The Allergies at The Garage in London

Wow! Wow! Wow! Who knew by taking a few random snaps at a gig in Bristol would lead us to travel up to London the same week and take some pics for the amazing group ‘The Allergies’!

If you haven’t heard these guys then you must…as quoted by Craig Charles himself ‘The Allergies are neck deep in the world of scratchy samples -This is truly funk and soul for the 21st century’.

So anyway, how did we get here you may ask, well…The Allergies basically liked my photos from a previous gig (hashtaging really does help!) and next minute we were hopping on the train London bound heading towards The Garage. Both Woz and I absolutely love music in a huge way (it helps the soul, right?), and other than our wedding photography business going fairly quiet over the series of lockdowns, we have really missed live music at gigs and festivals. Unfortunately we contracted Covid over the summer (even though we are both double jabbed) which meant we couldn’t attend the Beautiful Days festival which we had been gearing up for. But hey, some things are slowly getting back to some normality now and so we jumped back deep into going to gigs.

The Allergies are a duo of skilled turntablists from Bristol who formed back in 2012 and along their way they have incorporated the mighty sounds of rapper Andy Cooper, soul sensation Marietta Smith and saxophonist extraordinaire Mr Woodnote. Together they make an incredible team and their performances are nothing but sublime.

Instant Large Format Photography

What seems a very long time ago, I spotted a curious little thing that Lomo were offering that would fit on the back of our Intrepid Large Format Camera: a Polaroid style back for instant film!
I thought it might be fun to be able to get instant results from photoshoots, so joined the kickstarter and waited.
Then the pandemic hit, so I waited some more!

Finally, just recently we received a package containing a nondescript black plastic box, shown here attached to the camera:

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The process of taking a photo is even more of a faff than the film process we’ve documented previously on this blog! Once you have the camera set up and focussed, you place the back on the camera and then take the photo.
You then have to remove the back (I think this is an Intrepid thing - if you leave it on the back, the clip you can see in the picture scratches the photo as it ejects) and press the button to eject the photo:

We tried this out on a recent maternity shoot and it’s great fun and helped get us all in to the right mood for the digital shots. It’s really lovely to all gather round and watch the picture appear as if by magic.
The pictures you get from this system can be very charming, but they are nowhere near the quality you can get from film in this camera or from our Fuji digital kit, but they are a unique instant memento and have a very different look to them. We’ll definitely be using it lots in the future.

For Gotton Farm

I first got news that Gotton Farm was to be sold in the summer of 2018. I was devastated and extremely worried for the future of my family

Gotton has been with us for a hundred years and my cousin Ted is the last of the three generations to live and work there. I've grown up with him and spent many a summer day on the farm and the long nights by the fire. The fear of change was overwhelming for us all.

It was later that I learned that there was a way to keep the farm in the family, but to do this meant selling the entire herd and changing the structure of the farm buildings.

I decided I wanted to capture the life of the farm and the enormous changes it was undergoing I later discovered that the history of the farm has never been recorded so this will be the only document of Gotton as a working farm.

The final months of the herd were witness to mv uncle Mike suffering from significant illness, a trusted farm hand suddenly losing his life, deaths in the herd and failed TB tests. All the while, Ted and his father remained upbeat, showing smiles that hid the tension and anxiety they were facing every day.

The following is my initial set from an ongoing project. The photos are a mixture of digital and medium format film, which was taken on my Bronica.

Intrepid Camera family shoot

We had a family shoot towards the end of October and as we were preparing to finish we asked if they would be happy to pose long enough for us to try out our Intrepid large format camera. They were very keen! When the camera emerged from the car they were all extremely curious and wanted to get under the dark cloth and have a look at the screen to see what we saw.

The image you get on the back, as you’re focussing the camera, is upside down and reversed, which makes framing the image quite interesting!
When you add that you can’t just ‘click a button’ and get a picture, the whole thing becomes much more of an event than using a digital camera.
Here’s the rough process, to give you an idea of the time it all takes:

  1. Arrange everyone in the frame. There’s no zoom and everything is cumbersome and on a tripod, so this involves moving people and camera around a lot…which you’ll see we didn’t quite get right!

  2. Get under the dark cloth and focus the image.

  3. Get a meter reading (we cheated and used one of our Fuji cameras)

  4. Set the Aperture and shutter speed.

  5. Realise people have moved, so refocus the image.

  6. Notice a cloud has covered the sun, so take another meter reading and change the settings!

  7. Manually cock the shutter - this is priming a spring that will open and close the shutter for a set time when you eventually get to press it!

  8. Close the shutter - you have to do this manually and if you forget you will expose the film when you remove the dark slide at step 10 and get no picture.

  9. Insert the film holder (you can’t do this before as it goes in front of the focussing screen and blocks your view).

  10. Remove the dark slide.

  11. Get everyone to smile…while noticing the cloud has moved so the light has changed!

  12. Press the shutter button.

  13. Replace the dark slide.

  14. Remove the film holder.

This process happens for each shot, and takes a while! Weirdly though, it’s such a performance that the family posed really well and it’s about the only time we got them all to hold still and smile at the same time!

Of course, we had no idea if we’d managed to actually capture anything on our 4 shots, so off we went to process the film.

Result!

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Of the four shots, we got one dud, which we think was because the shutter was cocked but not closed, and two that are a bit too contrasty because the light changed before we took the picture.

Overall though, we’re happy with the results on this first trial. Next time, we’ll definitely spend more time posing and hopefully less time in the process of taking the image!