriate considering the theme.
When I first became familiar with the river around the 70s, it was a stagnant polluted mess. I believe that industrial setups in the Macclesfield area used to discharge their raw waste straight into the river, and it just stayed that way. Eventually the Bollin Valley Partnership was formed and they managed to breathe new life into the river and its environs.
After extensive research I finally managed to chart the course of the river in its entirety (on most maps, it appears to disappear in Macclesfield and gets quite tricky to find again the other side), and worked out where the main catchment area lies on the edge of Macclesfield Forest.
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For this first shot, I wanted to make an image of a dank wet forest scene to depict the catchment around the source of the river. Well I got what I wanted! In fact, I got a little more than I bargained for. By the time I was finished, I was absolutely soaked and having left the camera’s rain hood in the car it got increasingly difficult to get it out without drowning it.
I then decided that I wanted to produce this series in black & white. So these images are multiple frame HDR images processed in Photomatix and then converted to black & white in Silver Efex Pro. It may be a little overdone though – I’ve just printed them A3 so I need to get them up on the wall and digest them over a few days.
Another image from the abnormally heavy snowfall we had last week. Shot with D300 and toned in Silver Efex.
WooHoo! I’ve been troubled by the problem of removing the inevitable dust marks and scratches acquired in processing black and white film for ages. They generally don’t show when you’re printing them direct from the neg, but when you scan and then import into PS they can often look awful. ICE and all the other scanning plugins work a treat on slide film, but they are nigh on useless with B&W.
That was until I discovered a PS plugin from Polaroid (http://www.polaroid.com/service/software/poladsr/poladsr.html). Its like 6 years old and written for PS5, so I was dubious that it would work with CS3, but lemme tell ya, its like a dream come true! It’s not the most reliable piece of software and it stops responding regularily. Oh and its a real struggle to change the settings, but what you get from hours of cloning and touching up pales into insignificance with 2 clicks of a mouse!
Quite hard to demonstrate here as you really need to see it at 100%, but even reduced to this size you can see the difference.
| Before |  |
| After |  |
Well done Polaroid! But please could you update it so its more stable in CS3? (I can dream can’t I???)
Made the Peak District on Sunday morning. Up at 4:30, on location by about 6 – 45 mins before dawn. It was a pretty misty start up by the Cat & Fiddle. Headed down towards the Goyt Valley and popped the ol’ wellies on to do some stuff in a stream. Got some interesting shots in there, and managed to keep my feet dry! Well dry-ish. On inserting my left foot into the first boot, I discovered that it still had rain in it from the previous day, as I’d left them outside after jet washing the drive. DOH!
After the stream stuff, I jumped back in the car and headed over to Macc forest. The mist had lifted by this time and the sun appeared intermittently. I donned hiking boots, grabbed tripod and set off on foot. After about 20 minutes I realised that this was a bad idea. The Billingham bag I use for film is so damned heavy and uncomfortable! I really should have emptied the LowePro rucksack before I left but I hadn’t envisaged doing much walking. So I trapsed back to the car and headed off elsewhere. Quite where I ended up, I’m not sure. It was by a small stream down the bottom of a single track road, but I got some great shots here too.
All shot with T-Max 400 and processed in T-Max developer. I used some Ilfotol this time too instead of washing up liquid as my wetting agent and there is a vast improvement in the clarity of the negs. I’m afraid that I think I’ll be ditching the Mobberley film in favour of Kodak from now on.
See here
http://creativeimagemaker.co.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=17
Another work in progress. Not quite decided they layout and format of this yet, so I’ve posted the best of the bunch. Got some from Sandbach & Cannock still to post. Need to investigate some references to make a more informed decision on the layout.
To see more, go here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacobsdad/sets/72157604048185918/
To date, I’ve shot primarily with Ilford Delta. I’ve used HP5 a bit, but I’ve preferred the Delta. Developed in DD-X I’ve been getting some pretty good results. That is until I tried Kodak’s new T-Max
.
Wow! The results are so much better. I shot a couple of rolls of 400 and dev’d them in DD-X and the quality of the negs are vastly better than the Delta. Very sharp and seriously fine grain. I’ve ordered some T-Max developer from Silverprint along with a job lot of film and am quite keen to see the results of T-Max dev’d in its own developer. I’m pretty gutted that they don’t yet appear to do a 3200 ISO in 120. They only seem to do it in 35mm, but allegedly it can be pushed 4 stops to 50,000 ISO. I’m quite keen to have a go with that too 
