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Art of Albion
Photographs by Bob Trubshaw
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Too much information about me and my 'gear'
In 1961 I was given a Kodak 127 Brownie camera for my seventh birthday. But only shot two or three rolls on it because the cost of film and processing was way beyond my pocket money. About 1970 a school friend allowed me to use his Zenith 35mm SLR and then taught me to develop and print using his father's equipment in their bathroom. Autumn 1972 I spent a fortnight 'doing' photography as part of my foundation year at Bradford College of Art. The technician running the 'module' was certainly not a tutor. I learnt little as I'd already had some experience of developing and printing photographs. About 1974 my student grant stretched enough to be able to buy a Rollie B35 to use as an 'instant sketchpad' when in museums and such like. It cost £30. My grant was £13.50 a week. I shot slide film (mostly Agfa ISO 50 but also the contrasty and grainy Orwo 100). About 1975 I started walking over the moors to the north-west of Bradford, especially during the drought summer of 1976, and took 'snaps' of the landscape. The weird colour reproduction and high contrast of Orwo slide film just added to the 'otherness' of the resulting images. I began to read more books about famous photographers. Fay Godwin was already publishing photographs of West Yorkshire so she was more of an influence than, say, Ansel Adams. And, anyways, Edward Weston's wider range of subject matter interested me even more. At the end of 1976 I got my first job and in the following year used my salary to buy Prakticas, extra lenses and other 'gear'. I was initially working at Newhaven in Sussex so spent at least one day of the weekends walking the South Downs, with an increasingly heavy camera bag. By 1980 I was living and working in Redhill, Surrey, and walking and cycling the North Downs. And I also 'blagged' use of the company's darkroom in the evenings, typically spending one evening a week slowly getting better at photographic printing. I started doing Sabattier ('solarised') prints and devised a way of using that process as part of printing from three or more negatives. Not something I've ever seen done by anyone else. And the technique became totally redundant once digital image processing became a 'thing' in the 1990s. For reasons unknown the company I worked for subscribed to the British Journal of Photography so each week I was seeing the portfolios of photographers that the editor wanted to promote, and also the articles about professional-quality equipment. Around this time I replaced the Praktica SLRs – by now there were three bodies – with Olympus OM1N cameras. I only ever bought two of those as about 1982 I bought a secondhand Mamiya C220 6 x 6 cm twin-lens reflex. I intentionally did not buy the 'standard' lens (80 mm) but the slightly wide-angle 65 mm and the slightly long 135 mm lenses. While the comparison is not accurate because 6 x 6 cm is a square format and 35 mm is a rectangular format, think in terms of these being similar to 35 mm and 90 mm focal length lens for 35 mm format or so-called full-frame digital cameras. This lens combo on the Mamiya worked very well for me. I loved the square format and the waist-level finder. I mostly shot Ilford FP4, processed in Paterson Acutol which allowed me to slightly underexpose but still get quite delicious tonal range in the negatives. Occasionally I splashed out on a few rolls of E6 Ektachrome. The OM1Ns were almost always loaded with Fujichrome ISO 100, occasionally Fujichrome ISO 400, both of which use E6 chemistry. Around the same time in the early 1980s I converted an empty biscuit tin into an anamorphic pinhole camera, using low-contrast 10 x 8 inch printing paper as negatives. In sunlight each exposure was about five minutes. I even bought some 10 x 8 inch Cibachrome colour printing paper and used that as 'negatives'. Although they weren't negatives at all as Cibachrome was a positive-to-positive printing process to make prints from slides. Because slides are contrasty the Cibachrome was low contrast, which was just right for using in a pinhole camera. I have never come across anyone else who took pinhole photographs on Cibachrome. If you want to give it a go then bad luck as production of Cibachrome stopped in 2012. A move to Leicestershire in 1986 put paid to use of the darkroom. I still had the equipment but setting it out in my kitchen was too much hassle at a time when a sucession of different day jobs required lots of effort. But I was exploring Leicestershire and adjoining counties and still visiting Sussex regularly. Not to mention having enough money for holidays, including trips to southern Africa, New York and Hong Kong. So the OM1Ns got plenty of use. And the boxes of Fujichrome slides kept piling up! About 1998 a friend gave me a Kodak DC210 Plus, one of the very first digital cameras. Only 1 megapixel resolution and a very iffy colour palette. But useful, if only because it was cheaper than slide film. Around this time I used Paint Shop Pro to do multi-image photomontages and a whole variety of arty-farty image manipulation. Paint Shop Pro version 7 from 2000 is still my go-to image editor, although I bought three later versions. I also bought an A3 inkjet printer so I could exhibit some of these images. I use the word 'images' because I was producing photomontages and also heavily-processed landscapes. I thought of myself as an 'image maker' rather than a photographer, even though photography was the starting point of the images. To be honest when not taking 'record shots' of old buildings and such like (seemingly now referred to by other folks as 'documentary photography') then I still think of myself as an image maker using a camera rather than, say, a sketchpad. Early 2001 a good friend who taught life drawing introduced me to a succession of life models willing to pose for photographs. Thanks to Jessops I was able to buy studio flash lights at a price I could afford. Some of the models also did outdoor shoots, but that was always tricky to organise as summer weather in Leicestershire is not very predictable. At the end of 2005 I bought a Nikon D50 with 6 megapixels resolution and perfectly OK colour reproduction. That was followed around 2008 or 2009 by a Nikon D300 with 12 megapixels. I own a Nikon D5300 as well, but that wasn't bought until 2022 and turns out to be less than useful for me as the autofocus system requires different lenses to the two older bodies. The first two Nikon bodies got extensive use at street performance festivals, seasonal folk customs, folk music festivals, pagan rituals and other public events. I photographed both performers and audiences. I attended at least two dozen such events between 2003 and 2009, taking hundreds of photographs at each one. Some of the images fall within the rubric of 'street photography' while many were taken at the side of a stage when musicians were performing. Some are counterparts to street photography but taken inside prehistoric sacred sites, usually Avebury in Wiltshire. Sometime around 2005 I bought the first of four 'point and shoot' mirrorless digital cameras. The first two (one was a Ricoh, I forget the make of the other) weren't all that good, expecially in how they processed colour and contrast, so I gave them away to friends' children. By then another very good friend of mine had bought me a Nikon Coolpix P300 as a present. I was living in Avebury and doing lots of walking on the Marlborough Downs. But getting old enough not to want to lug a DSLR camera bag very far. The Coolpix P300 was excellent to carry around and did almost everything I needed a camera to do. The P300 served me very well for several years. Until I dropped it on the kitchen floor… So I replaced it with a Nikon Coolpix A900 which has taken tens of thousands of images and is still going strong. If I ever come by some 'spare' money I may replace it with the mirrorless (but less compact) Nikon Z50 II.
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My PDF photo books
Back in 2007, before online photo books were readily available, I put together three large format (A3) photo albums. They were inspired by aspects of alchemical symbolism and intended to be part of a gallery installation (although that never materialised). Here are PDF versions:
Because they were intended to be printed out on A3 pages you may have to zoom in to read the text or see the smaller images. In 2008 I put together one hundred of my studio and outdoor nude photographs as a book:
In 2012 I prepared a 'sketch book' of photomontage ideas inspired by prehistoric pottery:
There's also a 2012 PDF which combines my photographs with translations of early Daoist texts: In 2017 I compiled five PDF albums with no nudity – though plenty of naked stones ;-)
Two thoughts followed. Firstly that I wished I'd been aware of their work back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Secondly that, while technically their work is superior, my approach to photography was similar. So early in 2026 I decided to put together a 'retrospective' of PDF photo books, each with a different theme. Some have lots of images and some only a few.
There's also a YouTube video called Performers and Audiences that I put together in 2018 from photos of musicians, dancers, street theatre performers and pagans photographed between 2003 and 2009, mostly in Leicestershire. |