Living Crafts at Hatfield House 2014

We're exhibiting at the Living Crafts show at Hatfield House marquee G. Open 10am to 5pm every day to Sunday. Jan's colour photos on the stand too!

Lots of new photos including some that are also in the City Light exhibition in the Buxton Pavilion Gardens Art Café.

Come by and say hello if you can!

City Light Exhibition in Buxton

We have put up a new exhibition in the Art Cafe in Buxton Pavilion Gardens called City Light. It is mainly photographs from my recent book of the same name.

There are a total of 41 framed photographs, all taken on film and hand-printed by Dave Butcher on the finest darkroom paper available, Ilford Multigrade IV Fibre Based silver gelatin paper.

It runs Saturday 3rd May to Wednesday 9th July, 9.30am to 5pm, free unrestricted entry, just come and go as you please. You can also buy on the day and take away with you, no need to wait until the end of the exhibition. I will of course replace photographs as they sell.

In case you are unfamiliar with Buxton, Pavilion Gardens on St Johns Road, it is one of the main Victorian buildings and gardens in the town and is joined on to Buxton Opera House. It is very easy to find but to help you the postcode for Sat Navs is SK17 6BE!

There is a bit of logic to the hanging order, you may be pleased to hear. On the right at the top of the spiral staircase are 2 large boards with all of the England photos, including Buxton, Oxford, Cambridge and Newcastle as well as a complete board of London photos.

On the back wall there is limited hanging space so just room for 2 large photos of Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The wall facing you at the top of the spiral staircase has all the Europe photos in a long line of single photos and includes Rome, Venice, Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Oslo and Dublin. The last picture is Hong Kong to tie in with the large board at the end of that wall. Here there are photos of Sydney and Christchurch but mostly New York with one each from Chicago and Washington.

There are lots of night shots in the selection, in fact 26 of the 41 are dusk or night photographs.

Here are some photos taken after hanging the exhibition on Friday. There is a lot of glass, both for each framed photograph and in the building surrounding the pictures so I was unable to avoid reflections on all of the photographs. They look great when you stand in front of them though!

Europe photographs under the window

England photographs

USA, Australia, New Zealand and Scotland on the right

There are also quite a few of my local landscape photographs displayed downstairs in the Gallery in the Gardens, home of High Peak Artists, the local co-op of artists that runs the Gallery in the Gardens and Art Cafe.

Darkroom Dave Has Arrived!

For some time I have been thinking about separating my main website www.davebutcher.co.uk from the technical information in order to improve navigation.

I have been actively working on this, with Andy Oakey my web and marketing man from Sheffield, for a few months and have now completed the main part of the project. My new website for all things technical to do with black and white film photography and darkroom processing and printing is now Live!

The site is called www.darkroomdave.com

I have had to learn a few new skills to bring this to fruition, most notably how to make and edit videos. Most of these are on the Tutorials page which has a mix of text articles and videos.

The technical information from my main website www.davebutcher.co.uk has been copied or moved and updated. This includes some of the FAQ's section and there is a new blog specially for photography and darkroom related items. The last blog post was describing the way I do the videos as I had no idea how to do this just 3 weeks ago!

www.darkroomdave.com seems to work on mobile phones and tablets but as is usual with new sites I'm sure there will be teething problems. Please let me know if you spot anything using my email mono@davebutcher.co.uk. The screenshots here are all from my Google Nexus 10 tablet.

There is also a gallery for darkroom and photography related photos as well as the last 10 photos loaded onto the www.davebutcher.co.uk site. Events are listed more prominently too.

There is a button top right to link directly to my new YouTube video channel and another for my Google+ business page which uses +DavebutcherCoUk as the name.

I hope you find it useful. Dave

Buxton Easter Extravaganza 2014

We're exhibiting at the Easter Extravaganza in Buxton Pavilion Gardens for the next 4 days. 10am to 5pm every day. Free entry. 60-odd exhibitors.

Lots of photos and some of Jan's colour prints for the first time on our stand.

New Images of the Shard in London

I have just scanned 7 new images of the exterior of the Shard in London and added them to the website. Here's a selection. They were all taken on 10th January with quite a good sky at times but rain stopped play from 3pm to 6pm. Just 1 night shot as it eased off on our way home.

London Shard at Night from near London Bridge

Shard on Stilts

Shard Panoramic

Shard and Trees

Winter Peaks Exhibition at Derby Cathedral Centre Until 28th February

I have two exhibitions of my work this year. The first of these is of some of my winter hill and mountain photographs at the Derby Cathedral Centre, called Winter Peaks. It's a mix of Mountains and Peak District.

It's on now until the end of February and entry is free.

Here are a couple of examples.

High Mountain Shrine and the Breithorn

King Sterndale Trees,  Buxton

Colorado Skiing

The last 3 days we have been skiing in Colorado. Tuesday at Arapahoe Basin, Wednesday and Thursday at Beaver Creek.

All days were cold with poor visibility so I did a lot of skiing and no photography. I didn't even carry the camera, luxury. Can't remember the last time I skied without my Mamiya 7 camera and tripod before this trip.

There was a bit of light around 4pm as we were skiing the last runs of the day so I took these on my Samsung Galaxy S3 phone.

Tomorrow we try and ski at Vail but more snow is forecast. Not expecting to take any photos but will check forecast in the morning before deciding on whether to carry the Mamiya 7.

Beaver Creek views

Colorado Snowshoeing and Photos

The weather brightened up the last couple of days. Lots of sunshine after fresh snow.

Yesterday we snowshoed about 7 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park. We went up to Cub Lake and down to the Fern Lake trail to do a circular route. Good snow cover all the way. Really nice shots of tree trunks and their shadows on the snow. Forgot to take on the phone to put in this blog so please be patient for when I have had time to process the films and add to my website.

Today we went back to Red Rocks in Boulder to take the shots I took on my mobile phone the other day, but this time on my Mamiya 7 camera with Ilford FP4 film.

Cub Lake Tracks

Me and my Shadow

Boulder Red Rocks

Red Rocks Picket Fence

A Walk in the Snow

Actually several walks in the snow!

We have been walking around the Boulder Foothills the last few days. There has been some fresh snow to brighten things up but it needs a bit of sunshine to help the photos.

We have also visited a few local breweries: Boulder Brewery, Upslope Brewery, Walnut Brewery, Southern Sun and Mountain Sun Brewery, J. Wells Brewery, Wild Mountain Brewery. All brew a wide selection of beers and all had at least one stout or porter, my favourite style of beer.

Yesterday and today about 8 inches has fallen. In the ski areas like Vail and Beaver Creek, where we will be from Tuesday to Friday, they have had nearly 3 feet. Roll on Tuesday!

Tree and Red Rocks

Another Tree and Red Rocks

Mount Sanitas from Red Rocks

Boulder Flatirons before the Snow

Using a Mamiya 7 Camera with Polarising Filter in a Snow Blizzard.

The Mamiya 7 is a rangefinder camera, which means it is not possible to look through the lens, so normal polarising filters are difficult to use. Fortunately Mamiya make a special filter that gets around the problem. The bad news is that it costs £230 new in the UK. I bought a secondhand one for £90, including shipping, from Ffordes Photographic of Beauly and it looked like new and even had the piece of tissue on top of the glass that would be the first thing to be thrown away on first use so I don't think it had been used at all!

I actually bought it to take some photographs from the viewing gallery of a building where the only way to take photos was through glass. This proved to be only a partial success, there were just too many reflections. As it was a new toy I included it in my kit bag for our current photo trip to the USA.

It fits to the lens so that it can be pulled up vertically. Once in this position you look through the filter as you rotate the front element. When you see the effect you are after you push it straight down in front of the lens. It is reasonably easy to use but means that the front of lens is open to the elements while you are adjusting the filter.

There are 2 filter thread sizes for Mamiya 7 lenses but one filter fits both as it comes with an adaptor ring built in for both the 67mm and 58mm lenses. The adaptor ring takes some getting used to and is a nightmare to use with thick gloves in a blizzard! I ended up taking my gloves off when switching between lenses and suffered a bit of frost nip to my right index finger as a result.

So how was it to use? In the city it was easy once I worked out how the adaptor ring fitted to each lens. In the Colorado Rocky Mountains on a cold windy day after fresh snow it made taking pictures very difficult. In fact I was using it between -15° and -20°C with winds gusting 25mph blowing powder snow around while standing on the frozen lake covered in about 15 inches of fresh snow while wearing snowshoes.

First of all as you raise the filter vertically the front of the lens is exposed to the weather. In my case that meant I was getting snow on the front of the lens and the back and front of the filter. Not good and I did a lot of lens/filter cleaning during the 30 minute shoot! It was also difficult to rotate the front element of the filter to see the effect in the cold conditions.

One thing I hadn't expected was that it wasn't possible to look through the raised filter with a second viewfinder attached to the hotshoe on the top plate of the camera. The 43mm filter needs this or you don't know what you are taking photos of. This viewfinder usually stays fixed to my camera as I use the 43mm lens so much but the fixing was difficult to undo in the cold as my fingers were pretty numb by this stage (I left the polarised shots until after I had done the orange filtered shots).

I used the 43mm and 65mm lenses, the foreground is more prominent with the 43mm but the mountains are more of a feature in the 65mm shots. The orange filter darkens blue sky well but also darkens green, sometimes too much, so I was hoping the polarising filter would darken just the blue sky and leave the greens alone.

In the end I managed 3 rolls of Ilford FP4 120, that's 30 exposures. One roll with the 65mm lens and orange filter, one roll with the 43mm lens and orange filter and one roll with both lenses and the polarising filter.

Finally a bit of detail about the location. I was after a shot I had tried for on 7 previous occasions. It was from the surface of a frozen lake called Red Rock Lake in the Brainard Lake area of the Colorado Rockies (about 20 miles west of Boulder). At the end of the lake are dense conifers with Mount Audubon and Paiute Peak in the background. I also wanted good foreground interest, frosted trees and blue sky above the peaks, so not much to ask for!

My wife Jan sheltered in the trees out of the worst of the storm during most of the time I was taking photographs, but did take some colour shots to give you an idea of the situation and conditions.

All photos copyright Jan Butcher