Many of you dear folks would have heard Alex entreat you to “Think of the Buffalo”, perhaps while posing for a Tintype portrait, or perhaps over a cup of tea and a biscuit at a workshop. We’ve finally taken a minute to take our own advice and guess what? The Buffalo is more than we…
Introduction Why would you want to make your own developer? There’s plenty of perfectly good developers that you can buy right off the shelf. Well! There’s two good reasons The history of photography is a long one, littered with thousands of chemical recipes that do different things. Many of the popular formulas from years gone…
With all this Doing Science With Cool Kids stuff comes the inevitable question of safety – is Cyanotype safe for children to work with? While the answer is simple, there’s a bit of misinformation out there, compounded by some assumptions. This post will go into the subject in detail.
Since I started playing with Silver-Gelatin Dry Glass Plates I’ve been keen to find some sort of plate holder that would fit my 4×5″ camera without a lot of fuss. Glass plates are generally 2mm thick, and of course don’t fit comfortably into a standard 4×5″ film holder. The Light Farm, that perennial goldmine of…
From the top of Sulphur Mountain Now and then, if you’re stupidly lucky, you get crazy opportunities to do absurdly fun things. (I have to note that this is two times in a row for me, if you’ve been reading the other blog posts) Since January 18th of this year I’ve had the pleasure to…
The Art Shed at BigCi When I’m not playing alchemist, I’m an artist (who coincidentally works principally in alchemy) – you can read a bit more about my practice and see some more examples of my work on my website. Recently I got to do one of the most absurdly fun things anyone has managed…
Adelaide has been struck by a particularly nippy winter, with a few sprinklings of snow being spotted, recorded, and promptly played in up in the Adelaide Hills. It can be hard to convince yourself to go play in the dark when it’s a lovely sunny day outside, but winter comes with it’s own set of…
The other day our friend Fruzsi came to us with a problem – she’s bought a roll of expired colour film for her Diana on eBay and taken it Adventuring in The Big Wide World, only to be told on her return that her local 1-hour photo lab couldn’t process it. “Nonsense”, I said, thinking…
The first few months of workshops have been a complete blast – we’ve met so many new awesome people and enjoyed the heck out of seeing the lab humming along with everyone making All The Things Ever. So, let’s do some more! selenium toned fibre print Crash Course C: Darkroom Tricks & Techniques Saturday, November…
On Saturday and Sunday we ran our very first Crash Course A & B workshops at The Lab, and it was ALL KINDS OF AMAZING. The idea of Crash Course A was just to introduce people to developing their film at home and step them through the process, and we decided to offer a Crash…
