Photography

Sat, Sep 26, 2015

I’ve been rather busy of late setting up my new photography business Gabbro Photography. It was a fair old journey designing and building the site to be mobile friendly using Bootstrap and involved too much time on the computer for an old gangrel like me but the end result was worth it.

I’m mainly concentrating on landscape fine art at the moment, although I have an intimate wedding comission in Portree next month and I’m also thinking of offering my services as a qualified Mountain Leader to photograph final Munro trips.

My wee Chezzas project is coming along nicely with Queenie and the boys travelling around interesting places. Lots more pictures to come.

Another cracking development (literally) is my return to black and white film. I have an old Minolta XG-M (two actually) but the light baffles have disintegrated, which I found out after I sent off some slides to be processed. Luckily there’s a chap on ebay who sells refurbishment kits for replacing the foam seals. The Minolta X-300 I got off ebay for a tenner (with a spotless 28-100mm lens too!) is in much better condition and I have an Ilford Delta 1600 waiting for some stuff to arrive so I can develop it. Another two rolls of Ilford Delta 400 are awaiting my photographic attention. I’ll prolly use the DSLR and 40mm macro to digitise the negatives once I’ve developed them.

Ah, the halcyon days of the darkroom! A day on the hill shooting black and white, a development session in the evening and a day in the darkroom when the weather is crap. I prolly won’t build up a darkroom until I decide whether it’s worth getting into analogue medium format, although I have my eye on some nice Yashicas on ebay. The DSLR can only digitise 35mm negs and the cost of a 120 scanner is prohibitive so if I do go down the medium format route, it’ll be darkroom all the way. Cannae wait!

With snow reported on the Ben and the ‘Gorms this week it may be an early winter! Snow was also spotted on the Cuillin the other day apparently, although it’s gone a bit milder now but hopefully there will be tons of snow again this year, especially in the Cuillin, so I can get some stunning images for the exhibition.

The old eBothy blog has a new look too. I got fed up with Octopress and its collection of Ruby gems and all they entail so with the release of Octopress 3 and the dropping of support for v2, I decided to go with Hugo. It wasn’t too difficult to create a Go program to automatically convert my posts to Hugo format and replace the old blog with the new one. A small addition to my .htaccess to redirect the RSS URL and that’s it nice and shiny again.

So there’s another blog for you to follow, if you’re following this one and fancy some outdoor photography tips, tricks and titilations on my Gabbro Blog

Now I really must get on. I need to sort the main body of work for my exhibition next spring.