Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a legendary photographer best known for being a father of photojournalism and street photography and for the promotion of a paradigm he called the decisive moment. Along with Brassai, Cartier-Bresson is probably the most influential European photographer of the Twentieth Century, a trained painter, master of photographic composition and a founding member of Magnum.

Yet, the previous paragraph is a profound understatement of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the complexity and sheer life experience of the man behind the camera. This review can barely touch on Cartier-Bresson’s life story. To that end, the Internet provides ample anecdotes and history.

My copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is in constant use – a solid 338 pages measuring 30.5 x 29 x 3.3 centimetres and weighs 2.7 kilograms. It is a beautifully made book of 155 black and white photographs and worth absolutely every penny. The photographs within were selected by Cartier-Bresson and he gives insight into many of them during interviews for the documentary Henri Cartier-Bresson: l’amour tout court. This documentary is available on YouTube in five parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

The book spans work from the whole of Cartier-Bresson’s career and includes photojournalism as well as many iconic photographs made between the employed moments in his life. The prostitutes, the boy on the country road who walked on his hands, the social, tranquil and profound. The documentary mentioned above is great to watch for those explanations behind the photographs, too. It brings many of them to life like personal memoirs – his mother never liked him hanging out with the prostitutes; he took two photographs of the stairs but only showed the one with the child and not the one of the priest; he set up the scene for his most famous photograph – Plate 14: Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, 1932 – and fired the camera through a hole in the fence embracing luck as much as opportunity and preparation. That photograph was said to be the best taken in the Twentieth Century.

In my world Henri Cartier-Bresson: Photographer is everything that I’m looking for in a photography book. It has quality, durability and ongoing fascination.

In a world saturated in images of every quality, taste and intention there is one skill that needs to be refined – how to look at photographs. This is as important to the general populace of consumer as it is for the aspiring or skilled photographer. On Looking at Photographs: A Practical Guide by Magnum photographer David Hurn in conversation with Bill Jay is about setting you along that path and, while I’m not sold that it’s as cut and dry as photography versus art, it was an insightful read.

They are concerned with the difference between what a photograph is OF as opposed to what it is ABOUT. These are two entirely different things. A photograph of a ship could be about a holiday brochure shot, the ship your family immigrated aboard or a study of large metal industrial behemoths. And the question arises within the photographer of what to show and what to exclude; itself, a manipulation of the photographer’s message. Hurn and Jay are interested in what makes a good photograph – the photographer’s intent, how well it’s been realised and whether it was worth the effort.

Because photographs are never definitive statements about anything. They are open to interpretation as much by the culture, beliefs and socio-economic standing of the viewer as from any accompanying text by the photographer. Photographs mean different things when you see them in different venues – for example, a photograph of a working man in the union trades hall may be an entirely different take on that same photograph on a widow’s mantle-piece. Rich versus poor, nationality, level of education, sophistication and political persuasion all come to the photograph through the viewer independent of the photographer’s wish to push their own agenda.

I particularly agree with a statement they made about style in photography because I see so many photographer’s trying to invent a Photoshopped signature in images that might be about consistency but not about their style. They write that style is not like a filter…

A unique style emerges in photography by ignoring it, concentrating on the subject, and allowing care, passion and knowledge to bubble to the surface through a lot of hard work over a long period of time.

A photographer’s style will become evident in hindsight by looking back at the work and noting the patterns and qualities of what their work produced.

This book covers a lot of ground and to balance it out I’d suggest you also read John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Each book comes from their individual perspective and it’s just as important to understand the photojournalistic idea of a good photograph as it is to appreciate the work of art that hangs on a gallery wall with a hefty price tag.

1. After each developing session I tend to wash the spool in soap and water then dry it in a fresh breeze because any residual chemical or miniscule dampness causes the film to stick when feeding onto the spool.
2. A handy place to develop film is in the bathroom. Before a developing session run a hot shower for five minutes to capture dust. Then wipe down surfaces & quick damp mop the floor to collect the dust.
3. When loading the spool: use your fingers to drag the first part of 120 film into the spool for about 4 centimetres… the first part of the film has no images.
4. Consult a developing chart from the chemical manufacturer for mix ratios and corresponding times (ie. Ilford’s Film Processing Chart). Note also, these are starting points not fixed and fast rules.
5. Exact chemical ratios: buy a medicine measuring cup or a purpose designed photographic measuring cup for preparing your chemicals.
6. Measure the temperature of your chemicals with an oven thermometer (sit the jugs in a baking dish so you can add ice or boiling water to the dish to attain the exact chemical temperature – I place the thermometer in the developer).
7. Be precise: the three ways you can affect film development are time, temperature and strength of the developer. Precision is your control.
8. Consistency is also key to control: the more consistent you can make the developing process the more you will be able to predict the resulting negatives.
9. There is ‘good enough’ developer and there is ‘the best’ developer. Choice of chemical can be as important as choice of film – economically and for the quality of the negatives.
10. You can pull process over-exposed film and push process under-exposed film so understand your options while shooting (ie. 100 ASA film shot inside a building can be pushed 1 or 2 stops to either 200 or 400). The effect of pulling film in development is lower contrast and the effect of pushing film in development is higher contrast and grain.
11. The developer stage of processing film negatives is a lot more sensitive & unforgiving than the stop bath or fixer stages.
12. A portable film drying cabinet prevents a large amount of dust from reaching wet negatives.

Once you have a strip of dry film negatives (usually the next day I open the film drying cabinet) there are several choices. The most romantic is to create prints in a darkroom. However, you could purchase a high quality photo scanner to enable the creation of digital files from your analogue negatives. It means you can take those files into an image editing program and treat them as any other digital product.

Most of all, I hope people read these tips and give shooting and processing black and white film a first attempt. It’s neither hard, nor overly expensive. And the satisfaction of creating analogue photographs is another world entirely to the easy graft of contemporary digital photography.

I’m finding the closer I can get to creating ink on paper the more challenging and satisfying photography becomes. My next step is to create a darkroom.

The Kit to get you Processing 35mm and 120 roll film

The Paterson Super System 4 will set you back around AUD$50 – mine cost $35 second-hand. The tank can process 35mm, 120 and 127 film rolls. You will need a reasonably large darkroom bag that will cost around $55 (mine is 27 inch by 30 inch). You will need a developer solution, a stop-bath solution and a fixer solution. They are used in that order – developer, stop bath and fixer. You will also need a few drops of wetting agent.

I use Ilford chemicals for black and white printing. Colour is a little harder and a lot more toxic so I suggest you stick to black and white; a good photo lab can still process any colour rolls you want to shoot.

Ilfotec LC29 (500ml) is a basic and stable developer… I use it at 1+19 (one part in 20) and at a cost of $38 it makes 10 Litres. This will process around 20 rolls of 120 medium format film, 27 rolls of 127 medium format film or 30 rolls of 35mm film. However, if you’re looking for the best Ilford developer the cost is approximately double – Ilfotec DD-X. This was developed for the Delta series of film but is recommended across the Ilford film range for best results.

Ilfotec Ilfostop (500ml) cost $20… it’s also used at 1+19 and makes 10 litres. However, I re-use this a second time so the value is doubled.

Ilford Hypam (5 litres) cost $55 and is used at 1+5 so it makes 25 litres. If you buy this in 5 litres it will cost about half per volume of the smaller bottles.

At the end of your processing you are going to need 2 small drops of a wetting agent before hanging the film to dry. Ilford Ilfotol 1 litre cost $31 but it’s a lifetime supply. If you can acquire it in a smaller and cheaper bottle then all the better.

You’ll also need (something similar to) three 500ml Pyrex jugs, a ceramic baking dish, an oven thermometer, a small measuring cup and a small medicine measuring cup, an eye dropper and a clock with a second hand. Finally, chemical resistant latex gloves.

The Process in Easy Steps

Assuming you have 120 film to process, you need to put the pieces of the developing tank inside the darkroom bag so your film won’t be exposed to light. Alternatively, you could do this in a pitch dark room. Feed back the paper until you reach the film and feed it onto the spool using the back-and-forth feeding motion.

Once in the film is on the spool and safely in the light-tight environment of the developing tank you can head to the bathroom.

Measure out the correct quantities and fill the three pyrex jugs to appropriate levels of chemical for the type film being developed (35mm, 127 or 120). Place the three jugs, in order, into your ceramic baking dish and submerge the end of the oven thermometer into the developer. The temperature needs to be approximately 20 degrees celsius (68 degrees farenheit).

You should consult the Ilford Film Processing Chart to see how long your specific film variety and speed need to be developed in the specific developer you are utilising. If your quantities, temperature and time are controlled the results are more predictable.

The process of using the developing tank is simple (Google will offer up a number of instructional videos).

Pour the jug of developer into the top of the developer tank and slowly rotate end over end for half a minute then tap the bottom of the developing tank three times on the sink to release bubbles from the film surface. Every 30 seconds slowly rotate the tank one more time and tap three times on the sink. For example, if you shot Ilford Delta Professional 400 then your development time as indicated on the Ilford Film Processing Chart will be 7 and a half minutes.

Then remove the top cap to pour out the developer. Pour in the stop bath solution and continually but slowly rotate the developing tank for two minutes.

Again, pour out the stop bath solution and pour in the jug of fixer. Rotate the developing tank for the first 30 seconds and tap three times then continue to rotate the tank once every 30 seconds for the next 9 minutes. Don’t forget to tap the bottom of the tank three times onto the sink after each rotation. At the end of the 9 minutes, pour out the fixer solution.

At this point the film is processed. Unscrew the top off the developing tank and, under running water, agitate the roll of film inside the open tank for 15-20 minutes to remove any traces of chemical.

Finally, fill the open tank with water (you may use distilled water if necessary) and add two drops of the wetting agent to stop the film drying with unsightly water marks. And hang your film overnight… or until dry. I use a home-made film drying cabinet to prevent unnecessary dust on my negatives.

The next day I use an Epson Perfection V600 scanner to bring the images into software for minor editing & dust removal. Voila.

Developing Film is Easy & Affordable

The big take-away from this article should be that processing black and white analogue film is easy and affordable. It costs somewhere between $3-$5 to process a roll of film into negatives… a little bit more if you want to use the best developer Ilford offer. I have a small jar and every time I process somebody’s film I just drop in $5 to help replace the chemicals.

Yes, there are initial outlays for kit including the tank, the darkroom bag and ongoing consumables. But compare that to the cost of going to the processing lab with every roll of film you want to shoot. And factor in the benefits of owning the kit – just like you own and control your own camera equipment.

All I can do is encourage you to give shooting analogue film a go… the worst that can happen is you get a few flat photographs and give up. The best? You discover the tactile experience of analogue photography. Also, if we shoot film they’ll continue to make film… if we shoot only digital then we’ll lose the choice.

My next article will be a number of small tips on getting the best out of your experience at processing your own film in the developing tank. Small things that can save you from bumps and bruises along the way.

OK I’ve been known to shoot a little street photography. It’s the dance of total strangers among the light and dark corners of our city streets. People selling things, buying things, drinking coffee and captured (even stolen) moments of intimacy in the right place at the right time. The trick is to be open to luck and to embrace it when the opportunity knocks.

More often than not I’ll be coming home with my hand on my forehead thinking about the missed shot. The one that got away.

Portrait is a little more scary. I really don’t do portrait that well and keep telling myself this is the year that I’ll start putting in 20,000 hours of hard graft and grind to master the craft of photographic portraiture. It’s difficult because you have to cross the human relationship barrier and actually get involved with human beings – moving from observation to description and hopefully onto a ‘response’, stealing Ricky Maynard’s line.

Having good gear, good technique, understanding light and the exposure triangle will only get you so far with portraiture; you have to mesh with other human beings. You have to be likeable and to like other human beings. There is a whole skill-set in portrait photography that comes well before you pick up a camera.

But I put that out there… I’d love to be better at portrait photography. I’d love to have the Diane Arbus way with people where they would feel comfortable inviting me into their homes and including me in their human experiences.

I also radically culled my social circle some years ago so good old friends with deep relationships over decades are pretty much right out of the picture. When I meet old friends we’re pretty much all on that wavelength – we were never good for each other. Times have changed. We’re older and wiser and too tired to look for trouble. But hey, those people would be absolutely fascinating to pursue for portraits. If only we were still friends, which we’re not.

What I do enjoy and often shoot are still life photographs of surprisingly mundane objects. A few bowls. A pot. The fascinating way light can be bounced and manipulated across various surfaces and textures within a simple composition. It’s more challenging than most people think… and even more fun if it happens to be a piece of original three dimensional artwork that I can attempt to extend.

Still life is about control. Still life is about construction of an image with the limitation being you have to breathe life into the lifeless. Almost the opposite of dealing with human beings.

I guess what I really wish is that I were better with other human beings. I only seem to take good portraits when I’m that third wheel photographer at somebody else’s event. Still observational. Only slightly connected. But I admire people with those human qualities. I really admire them.

That’s my five minutes of introspective reflection for the day on the subject of photography. One of the many ways I could improve.

The Problem with Pinterest is the Terms of Service

OK, before I get anymore troll action from Pinterest fan-girls who are upset that somebody isn’t impressed by the business model of their favourite new web-tinsel frivolity… let’s all just pull our heads in and look at this as grown-ups. It’s not about your jollies or the things you do with your web-besties when porn loses its lustre – this is about the law.

When you join and upload content to Pinterest you are legally entering an agreement that affects you (as an adult in the real world) and at least in that regard it should be hitting your radar. Because, love their service or not… the idiot that will be sitting in a courtroom is more likely you than representatives of Pinterest. It’s in their TOS… that TOS that pretty much throws you to the wolves.

Kalliopi Monoyios posted an article this week titled Pinterest’s Terms of Service, Word by Terrifying Word pointing out the magic words within their TOS that should get your adult brain firing. One paragraph from the Pinterest TOS reads:

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

Kalliopi points out the bits you need to be concerned about… “worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense… yada yada. Yes, pretty much all of it.

In simple terms you hand over the content you uploaded to your Pinterest account… it goes to Cold Brew Labs forever and you can’t change your mind and they can on-sell, repurpose or do whatever the hell they want to squeeze a quid of profit from it anytime they consider it worthwhile. You have given away your stuff.

Pinterest’s Aggressive Opt-Out not Opt-In Feature

Oh yeah, it most likely wasn’t your stuff. Hey, it could even be my stuff or the stuff from somewhere bold enough to sue your sorry butt. It could belong to an aggressive company that protects its intangible business assets, like Getty Images. Or Associated Press. These are organisations that can and will pursue you to protect their profit margins.

Kalliopi hits it on the head when he points out that the real problem is Pinterest’s TOS “don’t mirror the intentions of users”.

Yes, Pinterest provides a snippet of code that will tell people (like they’ll listen) that you don’t want to share your online images in their service. However, as a web developer who just had to put that snippet onto my clients’ websites I don’t think it’s a good direction to head where one business model requires every website on the Internet to opt out of their environment. Here’s a better idea… ask us if we want to opt into the Pinterest service… let those websites willing to play in the little sandpit of their business model to put a piece of code into every clients website.

And you are the Sole Owner of all Member Content

Glendon Mellow brings out the most salient point in my concern about the Pinterest TOS… ownership. It reads that you:

“…are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content…”

and you,

“agree not to do any of the following: Post, upload, publish, submit, provide access to or transmit any Content that: (i) infringes, misappropriates or violates a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other intellectual property rights…”

That means the only person who will get into major legal shit is YOU, the customer. Why? Because when you upload your Pinterest content for sharing you are claiming you own the intellectual property rights of that content and you are passing total control over to Cold Brew Labs to do with that content whatever they wish. That means eventually somebody like Getty Images… or even me… will come back to haunt you.

Any content creator, commercial or non-commercial, needs to be concerned about this type of business activity affecting their work and legal environment.

My point to Pinterest users is that they stand a very good chance of losing a court case if they give away the wrong person / company’s intellectual property to Cold Brew Labs. Depending on the country that intellectual property crime occurs in, they could be pursued with extreme prejudice. Pinterest got them to agree to that from the beginning.

Don’t Say you weren’t Told about the TOS

No, I’m not against social web applications and all the better if they make some money. But I am against business models that are purposefully worded to capitalise on property theft while getting their users to foot the legal payload.

And I am against the idea that every website has to place explicit code asking to opt-out of the Pinterest service. What if twenty or a hundred web services adopted that arrogant attitude? Would we have massive web page headers loaded down with a thousand explicit meta tags to opt-out of each and every one? Features like that need to be opt-in or not at all.

And on that point alone the web industry bodies should be up in arms at the management team at Pinterest.

A bad exploitative business model is just that. As long as Pinterest keep that wording in the TOS there will be an issue to answer. So go play on Pinterest until your bum falls asleep on your office chair for all I care, but don’t dare suggest (on Twitter or elsewhere) that this is an ethical manner of doing business. It isn’t. That TOS really isn’t.

Here’s a passing tip: Don’t sign dumb legal contracts on the Internet and expect that life will treat you fairly. The old saying, now almost a cliche, applies… “if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product.” Pinterest is no different.

My older sister scanned this negative using a simple piece of white paper and a lamp instead of a scanner so it’s not that high in quality. However, it’s a classic nortypig portrait taken by my paternal grandmother on (maybe) my 8th birthday… making it (probably) May 1972. Classic double six-guns. My grandmother was a direct descendant of the Watsons of Rockingham Castle, Northamptonshire. As reverends they were first settlers close to where I grew up.

Where I am with Photography Today

Photography is not just about the equipment. I guess if your idea is to spray 1500 photographs at a local festival and those files are created from a 10+ megapixel technology using a reasonable lens then your chances are high to pull the odd fluke. I’ve been caught up in that idea of photography, too. It’s numbing to open all those files one after another and see the modern photographer’s machine gun capability.

And yes, in some sense it’s all about the photograph. If it was made on an iPhone or a Brownie Box camera the simple reality is that you have a photograph. That’s an immutable truth that I won’t deny. In a world saturated with images we all have this amazing ability to spray and pray our way to the odd successful shot.

But I’m finding that’s no longer how I like to work. Even with a Nikon D90 I’ve come around to the idea that what I enjoy is making photographs by thinking about them in advance. Sometimes for weeks or months. I’m moving into a world where although a picture is just a picture… and although the world is saturated in those pictures… I am looking for context and some level of personal satisfaction from being involved with them on a daily basis.

Shooting Medium Format Analogue Film

The other part of shooting massive numbers of digital files is that I feel less engaged with each digital image. They roll past my eyes on an electronic ticker-tape… an empty visual rhetoric with a tendency toward causing a mild form of photosensitive epilepsy… explaining why I moved toward black and white some time ago.

Whereas shooting film has a real process that you don’t appreciate until you pick up the analogue bug.

I’ll probably shoot between one and three (most likely one) of a subject at $1 per shot to achieve processed negatives. Investment means I pay more attention and stop thinking “Oh that might make a great photograph [SNAP]“. Each image currently takes several hours to scan into the computer and to clone out the dust spots that inevitably rush onto the negatives in my office.

I’m also limited to Gimp at present because the antiquated Photoshop 6 disc in my drawer has failed – meaning until Gimp reaches 3.0 or I can afford a new Photoshop I’m limited to a shitty 8 bit representation of my medium format photographs (as opposed to 16 bit). I guess constraints are healthy.

Beyond the loading and unloading of the film – with an enduring magic of its own – the processing involves some meticulous attention to detail. Half a degree difference in the processing liquid… or half a minute either way at a given step… can make or break the quality of the negative. I can see that when I finally get a darkroom to process them into prints that the satisfaction level will rise an order of magnitude again.

Because when a film photographer walks through that process with an overhead cost in time, intent and accumulating cash outflow they tend to become more invested in the photograph. So, while a picture is still a picture in a saturated world… that particular picture is not just a picture in my world. It is a human experience from conception through to the development.

It’s like having a very small family to invest your attention toward rather than a family of a thousand. If that makes any sense.

In a World of Photographs I Choose to be Myself

So I’ve gradually moved from this idea that in a world full of photographs I need to somehow produce shiny replicas of what everybody else is out there to shoot. And, seriously, given the standardisation of modern equipment there is a lot of replication that can be achieved with some technical skill.

I’ve moved toward an idea of photography that is entirely about exploring the medium through occasional artifacts. The world doesn’t need 10,000 new digital images from my DSLR this week… and those that run with the herd behind established leaders are making fine pictures, so don’t take this as a criticism, but it’s just not for me.

In a world of photographs I choose to be myself and create these occasional explorations of light and shadow in black and white. I choose to have an ambition to afford a decent darkroom and a large format camera (eventually).

In a world of photographs my ambition is to make occasional photographs not take a hundred thousand of them. And I know that makes exactly no sense if you’re not interested in turning back to film technology. But it makes perfect sense in my world where I’ll neither be the best or the most famous photographer.

The most that I can hope for in my later life is to sit as an old man at a kitchen table with a beautiful pile of hand-processed black and white prints that individually mean something to me. As arrogant and as absurd as that would sound to most photographers.

Brassai (1899-1984) was a Transylvanian painter who arrived in Paris in 1923 under his real name, Gyula Halasz. He was 24 years old and fell in with the “poets and painters of Montmartre and Montparnasse – young men like Picasso and Dali and Braque.” These circles were the centre of the European art world – Man Ray, Rene Clair, Andre Kertesz. In fact, it was Kertesz who loaned Brassai a camera to start him on the path to photography master.

Reading the essay introduction to Brassai: Museum of Modern Art, New York, by John Szarkowksi offers an insight into the middle aged Brassai and his approach to making a simple photograph.

Brassai is probably most famous for documenting Paris and it’s seedier culture, particularly at night, through the lens of his Voigtlander Bergheil 6.5 x 9, a camera still in his hands along with a rickety old tripod when this book was made in 1968. “After twenty years you can begin to be sure what a camera will do,” he said. Many of our most enduring images of famous artists in Paris in the early part of the Twentieth Century were taken by Brassai.

His words speak volumes to the modern photographer with the technology in hand to create flawless images at zero cost using a machine gun digital methodology:

Yes, I only take one or two or three pictures of a subject, unless I get carried away; I find it concentrates one more to shoot less. Of course it’s chancy; when you shoot a lot you stand a better chance, but then you are subjecting yourself to the law of accident – if accident has a law. I prefer to try and if necessary fail. When I succeed, however, I am much happier than I would be if I shot a million pictures on the off-chance. I feel that I have really made it myself, that picture, not won it in a lottery.Brassai

Brassai also passionately disbelieved in specialisation in any single medium – he excelled at photography, drawing, painting, writing, sculpting, filmmaking, theatre decor and engraving. At the point of Szarkowski’s book, the subject of this review, Brassai had published an impressive 15 books and made a global impact in numerous creative fields.

My love of Brassai’s photography is his willingness to embrace shadows and darkness along with light and contrast. His eye gives us humour, elegance and a profound understanding of structure that probably comes from his formal training as a young painter.

I feel a little meek that I find night photography daunting with a contemporary DSLR and fast glass or even the 30 year old Bronica ETRS medium format film camera. Brassai shot Paris at night between World Wars using a Heliar f4.5 lens of the era. An amazing technical feat in photography.

If you haven’t seen a lot of Brassai photography you should keep him in mind. I find that nearly every time I open this book I become aware of deeper facets in the images. It’s a book that keeps giving.

You can Google film drying cabinets – they are EXPENSIVE. So I went hunting for a simple idea to create a cost effective solution.

To make my film drying cabinet I cut four large squares from the end of a disused roll of dog fencing wire from our back yard. I used the excess wire at each join to connect the structure together. This formed a stable wire tube frame. I then joined a smaller section of the fencing wire across the top and bottom of the tube – this will give me somewhere to hang my rubber band & top peg. The 120 film will hang from that peg with a second peg at the bottom of the film to keep it straight.

I needed to cut out a door large enough that I wouldn’t scratch the unwound wet roll of film as it entered or was removed from the cabinet. So I used wire cutters to remove all but the top and bottom rectangles in a vertical line and taped over all joins and wire ends to further ensure that my negatives would survive.

A photograph should give you an idea – the red tape covers joins along the back of the wire tube where the coil was brought together; black tape was used on the top and bottom joins; and, yellow, green and blue tape was used around the front entry doorway.

I can sit a small heavy ceramic plate inside the wire structure to prevent pooling of the drips. The outer covering is a full length cream coloured breathable wedding dress bag with a zipper (costing $15). I used black tape to cover the coat hanger opening in the top of the bag as an effective seal against dust.

For a total cost of approximately $25 this affords me everything that I need for drying my film in a dust free environment overnight. The design’s lightness offers me the ability to take the drying cabinet into the processing area where I can hang the wet negatives and seal it away from dust. Then I can move the safely enclosed film negatives into my office to dry overnight.

For storage it’s imperative to prevent dust accumulating on the tape and frame so they should be kept zipped inside the cover when not in use. Similarly, it is advisable that you store the cabinet and outer bag under an old sheet to prevent the breathable cover accumulating unwanted layers of dust that could enter your film processing environment.

It just goes to show that you don’t need to invest upward of $600 to achieve results in a non-commercial environment.