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Last week in Hull Photos

28/12/2016: 27n51: Humber and Humber Bridge, 1981 – Humber

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my new HULL PHOTOS web site, ‘Still Occupied‘ and since then I’ve kept up my promise to add a picture each day to the site, on the Introduction page http://www.hullphotos.co.uk/hullintro.htm.

I’ve had a few comments, both in person and on Facebook about the site, and have been pleased with the positive response, but there are a couple of questions people have asked.

I try to remember to post an update every day on Facebook showing the new image, but I have forgotten a few times when I’ve been busier than usual, and I’ve been asked if there is any easy way to find any new images that people have missed. I don’t think there is, as the previous post could be in any of the eleven sections into which the site is (somewhat arbitrarily) divided.

So I’ve decided to do a post here every week with the last 7 images I’ve put on the site. In future I’ll try to add some of the comments that I’ve written about them on Facebook too.

27/12/2016: 27n23: New Holland view towards Hull, 1981 – Humber

26/12/2016: 27n15: New Holland, 1981 – Humber

25/12/2016: 27m65: Cafe, Hessle Rd, 1981 – North & West Hull – Hessle Rd

24/12/2016: Hull General Cemetery, 1981 – Springbank

23/12/2016: 27m35: Hull General Cemetery, 1981 – Springbank

22/12/2016: 27l55: Humber Bridge and Hessle foreshore, 1981 – Humber

I’ve also been asked about the order in which I took the pictures and the meaning of the file numbers – such as 27l55 for the image above. Until some time in 1986, I gave every negative filing sheet a unique number and letter, starting with 1a to 1z, then 2a – 2z etc. Each filing sheet had 7 rows of negatives and each contained a strip of up to 6 negatives. Rather than trying to read negative numbers in the darkroom, I counted up rows from the bottom, starting at 0, and then across the strip, starting at the left as 1. So the negative for the above image would be on row 5 and the 5th negative from the left.

However, especially when I was working with more than one camera, the filing sheets would not always get filled up in exactly the order I took the pictures. I might come back from a trip to Hull, for example, with 20 26 exposure cassettes to be developed, perhaps in 4 batches of 5. I tried to file them roughly in order, but sheet 27m might have been taken a few days before or after sheet 27l.

And when it came to cutting the films from a single long strip to put into the filing sheets, I might start cutting into lengths of 6 from either the first or last exposure on the film. Usually I’d have slightly over the 36 images on the film, and I’d end up with one short strip from either the start of end of the film – which I would always file in row ‘0’ of the sheet.

So without the aid of EXIF data which we now take for granted, there is no simple way to determine the exact order in which I took pictures, though the actual negative numbers on each film usually enable me to tell the order in any particular film (though later I owned cameras which started at frame 36 and worked back down to frame 0.) So I am simply putting images on line in order of the file reference (though with just a few exceptions.)
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More Hull Photos

You may have noticed that Hull , or as nobody ever calls it ‘Kingston upon Hull’ is 2017 UK City of Culture, with a year-long series of events. It has already started in some ways – I went to a preparatory (and rather limited) film festival there back in October 2014, and already things were being tidied up in preparation. And 3,2000 naked people painted blue posing for photographs made the news earlier this year, though I expect many of the pictures taken by amatuers and the press will be rather more interesting than those by Spencer Tunick to be unveiled at the Ferens Gallery next year (there are a few on The Guardian.)

Back in 1983 I too had a show at the Ferens Gallery, though with rather less publicity. My images were on a rather smaller scale than Tunick’s and despite the subject matter I think considerably more intimate. There were quite a few pictures – I sometimes call it a ‘gross show’, though I think it was may have been 4 more than that at 148 prints, mainly in black and white but with about 30 in colour.

The black and whites were on Record Rapid or Portriga rapid, both silver-rich Agfa papers ideally suited to the rather heavy printing – but with highly detailed shadows and a warm richness of tone (perhaps connected with the Cadmium content which was removed in later years on health and safety grounds) which I think unmatchable on current silver gelatine papers – though you can do it on the right papers using multiple black and grey inks on an inkjet printer, and probably with expensive quadtone printing for a book.

Silver gelatin is no longer king – though it never really was, with good carbon prints knocking its socks off both for quality and longevity. But carbon printing was a lengthy process – and very messy if you made your own carbon tissue, as I found when I tried it more than 20 years ago. There is an excellent article on it by Anthony Mournian, Carbon printing: An alternative process not for the faint of heart, in which he correctly states “Carbon printing relies on patience, fortitude and exacting darkroom techniques.”

The colour was taken on transparency film and were as I recall printed with Cibachrome, known more recetly as Ilfochorome, a dye-destruction process with fearsome chemicals that inherently increased the contrast and saturation of the already overcontrasty and oversaturated transparencies.

Ciba could be tamed by the tedious process of exposing with the tranny in contact with an unsharp negative, and I wasted many hours if not years of my life in getting good prints before finally turning to colour negative in the mid-80s. I still somewhere have most of the black and whites from that show, but though I will still have the transparencies I’m not sure if I’ve kept the colour prints

Or for that matter if the colour will have kept. Even Ciba prints have relatively short lives compared with the best inkject colour, although considerably better than the Kodak colour papers of the era that almost literally faded in front of your eyes. Fuji papers and films that came out around that time were considerably better and really gave the yellow giant a kick up the jacksy. They’d been resting on their reputation as No 1 for far too long and despite considerable efforts never quite managed to catch up.

Of course I’d taken many more pictures – and continued to photograph Hull at fairly frequent intervals for the next 20 or so years, and occasionally though much less often in more recent times.

Back in 2010-1 I took another look at my old Hull pictures, and produced a book of black and white images based loosely around that 1983 show but with slightly roughly twice as many photographs. I kept the same title, ‘Still Occupied – a view of Hull’ but included a few pictures from the two years after the show, and the book covers 1977-85.

I’d intended to produce a new book in time for the 2017 UK City of Culture, but time ran out, and instead I’ve tidied up the old one, correcting a few minor errors (and a really annoying glitch that crept into the page numbering while my back was turned) and will shortly announce the revised version here.

The other thing I’m doing to celebrate the City of Culture is a new web site, Hull Photos (hullphotos.co.uk) or rather Still Occupied – a view of Hull. I put it on line a few days ago and I’ve been testing it – and invite you to also do so and please let me know if you find any problems. I’ve put quite a few photos on already – mainly those up to 1981 – and intend to add a new picture every day (or at least most days, as I’ve not automated the process of adding them, though I have several hundred images ready to go.)

Each new photo will be featured for a day on the page http://hullphotos.co.uk/hullintro.htm so if you want to follow the series, bookmark that page and visit regularly to see the latest. I’ll also be posting them on my Facebook page.

Fuji in Hull

A recently built footbridge across the River Hull

I’d been thinking for a while that while I liked the Fuji X-T1, and in particular the viewfinder, the lenses that I had for it, the 18-50 zoom, the 14mm and the Samyang 8mm fisheye, were all rather large. Not a problem when you are going out to work seriously, but they make it a little bulky when you want a camera to take along when taking pictures isn’t your main intention.

So for those occasions, I was still picking up the Fuji X100, a nice but sometimes frustrating fixed lens camera, with a 35mm equivalent lens. One of the frustrations with using it is that it sometimes just won’t take a picture – and the only way I’ve found to persuade it to function is to turn it off and then back on, wasting a few seconds, usually long enough for people to move or lighting to change and pictures to vanish. But my real problem is that so often its view is not quite wide enough. You can get a supplementary lens that fits on the front and makes it wider, but that seems a rather clunky solution which rather negates the concept.

For some years the main camera I used and carried almost all the time was a Leica M2 with 35mm f1.4 Summilux,. and 35mm became my ‘standard’ focal length. But after around ten years I put it to one side and standardised instead on a Minolta CLE – a more compact camera with an exposure meter – and the Minolta 28mm f2.8 which became my carry everywhere camera. I found the wider lens much more generally useful, and if absolutely necessary you could crop the image a little to give the effect of a 35mm or even a 50mm.

The Ferens Art Gallery – where I had a show in 1983 – you can see many of the pictures in ‘Still Occupied‘

So I wanted a small lens, and one with approximately the angle of view of a 28mm on a film camera. Taken together these two requirements made the 18mm f2 an obvious choice. But two things put me off. Firstly there are quite a few reviews that knock the performance of this lens, and secondly that I didn’t want to pay the roughly £400 that my usual dealers were then asking.

I left it for a while, then thought about it again when Fuji started a cashback scheme. There is a rather better scheme now – and for around a month longer, but unfortunately it doesn’t include the 18mm. I turned to Ebay and found that there was a fairly steady stream of secondhand 18mm Fuji lenses coming up for sale – mainly as owners were replacing them with the 10-24 zoom. That’s a lens I’d rather like too – and will doubtless buy in time – but that in my mind serves a quite different purpose – and another relatively large and bulky lens, if half the size and weight of its Nikon near equivalent I currently use.

Spring Bank

I bid in a few auctions, gradually increasing the maximum bid I was prepared to pay, kicking myself for missing a real bargain in the first I took part in which went for £165, and eventually getting the lens I wanted for a little under £200 including postage. It arrived just a couple of days before I was leaving for a couple of days in Hull, where I was going to attend a wedding, followed by a brief visit to Derbyshire on the way home.

I thought it likely I would be asked to take some candid pictures at the reception, and knew I would also have some time there to take pictures, but I wanted to travel reasonably light. So I put the 18mm on the X-T1, packed the other three lenses in my shoulder bag and set off for Hull.

The Deep and the River Humber

In Hull and Derbyshire I took over a thousand pictures over 4 days, though I’ve not kept all of them, including several hundred at the wedding reception, mainly in relatively dim room lighting, and the technical quality of the results from the X-T1 and 18mm surprised me. I took quite a few night images as well, all hand-held, at shutter speeds down to 1/10 s (and one at 1/5.) Of course where possible I leaned on rails or against posts to help keep the camera steady, but often there was nothing to use for support. Not every image was sharp, and I generally took several so as to pick the sharpest.

The Deep is on the point where the River Hull flows into the River Humber

You can see more of the pictures I took in Hull with the 18mm, mainly at night, in Hull at Night and some during the daytime – as well as a few from Hornsea in Hull and Hornsea. And still with the 18mm, Unstone Grange & Chesterfield.

Although I carried around the three other lenses in my bag throughout my trip, somehow I never felt a need to use anything but that 18mm.
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