At last, I finished printing my new Snow Light lecture on Tuesday. 82 darkroom prints on ILFORD Photo Multigrade FB 20×16 inch paper, many thanks once again to Ilford for donating all the paper and chemicals to me. A few of the prints are on 24 x 20 inch Multigrade FB paper, also kindly provided free of charge by Ilford. Now I just have to work out the order of the prints and the words ready for the world premiere on 16th October in Nottingham! I actually made over 90 prints but trimmed them down to a more reasonable number to fit the usual 90 minute lecture time slot.
The lecture is now available for bookings after October 2018 and contains images from my 3 current books, Snow Light, Land Light and City Light plus more recent shots. It’s a sort of travelogue with photographic hints and tips all the way through illustrated by the prints. All images were taken on either Mamiya 6 or Mamiya 7 medium format cameras using either Ilford FP4 or Ilford 400 Delta film. The first half contains 28 prints of snowy landscapes and 13 prints of coastal landscapes. The second half contains 13 landscapes without snow and 28 prints of cities around the world.
Confirmed lecture dates so far:
Tuesday 16th October 7.30pm, Nottingham and Notts Photo Soc
Sunday 28th October 10am, Lancashire Monochrome Group, Leyland
Thursday 8th November, Lytham St Annes Photo Soc
Tuesday 19th March 2019, Chester Photo Soc
Tuesday 2nd April 2019, Warrington Photo Soc
Wednesday 3rd April 2019, Market Deeping Photo Soc
To give an idea of the work involved, 60 of the prints were made on 28 printing days spread over 4 months from mid-March to mid-July 2018. About 10 of the prints I already had from printing orders and exhibitions. The others were made last year. A printing day for me is usually no more than 4 hours, a limit imposed by my bad back. The process for every print was Ilford Multigrade Developer 1+4 for 5 minutes, Ilford Ilfostop Stop Bath 1+19 for 1 minute, Ilford Hypam Fixer 1+4 for 5 minutes, washing in a Nova Archival Wash Tank for at least 1 hour, drying in a Maco Ecomat 24 x 20 inch flatbed dryer at 50ºC for 1 hour, mounted onto Slater-Harrison Colourmount Conservation Quality mountboard with HotPress Double-Sided Pressure Sensitive Adhesive through a HotPress Mounting Press (mangle!) then spotted with a fine paint brush and black dye to remove small dust and other specks before finally being trimmed flush all round.