Field Notes

Film photography, long walks and slow travel.

Pushing HP5 to 1600 on a grey afternoon

Overcast light is kinder to pushed film than most people expect. Two stops of push in a stock developer, a little extra agitation in the first minute, and the shadows still hold more detail than the meter promised. Grain is there, but it looks like texture rather than noise.

A three-day walk along the river

Sixty-odd kilometres, two guesthouses and one very long lunch. The trick with multi-day walks is to plan the first and last day carefully and leave the middle loose. Most of the good frames came from the stretches I had not bothered to look up in advance.

Why I still scan at home

Lab scans are fine, but scanning at home gives me one more slow pass over every frame. A cheap light panel, a macro lens and a bit of patience get surprisingly close to a dedicated scanner, and the inversion step is where I actually decide what a picture is about.