How a global pandemic influenced my relationships with the outdoors, my region, my photography and myself during a yearlong forced sabbatical.

When I was very young, I found myself, along with my brothers, traipsing on the banks of anonymous brooks and creeks that fed nearby rivers, first the Hudson, later, after we moved, the Merrimack. These brooks and creeks were part of bottomlands—those river flanking, low-lying areas prone to flooding that lay like limbs akimbo alongside riverbeds. Bottomlands form the connective tissue, shuttling a watershed’s hilltop rains and spring snow melts back to the regathered run of a river. In these bottomlands, our summer play was raucous with our dares and shouts bouncing like the sun shining off the water. We explored shamelessly, trilling for whatever lurked in the water or the reeds or among the low hanging branches of leaning, mud-banked trees. There, frogs and peepers sang the summer into night and moonlight skittered on icy rivulets under winter’s bare branches. And when we moved again, to an urban area where no river ran, I still would find myself ankle deep in concreted streams, scattered with beer cans, tires and the occasional shopping cart, catching crayfish that darted about my bare feet, only to then let them slip from my fingers and swim on. Bottomlands, I discovered, were places where reverie among the thickets and culverts could overtake any need for solace and dank solitude hung hazy and inviting.

It comes as no wonder that now, decades later, I find myself living literally on the banks of the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley and making its watershed not only my patch but my playground. These days, I can often be found ankle deep in unremarkable brooks and creeks, framing the bounce of light that darts and swims on, slipping from the fingers of my lens.

And it is no wonder, as the following images show, that I am drawn to those same places and those same feelings of solitude and the subtler brilliance of nature found in the humble form of an anonymous bottomland. And when, in the spring of 2020, the outside world shrank away from us, becoming smaller and smaller and farther and farther away, the disease that robbed many of us of our loved ones, our physical and mental health as well as our freedom to roam, took from me my employment. And in the ensuing year, outdoor creative photography loomed very large on my shrunken landscape, at times even eclipsing the strains and stresses of living life during a global pandemic. That is to say, that photography took on an outsized role, consuming hours and hours of otherwise idle time in my stripped bare world of hand sanitiser, masks, social distancing, outright lockdowns, and, like so many others, a loss of livelihood.

One product of this unprecedented year is my short e-folio—Bottomlands: Luminous/anonymous—that forms the basis of this article. Bottomlands was shaped by the pandemic and the strictures it placed on me—not just government restrictions on movement and masking, but the limitations it placed on my psyche, my mental and physical health and, quite frankly, my ability to muster the nerve to get out the door during a pandemic. The pandemic and my loss of employment had placed new boundaries on my photography—that is to say, altered the form within which I created images. For me, the creative photographer must commit to an exploration of the form that bounds their efforts. That is, we must commit unrestrainedly to probing our relationships with our environment and subjects; with our gear, technology and our practices; with place and the places we shoot; with weather and light; and, perhaps most importantly, with ourselves and our work and the process of creation. It was in the crucible of forced economic idleness and a global pandemic that I set about to do these things during my pandemic year.

In America, lockdowns come in many flavours with varying restrictions from state to state, and in the red states, even from county to county if not street to street. In Massachusetts, while many businesses were shut down, mask mandates were put in place and strict limitations were imposed on the essential businesses that were allowed to remain open, parks, wildlife refuges and sanctuaries and other recreational areas remained open. In fact, people were encouraged by government and local media to visit these areas, practising social distancing while communing with nature—perhaps not surprising in the home state of Thoreau!

And while it was wonderful to see these areas being accessed by many, it shrank my shrinking world even more so, pushing me away from my usual photography spots and into areas even the most lockdown crazed shut-in would drive or walk past. Oddly though, this alleged shrinking of my world was, in actuality, an expansive sprawling out of my photographic universe. I discovered new locations through investigation and plenty of time behind the wheel. It also resulted in a reawakened appreciation for the thickets and culverts of the nearby bottomlands and other off-the-beaten-path places where I could once again find solace and solitude in the form of creative expressive photography.

Looking back, as is often the case, the infiltration of the masked masses to my usual haunts opened up a whole new world not only in the anonymous (and not so anonymous) places where I made these images but other lesser known lands set aside for recreation or as refuges, sanctuaries, land trusts and the like. These include state forests and parks, bird sanctuaries, wildlife sanctuaries and refuges, historic sites and conservation areas situated on public land, public/private cooperatives, land trusts and even outright private land accessible to the public (no right to roam in the States!). The scene in The Way In, for instance, with its horse path among slanted trees and abundant undergrowth, sits on a narrow strip of land between massive potato fields to the west and the Connecticut River to the east. The stooping trees, seeming bowed in reverence to the sustaining river, call to mind the skewed world I was inhabiting at the time. The tangle of undergrowth mirroring the throng of chaotic forces lined up all around me, choking yet mesmerising in their unwavering uniformity. And the path. Narrow and diminishing, thronged on either side, yes, but a gift of hopefulness and comfort. A way in and onward, should you trust it in the face of its pin-point finiteness disappearing in your eye.

This scene sits in a nameless area, shared by horseback riders, fishermen and amblers about two miles from my doorstep and is part of the Connecticut River Greenway State Park, a series of 8 parks dotting the banks of the river. This bit of the park became a refuge for me during my pandemic year. The location is subject to regular flooding and bounded on one side by industrialised farming and yet, people have chosen to tuck it away for conservation and enjoyment—a hopeful gesture on the banks of a river. When the backlit ferns in Light Lifting filled in the understory a little way up the horse path, that optimism sprung up in me. Though unknown to me, I was months from returning to work and the worst of the pandemic was only hinted at when I made this image.

The sun glinting over the river, lifted into light the early spring leaves latticing the scene but left tree trunks behind in the shadow as it streamed over the tender, just unfurled ferns. And days before, when I made Sentinels mere steps away, a hopeful sunlight splashed against the bark of these river-banked sentries, standing watch over the still curled tips of the young ferns bathed in the early morning light.

Like most people, my optimism wasn’t unbounded during this difficult time nor was it left alone by complication, self-doubt and wavering. Arched Arrival, for me, captures the overarching complexity of the bottomlands flanking the river and the vagaries that complicate all matters of living and life, including mine. Taken about five miles downriver from the previous images, this setting is much more wild, complicated and knotty, in part due to the fact that flooding here is considerably more regular and severe rendering the landscape a tangle of down-beaten foliage, muddy culverts and impenetrable thickets. But even here, spring snow provides the necessary illusion that matters may not be as complex as they appear and pattern and cohesion can still be found amidst the disorder and confusion of life. The arched tree frames a tableau rendered cognisable by the addition of a single element—snow—calling to mind that, for me, outdoor photography was more often than not, if not the single element, a significant one, rendering for me the chaotic pandemic world into a semi-recognisable place. Many were the time that I was “out and about” with my camera that I almost forgot the strife befalling the world and myself and my family and loved ones—that single element rendered my world a little more normal than it really was.

The extensive flooding in this area is the result of the confluence of the Mill River and the Connecticut River. During spring, snowmelt from Vermont and New Hampshire ambles south to the Atlantic down the Connecticut River, raising its banks and flooding the bottomlands flanking it.

During spring, where these two rivers meet, nearby my arched tree, the waters back up from the smaller Mill River and inundate these low-lying lands, laying down trees and bushes for their blanket of spring snow. This next image, I’m Ready for my Closeup, taken along the Mill River about a mile or so from the arched tree, typifies the resilience in the face of the pattern of nature’s chaos and the cycle that we at once must endure and embrace, a cycle that took on a monumental importance during the pandemic. That cycle here includes the seasonal flooding of the Mill River, as shown here in Knee Deep, a mile or so up the meander of Small River from the last image.

These next images, Eponymous/anonymous 1 to 5, were all captured in a nameless gulley, about four miles north of the horse path and ferns in the morning sun. This channel amounts to not much more than a dank, large trench carved out by the Sugarloaf Brook on its way to the nearby Connecticut River. To me, the ghostly light, scrabbly undergrowth, untended deadfalls and unwitnessed decay and entropy of this gulch are reminiscent of my childhood explorations in the solitude of the muddy bottomlands near where I grew up. This feeling was enhanced by the baseball field rendered dormant by the pandemic that sat next to this undistinguished ravine. Baseball was a huge part of my youth and thoughts of the games unplayed during the pandemic as I ambled around this gulley became a mental tangle of understory and bramble and sweet decay of time passing as I made these images. Not all images I made in these bottomlands evoke melancholy despite the decay evident in them.

For me, Calliphaea, with its single stalk of an unremarkable weed, jutting from rot and reflection evokes a certain hopefulness and optimism, though it lacks the wash of morning light and vibrancy of spring seen elsewhere in these images. Taken in a flooded basin near Cranberry Pond, a glacial pond that became inundated with people trying to escape the confinements of the pandemic. Cranberry Pond is a place where I have explored endlessly with my camera, literally making thousands of exposures in my early days of exploring the form of creative, expressive outdoor photography. The influx of pandemic invaders to my stomping grounds forced me to explore further the region surrounding the pond leading me to making Overreach stood in a dry, rock strewn creek bed south of the pond. The slanting deadfall juxtaposed with juts of shimmering saplings over the once flowing stream evokes the promise that all things will pass even in the face of cyclical want and the ever-present entropy of life. These feelings are present as well in the flooded Mill River’s grasses and cascading bank of foliage back dropping juts of deadwood reclaimed by the muddy waters seen in Subsumed. Abstraction and pooling light set out in Downcast and Ferned Gulley, respectively, round out this collection of images of anonymous bottomlands, the former fractalising a puddle reflected tree, the latter a small bowl of light in a banquet of shadow and murk.

My forced sabbatical ended, thankfully, in mid spring 2021. All told, I was out of work for 54 weeks. This essay aside, I did not spend all that time in the muck and mire of my local bottomlands. I surveyed the Pioneer Valley voraciously, exploring it and my relationship with creative outdoor photography with a ravenous appetite. I nurtured my reverence for places of beauty if not unique to the Pioneer Valley, exemplified in its parks and refuges, its farms and forests. I discovered new places of exceptional and distinctive beauty, shaped by this area’s unique history and singular geologic past. Places like the Poland Brook Wildlife Refuge, 664 acres of land managed, in part, to improve habitat for woodcocks, the Zoar Gap, a steep valley cut by the Deerfield River in the foothills of the Berkshires and, among many others, Whetstone Wood Wildlife Sanctuary, Massachusetts’ largest nongovernment managed wildlife sanctuary at almost 2,500 acres. I explored waterfalls, lichen covered cliff walls, hilltop orchards, countless farms, forests, fields and furrows. I stood in spring snow, summer downpours, autumn’s robes of gold and red and the frigid poverty of bare winter trees. While I would gladly exchange all that for a world without Covid, there is nothing else I would take in trade.

In part one of this article, Max wrote about the idea and construction of his oak wood camera. In this second article, Max writes about the technical notes, field testing and further modifications.

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Fame

The scent of blossom drifted through the iron gate. No one stirred in the twilight forest but between shadowed boughs shone the heady colours of the painted bushes. With miraculous luck, the snows of yester month had delayed the blossom more than ever before seen and at the beginning of May, many of the azaleas were still in bud.

With trepidation and internal bemusement, I set up the oaken camera amid the oaks and got to work. I spent a lot of time focusing and at times felt like nothing was really that close to being in focus. Keen to test every possible configuration I swapped medium and large format lenses frequently and applied camera movements galore. By around 7am the annual swarm of visitors began to pour in from every direction and the Mamiya lens mount was detaching itself from the lens board, adding droop to the residual tilt I couldn’t seem to rid myself of. Photographers began to gather, whispering, peering and speculating. I explained, demonstrated, justified and at times business carded to the crowds, using all the restraint I could manage not to mock the smart phoneys who follow the blossom-lined paths staring at nothing but the end of a selfie stick. I chatted with a busy dad enjoying an hour of freedom, a group of enthusiastic German tourists and had a lengthy discussion with one of the camera operators from 2001, A Space Odyssey. Solitary reflection ceded to lively socialising, of which like many of us I’ve been recently deprived.

I went home and took everything apart. I reattached the lens mount in a more favourable position, reset the rack and pinion mechanism, adjusted the shape of the front and rear standards in a vice and loaded the images, unsure whether I wanted to look at them or just get back out photographing.

Miniskirt

I found myself with little patience for looking through the images. The weather hadn’t been the best and I knew the poorly adjusted components had prevented me obtaining sharp focus in many of the images. I noticed that the skies were dustier than ever, making me wonder whether the exposed sensor was a serious problem in the design. I could redesign the back to incorporate a baffle protecting the sensor at one end of its travel, but also looked at the velvet bellows as a source of dust and contamination. Back to ransacking but this time in a charity shop, I finally found a black, fake leather miniskirt that was not only completely opaque (to the benefit of its intended user I’m sure) but fairly flexible. The inside was lined with thin matt fabric that didn’t look as much of a dust trap as the velvet, and the outside would look as good on a smart photographic tool as it would on a woman’s waist. As a proud Londoner who once entered a portrait of myself dressed as a woman in a grumpy old man camera club competition (“it’s something we’d never, ever do”) I bought the skirt with easy nonchalance.

The new bag bellows did look smarter but seemed a little stiff. With the medium format lenses, there was no problem but I wondered whether I’d be able to rack the front standard out far enough for the Schneider 90mm, or whether using rise would pull the bellows off the frame. I set my alarm for 4am again.

The Best camera

This time the overhauled camera met Isabella on one of her good air days, sunbeams pouring through the mist and every leaf and petal glistening with drops of overnight rain. Could I respond to this display of fleeting wonder with the heavy and as yet unproven camera? The desire to capture nature’s gift of light before forever lost can weigh heavily on the artist who unexpectedly gets what they want.

Awakened and focused thanks to my flask of espresso, I began to tackle my challenges with new confidence, knowing that if I could just master the idiosyncrasies of the controls, I would achieve results of unheard-of polish and refinement. I did have exactly the same back and the same lenses mounted on the same tripod as before, but now with the large influx of oak and brass between these elements, I had the true large format experience and the complete toolkit of controls I’d missed for so long. Scenes I would have struggled with using any other camera now became straightforward, more than anything because of the flexibility of having all the necessary movements (especially swing) available on a large mechanical scale and the means to study the entire field of view at once. Focusing and setting these movements on a small ground glass was easier than I’d imagined thanks to the large maximum apertures of the medium format lenses – all f/2.8 in fact, yielding very bright images with thin and precise focal planes, and being of modest angles of view, corner drop-off was minimal.

I’m currently reviewing the images from the first few trips – weeks later as the challenge of merging 8 or more 42MP frames is enough to break my computer. I still can’t quite believe what’s been born of a place so far removed from the pristine, high-tech factories of Japan, but now have the evidence that it seems to have worked – 150MP resolution, extensive movements, and as for the threat of flare, something yet more amazing – there is none to be seen at all, in any image. Scenes that would have lost contrast in my old Mirex adapter from unused parts of the image circle (despite careful shading with one hand) are now rendered in noticeably richer colours and tones, showing that my miraculously cheap and effective Mamiya lenses are even better than I thought. And finally, let it not be forgotten that as I, like you, aspire more to be an artist and naturalist than a camera enthusiast (or reviewer), the greatest reward is in the instrument responding to the performer in the most natural and unobtrusive way.

Technical Notes and Further Field Experience

For anyone still following this (and as you can’t buy this in a shop I do wonder whether anyone is) here are the basic specifications of the Rush Oak field camera:

Formats

Area covered by shifted sensor in two alternative patterns): 6x4.8cm=5x4, 80x36mm=6x12

Resolution

140MP for 5x4 ratio, 138MP for single row panoramic, potentially 150MP+ for double panoramic row, though not much used due to aspect ratio.

Back

Sony A7RII mounted on sliding plate assembly. The entire assembly, therefore, benefits from image stabilisation and live view focusing.

Lenses

Any medium format SLR lenses potentially compatible via commercially-made adaptors for Mamiya 645. Currently using Mamiya 55mm f/2.8N, Bronica 80mm f/2.8 PS, Mamiya 150mm f/2.8 A and on a separate lens board, Schneider 90mm f/5.6 Super Angulon. Large format lenses probably focusable to 180mm but current bag bellows considerably shorter to favour the medium format lenses’ close focus position.

In practice, I’ve found the medium format lenses to generally outperform the one large format lens I’ve been able to try, but I’m keen to carry on experimenting. The 90mm Schneider is designed to cover a large image circle, perhaps at the expense of the central region I’m using. Other LF lenses may present greater benefits if central sharpness matches that of medium format equivalents. All three medium format lenses were extensively used on a Mirex tilt/shift adapter, and now moved to the Rush camera they show the following improvements:

55mm N

Still capable of the largest shift before vignetting but now with improved colour and much lower incidence of veiling flare. Compact size and lightweight works very well on the camera and with a wide aperture is far easier to focus than an equivalent wide angle on 5x4. I only paid £60 for this lens and it’s a miracle.

80mm PS

Still the sharpest lens I regularly use but now covers a wider useable field (internal baffles caused vignetting on Mirex adapter with any vertical shift) and has improved colour rendition. Easier to mount and swap with other lenses in the field compared to the 90mm Schneider as no extension of the camera is required.

150mm f/2.8 A

Just about covers the 5x4 field without use of rise, whereas with the Mirex adapter was far more restricted. Extremely sharp and high contrast when wider apertures are possible, though for a lot of images they’re not. A bit on the heavy side so a challenge to keep the front standard tilt-free. Not as extensively tested in the field but awaiting its moment – perhaps for macro use as well as more conventional landscapes.

Wilderness test

Richmond Park is typical of the kind of environment I usually work in – a bit muddy but never too far from a path. At the end of May I took the camera to mid-Wales to visit some of the wilder spots I’ve photographed in recent years. These included the large, dramatic Elan Valley, and the beautiful hidden woodland waterfall known as Water-Break-Its-Neck at Coed Cwningar, Powys.

I also photographed distant border vistas from England’s highest golf course, Bradnor Hill. I didn’t have any concerns about how the camera would stand up to these environments, but it was useful to test it on some very different topography. It was also a welcome return to some old favourite locations, to be transformed I hoped not just by the new tool but by recent studies in atmospheric optics that have opened my eyes to new possibilities.

I’m still processing the images (bear in mind that I can’t see them until each one has been merged from its constituent frames in Lightroom) but everything seems to have worked well. In the field, the camera was as satisfying to use as it was in London, but it was nice to be able to try the “running up a rocky mountain” challenge with it on the tripod, which is a realistic test of vibration resistance. I aim to be in place calmly making my images as the sun rises, but in reality, sometimes sense an incredible wonder of nature unfolding somewhere quite different and have to resort to the laden sprint. In this case, the potential for some scintillating atmospheric optics led me to mount said mountain in record time, tearing through woodland, moorland and eventually some remote and probably private clear-felled upland plantation, to be greeted by the best fogbow I’ve yet seen.

I should also note that given a very limited window to make a photograph in short-lived conditions the camera can still function without ground glass viewing in the same way as the old tilt-shift adapter. As I still use the separate viewfinder in the field for rough composition (with new masks to account for the changes in format), I can quickly identify the centre point and position this in the Sony’s EVF with the backslider also centred. I try not to do this as it goes against the whole ethos of large format photography, but there have been occasions already where it was this or nothing at all. There have also been times when I’ve simply moved from 5x4 to panoramic format without reframing with the ground glass. Any need to add vertical shift to such a panorama in an already established setup can be achieved using the vertical movement on the back, which has the advantage of not affecting focus or moving tilt in any way.

At the canyon waterfall, I felt like a real nature photographer, boots in the river, icy water washing the mountain mud off battered tripod feet and above me a moss-festooned wonderland reminiscent of temperate rainforest.

In the Elan Valley, I watched fog rise and fall in the early summer dawn, alone on a craggy summit far from the land of Isabella. Maybe I needed a camera made from an old rowan tree? Then later in the day, I found a beautiful bluebell wood where I ended up on my knees, tilting to extremes to photograph a lustrous fallen birch trunk. Absorbed in my equally-prostrate focal plane I failed to notice a large lizard that had emerged from under the bark. The calm and quiet work of a large format photographer was no disturbance to wildlife and it remained for the whole experience.

“What didn’t work?” is what the camera reviewers always ask. What didn’t quite perform up to professional standards was my black t-shirt focusing cloth, which is infuriating. Dry and still it’s a simple and practical solution, but in a breeze it continually glues itself to my face or flips off the camera, or turns itself inside-out. Any recommendations for improved focusing t-shirts would be welcome. I did make a better one for my 5x4 camera but reluctant to admit that I don’t use it anymore (I’ve still got boxes of mouldy film and loaded dark slides) I don’t like to plunder that camera bag too much.

Late refinements

Finally, in summer 2021, I replaced the plastic chopping board back with a more polished oak one. It features a newly-ground glass and fresh Fresnel screen and has provision to adjust the precise distance from the rear standard. There are slot-in masks for 5x4 and panoramic fields of view, which unlike the old version won’t fall out when shaken violently.

The Orchard

I once built a telescope to do some astronomy, but feeling I could improve on the first one I built another one, and then another one, and then some years later again rekindling my former love of astronomy thought I could use another telescope or two, and I still had some spare lenses lying around. Likewise with the microscope, the electrostatic generator and now the view camera. At my family home near Wales (long out-of-bounds after the last two years) I revisited an old stock of hardwoods and thought about how much more I enjoyed working with some of them than I do with oak. The oak camera is far from perfect, with potential for improvements throughout its component parts. The sliding back could be more solidly built with an all-metal construction, allowing for a means to cover the sensor at one end of its travel, and with a minor adjustment of dimensions could also accommodate an even larger format.

The brass standards are just about aligned well enough to work, but with precision in mind, I’d like to redesign them in stainless steel and incorporate clearer stops at neutral positions of shift and swing.

The baseboard was designed to accommodate the draw of 180mm LF lenses and so had to extend far more than required by the MF ones I’ve mostly ended up using. If I decided to use these exclusively, I could design a much shorter, lighter and more compact baseboard, and with all the lenses sitting at the same distance there would be no need for a rack and pinion focusing mechanism – the lenses’ own screw would suffice, or I could incorporate a small amount of geared movement to allow for macro work. I could also dispense with the removable lens board and fit the Mamiya mount directly into a smaller front standard.

I found some good pieces of pear, a beautiful hard, fine-grained wood and also picked up some boxwood for smaller precise parts. Just in case I felt like adding black handles to the sliding back, I chose some pieces of ebony once plundered from a musical instrument supplier’s reject shed. I still like the idea of the camera being made of British trees though so will keep to these for the main body of the camera. I visited a beautiful private orchard during my stay and it occurred to me that this could be a theme for the new, refined camera – all the woods would be from fruit trees. I have some pieces of apple for additional reddish colour inlay, and even the ebony, while not exactly a British wood, is I understand from a tree in the Persimmon family.

I’m sure this will all take some time to materialise, but I feel it’s become a certainty rather than a dream. No inventor would be satisfied at leaving a concept half-explored and when the invention is also a tool of your trade, the incentive is even higher. Will anyone read the review though?

This is a photographic project, which I started during the first lockdown of March 2020. It is a collection of images, born out of the restrictions placed upon us all during those first strange, abnormal changes to our daily lives.

As landscape photographers we were no longer able to return to our usual locations to capture that elusive light and morning mist, we weren’t able to capture cloud covered mountain ranges or those life affirming coastal sunsets. Chasing the light, as we all do, was no longer an option. Unless that light was within the daily allowance of an hours exercise which had started and ended at our front doors, highly unlikely for the majority of us.

Just four weeks prior to the nationwide lockdown I‘d moved to Beaumaris, a small seaside village on the Isle of Anglesey. As a landscape photographer, I was excited to have moved to a new area. With such all year round fantastic light, I’d had plans of exploring the surrounding locations, especially the photographers hotspot of Penmon Point, a lighthouse at the North East tip of the island.

Instead, my only option was to slowly explore the area during my daily exercise, of course always taking my camera with me. And this is where the project began.

On one of the daily walks with my partner, we ventured to the outskirts of Beaumaris. The weather was grey and overcast, the kind of weather we all dread as a landscape photographer. Still, I took my camera with me ‘just in case’, as I always do. We reached a small clifftop, overlooking the water towards the North Wales coast, with slightly overgrown grass and a lone bench. We sat on the bench, taking in the view.

And this is the cliche ‘light bulb’ moment.

It didn’t matter the weather was poor. The bitter cold wind in our faces is an accepted part of living by the coast. But sitting there, it felt incredibly calm and peaceful.

The expectation of landscape photography is to have the best light, the perfect leading line through the image, the immaculate reflection in the still water of a lake, the list of ‘conditions’ required for a landscape goes on.

As landscape photographers we need patience, we need to sit down and wait for the light (which may or may not appear), we need to take time to perfect the composition. This is the aspect of photography I love, being forced to take the time to slow down, retract from our day to day lives and focus on the image.

But this all takes time.

However, my ‘light bulb’ moment got me thinking that we shouldn’t always need to wait for the ‘perfect conditions’. In fact, the ‘perfect conditions’ of an image can often lead to an unrealistic view of a location.

So in stark contrast to the norm of landscape photography, in these images I haven’t waited around for the best light or weather conditions and the compositions are very simple.

My intention is to document the solitude and quite often the beauty of the view which the bench provides at that particular moment in time.

Where possible I've excluded any people in the photographs, in order for the viewer to be able to imagine themselves sat on the bench, deep in their own thoughts or in some cases being witness to some dramatic cloud formations.

I continued to photograph any bench I came across. The relaxation of restrictions in the Summer of 2020 meant I was able to travel further along the North Wales coast and discover more benches and their views. It became apparent that with all the benches which I’ve photographed, there have been seldom any duplicates. All have different designs, different views and different purposes.

There are benches found at rural beaches, flooded landmarks, seemingly random grass covered crossroads, views towards snow covered mountains, town centre allotments, the list is seventy strong (and growing) so I won’t bore you with you them all!

But the common denominator is that they are there to serve a general purpose. They’ve been put in that particular place to provide somewhere for us to sit, for us to take in the view.

And this is the aim of my project. I want the landscape, in which the benches are found, to be viewed as if you were sat on the bench yourself.

If I’ve sat on the bench and it’s been pouring down with rain, I'm afraid that’s the view you’ll get in the photo!

My project is ongoing, I can’t see there being an end to my obsession with benches and their locations. Even more so now that we are all in a position to be able to travel.

My project has been exhibited at Found Gallery in Brecon, Wales during May/June of this year. It has also had a feature in this issue six of Offline Journal.

I hope you all enjoy the images and if you’d like to see more of my project my website has an extended section with more benches and locations.

My wife used to play a guessing game about cocktails – someone names a cocktail and you have to name the ingredients. I think she married me because I was the only one who’d heard of Angostura Bitters. Here’s a variation on that game: name the cocktail from the ingredients:

• One offcut of floorboard (oak)
• One plastic chopping board – sourced from Lidl clearance bin
  One black fake leather mini skirt
• Most of the brass section of a steam locomotive builders’ catalogue, coarsely chopped
• Stainless steel, sliced
• Generous handful of tiny screws

And the answer? A 150MP digital view camera of course.

Conception

Scrutinising an outcrop of Mamiya telephoto lenses in the recesses of one of London’s messiest camera shops, a salesman and I discussed vignetting of the 150mm f/2.8 on a Mirex tilt/shift adapter attached to a Sony A7RII, a conversational possibility of astonishing rarity. For a few years, this hybrid camera has been my primary tool, whose performance has been a constant source of wonder and pride. Not content with the camera’s basic resolution or with the 35mm aspect ratio (a former 6x6 and 5x4 user) I’ve exclusively used the rear shift function to stitch frames, and a separate shift adapter for front rise and fall. What formerly seemed like the clever bit was that to get around the otherwise considerable problem of not being able to view the entire field of view, I built a separate optical viewfinder (lens elements in plastic plumbing fittings) with sliding masks showing the different possible aspect ratios of each lens (3 portrait frames for landscape 5x4 shape and 3 landscape frames for 6x12 panorama) and also to some extent simulating the effect of shift.

“Maybe the vignetting comes from the adapter?” suggested the surprisingly young salesman, twirling a 250mm C like a huge cigar as he reflected. “You should try free-lensing – it’s what lots of people do now”. I bought a small camera bag and left, dashing his hopes of a real sale but leaving me feeling like I’d once again navigated the treacherous “middle of Lidl” without buying anything.

Subsequent research revealed an almost non-existent free-lensing community – perhaps they call it something different, or perhaps it’s not a fad after all. I began thinking about liberating my lenses from their unnaturally cramped environment though – perhaps I could rig something up.

Autumn

Partially recovered from a bout of wondering if anyone really cared about my photographs, I was enjoying going out again in the brief liberty of late 2020. By way of defiance, I’d resolved to do nothing other than make images for myself, which specifically means trees in fog. I did a little more research and found an online gallery of homemade technical cameras, featuring odd lenses mounted on plywood or cannibalised Fuji 680s and an incongruous digital camera clinging to the back. I also looked at Sony adapters for 5x4 cameras. Perhaps I could re-use my Shen Hao folding field camera and just use large format lenses. This seemed a promising idea, although I didn’t like the need to drastically re-focus, given that the camera would be a long way back from the ground glass.

Also, the widest lenses would have to sit even closer to the rear standard than they would for a film back, ruling out anything that was in fact at all wide. A tabletop test of my Schneider 90mm Super Angulon on the Sony looked good though, with signs that it could perform very well if I could get it anywhere near close enough. Always on the lookout for engineering challenges, I thought about whether I could cobble together something new that would do the job. I quite liked the idea of a custom-made solution, and also of something that didn’t look quite as much like an ordinary dull DSLR from a distance. I was bored of being ignored since I stopped using my 5x4 camera in the field and found the tiny controls on the adapter and minuscule camera to be less than inspiring tools for making big photographs.

Christmas

With my children home for the Christmas holidays, I was left with early weekend mornings to go out photographing and late evenings to think about cameras. I decided that I’d definitely need to build something from scratch, and began sketching some concepts. If I could just improve on the back shift mechanism and put together a basic lens mount, I’d be on to something.

What I’ve always wished I could do with the Mirex adapter was to shift both horizontally and vertically in the sensor plane – this way I could simulate a far larger imaging area but also apply camera movements separately. I do have a shift-only adapter (Canon to Mamiya) attached to the Mirex tilt-shift which enables front rise and fall, but if I use this to create another row of stitched frames I can’t also use tilt without one row being shifted out of the focal plane, and front rise creates imperfect matches for stitching owing to the tiny change in perspective from one row to the next. I also missed ground glass viewing and the ability, some would judge essential, to carefully view the final image before exposure. I decided I’d use a chopping board. I’d always thought these to be a good source of durable plastic for engineering projects, and I knew they could be sawn and drilled easily. There are often packs of discounted ones in the middle of Lidl.

Wardrobe

We’d recently moved house and I’d promised a built-in wardrobe. Bespoke wardrobes can cost thousands of pounds from even fairly low-end joinery firms, but I do like an engineering challenge. On opposite pages in my sketchbook from the camera designs, I quickly put together some concepts and explored configurations of drawers and rails. I opted for a monorail design and planned box-like drawers with a basic sliding focus mechanism to maximise socks per inch. I’d quickly put together the camera and then get to work on the wardrobe.

After a week or two of edging around boxes of clothes, I agreed to build the wardrobe first and put off the camera. It was probably for the best and in any case, I’d probably enjoy the woodwork. Always committed to using hand tools, I invested in a second-hand plough plane to cut grooves for shelves and sharpened my chisels to a highly polished edge. The Christmas holidays were coming to an end and I’d soon have hours every day to get the wardrobe finished and move on to the camera, given that my normal music teaching was clearly going to be on hold for some time.

Home School

Unfortunately, the holidays didn’t come to an end and as some of you may have experienced, homeschooling isn’t always the most rewarding occupation. At times the home pupils lost focus and the resolution to continue. With steamroller-like determination I continued with the wardrobe, picking up chisels in the morning and putting them down seconds later when someone would scream “Papa! My sister’s not sharing”. Nevertheless, a wardrobe emerged from the ruins of the early year and with some satisfaction, I managed to cut accurate rebates in Baltic birch plywood using the plough plane. It’s vital to pre-score the cuts though.

Winter

The snows of February blew in with welcome vehemence. My recurring photographic nightmare failing to materialise, I had time both to photograph and to tow excited infants around on a sledge before the meltdown returned. Despite very favourable conditions and what I knew would be at least a few good results, I found the snowtography less satisfying than hoped. I’d already designed a better tool in my mind and the one I had to use in the meantime didn’t seem very elegant anymore. Of course, I couldn’t expect winter to last as long as my camera building would take, so I needed a new target.

This had to be my annual pilgrimage to the Isabella Plantation. I’ll write about this project at greater length if anyone feels they might read it, but briefly, this enclosed woodland in Richmond Park is planted with an extensive collection of azaleas, rhododendrons and exotic trees, and around the beginning of May (depending on the early spring weather) the entire forest is illuminated with multi-coloured blossom. I’ve photographed there every year except 2020 and still feel I haven’t quite done it justice. Perhaps a bigger camera would help though.

Spring

The first cherry blossom emerged in a cool early spring and around the house patches of bright white painted drawers adorned the saw dusted floors. Having opted to forego bearings or metal rails to increase drawer capacity I installed thin strips of a low-friction plastic, acetyl copolymer or Delrin between the drawer bottoms and dividers. This worked well and was a welcome alternative to the often jarring crash of an excessively free-running drawer. I now began to feel a weakening in my motivation to chop up all the chopping boards I’d bought. The newly-sharpened chisels, incredibly useful plough plane and sustained recent practice led me to consider whether a wooden camera might not be more satisfying and elegant.

Then in the euphoria of school re-opening and finally seeing the road clear to start building I began to wonder whether, as I spend the majority of my time in London photographing oak trees, it wouldn’t be poetic to equip myself with a camera made of oak?

The crippling expense of moving house had brought one bonus – a huge pile of spare oak floorboards hidden under the stairs. The width of the boards seemed fortuitously close to what might work for the bed of a small field camera, and the grain of many pieces was very attractive too. There were to be no half-measures though, and if the base were to be of oak then so too must be the standards and ground glass frame. The rest would have to be brass as this is an attractive metal I had some experience working with, and using a mixture of soft soldering and tapping and screwing, I knew I could fabricate whatever parts were required. As a source of raw materials, I found two or three model engineering suppliers, all of whom sell metal sections for builders of miniature steam locomotives. I did every now and then rifle through a skip, considering whether an old Ikea bracket or fragment of angle-poise might make for a quicker and easier ready-made part, but in the end succumbed to the desire to do the job properly and make everything from scratch. I cannibalised as little as possible, but for the camera mount I used part of an abandoned Kipon tilt-shift adapter and for the lens mount I bought a short Mamiya 645 extension tube.

At the last minute I replaced some parts in the design with stainless steel, conscious of how precisely the sliding back would have to fit, and rapidly learned some basic silver soldering (i.e. silver brazing) technique in order to join the brass components in a more durable way. The chopping board was used for one component, the base of the sliding back assembly, into which the moving parts would be screwed.

Fabrication

I like the word fabrication as for me it evokes a sense of meticulously shaping and assembling carefully-considered components. I fabricated for some weeks, following my carefully-considered agenda of part assembly that would allow dimensions of subsequent parts to be re-assessed as necessary.

I began with the sliding back assembly, whose concept determined much of the camera design. The Sony A7RII may have a short flange distance (sensor to lens mount) but it definitely wasn’t designed as a digital back for a view camera and the large hand grip was a real pain to work around. I could just imagine the Sony engineers thoughtfully pondering the ergonomics of the miniature camera, making sure it fitted comfortably in the palm of one hand as the athletic photographer deftly negotiated his or her emaciated and tattooed subject, craning here, crouching there, leaning out of windows and hanging off trendy cranes. Didn’t it occur to them that we’d all want to screw it to a massive oak plank?

After weighing up the various limitations I opted for a small vertical and large horizontal shift achieved by mounting the camera on a wide steel plate sliding in horizontal rails and a simple set of screws sliding in slots to raise and lower the rear section. The camera would remain in portrait orientation, yielding “virtual” formats of around 36x80mm (a panorama of four or five frames shifted horizontally) and roughly 6x4.8cm (two rows of three shifted by the maximum vertical distance the design allowed before the grip got in the way). As has always been my simple aim with digital stitching, this gives similar proportions to 5x4” and 6x12cm, my favourite film sizes. These rear movements are solely for stitching, and working to similar concepts as used in commercially-made non-folding film cameras I designed straightforward mechanisms for front axis tilt, rise, fall and swing and rear base tilt. Keen to have one of the only cameras able to use both medium and large format lenses, I guessed the amount of shift that might be possible with a 5x4” lens, thinking it best to have too much rather than too little. To the same end, the front standard was designed to accept a standard 5x4 lens board, and then the Mamiya extension tube was attached to a brass plate of the same size so that it effectively became a removable lens board for all my Mamiya and Bronica lenses. I could have made the front standard smaller if only using the medium format lenses but I wanted to be able to at least use the Schneider 90mm f/5.6 as well, which required a much larger opening.

Thoroughly confounding anyone who might have thought they knew what the job of building a camera would entail, I ordered a set of vermiculite firebricks and constructed a makeshift brazing hearth in our barbeque. The silver brazing went well despite my blowtorch being a little under-powered for the weight of some of the brass sections in the back, and suddenly able to join almost any ferrous or non-ferrous engineering metal (other than aluminium) with weld-like strength I felt invincible.

Fire, rain, wood and metal bring a similar sense of connection to the outdoor world that I try to evoke in photography, an earthy mix of growth, decay and rural simplicity. This would be a camera born of gentle fire, trees, and a 17th C level of technology, sawn, filed and polished with such tranquillity that the robin on the garden fence would feel happy to sit and watch.

Haste

The sun was shining on the workbench and I fabricated in t-shirt conditions, to the continuous background sounds of the woodpecker and blackbird. With this clemency came a new haste though – would the Isabella camera be ready in time for Isabella at her best? With impatience fighting perfectionism, I paused at more than one point, considering whether temporary sections in MDF might not save me enough time to ensure nothing was missed of the precious pilgrimage. All I could dream of was my date with Isabella, and the distant, languid late spring spent photographing at leisure with whatever luxurious refinements time would bring to the camera, was impossibly far off. A kind of hurried perfectionism won and I planed on, thin oak shavings carpeting the garden with sandy hues and pleasant perfume. The rack and pinion focusing mechanism was a little tricky to construct and unable to obtain brass components I ended up used nylon ones for this largely hidden part, which are less durable and precise than I’d like but which I’ll replace later. I cut grooves for the focus mechanism with the narrow cutter on the plough plane.

Curtains

With some disbelief, I finally arrived at the point of tackling the bellows. Everything else seemed to work, albeit in a slightly sticky and recalcitrant way, but it was still difficult to assess photographic performance at this stage. I rummaged through boxes with feverish cannibal eyes, putting numerous perfectly wearable garments in jeopardy – waterproof trousers, a black shirt, a velvet tie. All were held up to the sun, laid out and measured. Then I remembered the black velvet curtains I’d refused to throw away when we moved into our old flat – clearly as vitally useful a photographic backdrop as they were Goth furnishings. The velvet side went on the inside and the bag bellows were made in two halves, hastily joined with superglue and un-hemmed seams. A masterful 17th C tailor would have been aghast. Until the first real test, I was convinced that either some unanticipated internal obstruction would mar performance or impossible levels of flare and internal reflections. I used matt black barbeque paint (as recommended by telescope makers) for inner metal surfaces and the velvet bellows would help as well, and once again experimenting with new techniques I finished the bare oak with Danish oil, giving a slight sheen and water-resistant finish.

Finally in a frenzy of tiny screws and dusty velvet I had everything assembled – everything but the tripod mount. I’d always wondered what the standard size of tripod screw was as it didn’t look metric to my scrutinising eyes. ¼ 20 UNC was the answer, which sounded extremely exotic. In a screw zoo, this one would be hiding behind a log while visitors peered through the glass with disappointment wondering if they could just make out the end of the tail. I picked a nut out of one of my very many boxes of useful things I can’t throw away and tried it on my tripod plate. It spun on perfectly. Quickly, before it dropped between the floorboards or spontaneously metamorphosed into a different kind of nut, I brazed it onto a stainless steel plate and fitted it onto the now-varnished camera base.

Grinding glass

I stand by my collection of moderately sized things that don’t work – from an old security camera I picked up a year ago, I took, in addition to many tiny gem-like achromatic lenses for telescopes, microscopes and hoarding, a flat piece of glass, about 8cm square. I ground it cautiously on some sandpaper – not a scratch. I tried wet-and-dry paper, both dry and wet – still perfectly clear and scratch free. Why are photographers so worried about scratching their lenses? Finally, I rubbed a coarse oilstone on it, reflecting as I did so on all the photographers nervously eyeing up pristine, untouchable cameras in camera shops, things of desire and lust, to pitifully justify having spent impossible sums of money on. The oilstone left a few deep and unsightly scratches in an otherwise clear field.

I ransacked the house again, looking at stationary. I knew I’d seen some plastic document folders that were white and translucent. In the end, I dug out a piece of stage lighting diffuser which I sandwiched between the scratched, non-ground glass and a plastic Fresnel magnifier. Isabella season was probably past its best and if I was going to get there at all I needed to work as fast as possible. I dug out the remaining parts of one of the chopping boards and quickly put together the ground glass back, in the form of a functional prototype. One of the main concepts behind my design was to make the removable ground glass back so deep that it matched the sensor position, set back by the flange distance plus the sliding adapter. This would mean the actual frame of the camera’s rear standard would be about halfway between the lens and the focal plane, which didn’t seem like too much of a problem. In the end, the grey plastic back looked a lot like the very medium format digital backs that this camera is designed to imitate. Keen to maximise their profit margins, I’m sure Phase One and Hasselblad get through a lot of chopping boards.

I ran some tests in the living room to measure the field of view and make masks for the two formats, and other than a little difficulty obtaining focus across the field with the Mamiya lenses (perhaps I should have done without the front swing) the camera did seem to work. It was slow and cumbersome and needed a plethora of hands to operate, but as I told myself, this was what it was meant to do. I’m sure I felt the same way the first time I tried a 5x4 camera. Finally, I took the back apart again and took the glass back to the wet-and-dry paper in the garden. I ground stoically in the rain for half an hour and in the end, little patches of matt glass grew and covered the screen, pristine like a wave-polished pebble, but for the big scratches left by the oilstone. I re-assembled, emptied my camera bag of clean black gadgets and re-packed it with part of an oak tree, a small fraction of a steam locomotive bound to a chopping board and a group of mismatched lenses that cowered in the recesses, unsure why they were suddenly living together. Then I set my alarm clock for 4am.