#NotGoingOutMuch so over the coming 100 days I'm going to post one picture a day from an online photobook I made about 7 years ago.
All the photos are black and white and were shot using B&W film in traditional cameras, some old, some new.

#SketchBookOfWales

The oldest camera was from 1910 and I had only just built the newest one, but the technical stuff doesn't count for much here.
What matters most is that I get to post all of them in one thread.

#SketchBookOfWales

Each image has a short descriptive paragraph, but this has been edited to fit the character limit.
Everybody needs a project, right?

#SketchBookOfWales

Each tweet is part of a pair of related photos. The two images may reflect each other, support each other, or challenge each other, in geometry, in tonal values, or in the relationship between the subjects, whether thematically or visually. /1

#SketchBookOfWales

The double exposure and the naturalistic view of the pond don't have to be viewed together, but one helps explain the other. The pond was shot for the formal values and their relationships - reeds, icy water, and January sky. The doublex was an accident. /2

#SketchBookOfWales

The pairs reflect a way of looking at pictures. These are not part of a series or fixed to any one style but bound together by a geometry that overrides traditional genres. /3

#SketchBookOfWales

The same elements of composition you find in a landscape, you also find in a still life, a portrait, a nude, or a street scene. One reason is the influence of the frame, the boundary that separates your world from the illusion. /4

#SketchBookOfWales

The only truth in photography is the historical truth that a shot was generated in a particular way by a particular person. Subject and method are as autobiographical as a sketchbook, the style reflecting the passage of creative time, shared asynchronously. /5

#SketchBookOfWales

At some point the photo will exist solely with the viewer, and be dependent on their feelings and level of visual literacy. Some may feel excluded by B&W and its emphasis on tone, line, and form, and the need to ‘read’ the image rather than just look at it. /6

#SketchBookOfWales

Tonal differences emphasise form and the relative importance of compositional elements. This demands seeing in black and white as much for the viewer as for the photographer, and a sensitivity to shape that goes deeper than our casual reaction to colour. /7

#SketchBookOfWales

Whether viewed as an art, a craft, or a subset of chemistry and physics, photography is an inclusive medium. It can be an art form, a sociological record, referencing the vernacular or the dramatic, infused with elements from painting, music, or theatre. /8

#SketchBookOfWales

Different cameras can produce very different images. The lens of the Holga is soft, the two-speed shutter vignettes, blurs and softens using a single meniscus design. It is a marvellous piece of plastic. /9

#SketchBookOfWales

The Carl Zeiss 50/1.7 Planar lens of the Contax is at the other end of the complexity scale. Fast, sharp, subtle, and smooth, the lens alone costs more than ten times the price of the Holga camera. Not necessarily better, just different. /10

#SketchBookOfWales

You can emphasise form through monochrome, but with a modified lens you can also bleed the focus to the frame edge. A single meniscus lens provides selective de-focus on the key elements of the subject. In this, one art form chases another. /11

#SketchBookOfWales

Memorial sculpture makes good subject matter if the design amplifies the message. If people can engage with it personally then the work becomes all the more relevant as public art. Again, a meniscus lens softens the detail while abstracting the background. /12

#SketchBookOfWales

At the Gower Show in Wales, animals compete for attention with classic cars, singers, and circus events. Horse trading is less than it used to be but it continues. A simple shot of a moment of affection between a man and his pony. /13

#SketchBookOfWales

Another simple shot, two engineers of the Brecon Mountain Railway just back from Taf Fechan Reservoir on a 1908 Graf Schwerin-Lowitz locomotive. Limited depth of field with the lens aperture wide open at f.3.4 on a Fuji GS645. Simple geek stuff. /14

#SketchBookOfWales

The New York poet and photographer Jorn Ake shoots trees in winter that seem like charcoal drawings, the twigs and branches carving out high contrast lines in the sky. This was shot at Blackmill Woodlands near Bridgend, which is known for its twisted oaks. /15

#SketchBookOfWales

You have to really like yellow on green to shoot daffodils in colour. I prefer to exploit their translucent qualities in monochrome, and up close. It is a beautiful flower, strident without being loud. A good daffodil can stand apart like a jazz soloist. /16

#SketchBookOfWales

These mountain ridges in the Brecon Beacons are intriguing, and they have an extra grace in the snow. On Easter Monday in 2005, the bare structure of the mountain was set in high relief by the ice and snow that remained. /17

#SketchBookOfWales

Llyn y Fan Fawr, (lake of the big peak) is about 600 metres above sea level. It took me an hour to walk up there from the road, with a 2kg view camera, tripod, lenses, etc, but shooting 4x5” sheet film does have some advantages in capturing detail. /18

#SketchBookOfWales

Friends of friends wandering in a Welsh graveyard in November, 2005. One of three shots here taken with a zoom lens, a 'dustpump' that mostly lives in a drawer. Sharp enough, but with a maximum aperture of f.4.5 it is too slow to be interesting. /19

#SketchBookOfWales

The distracting legs of an adult have been burned in on the left side. Photography can be described as a subtractive art; unwanted elements can be eliminated through careful composition, burning in at the print stage, or by cropping the final image. /20

#SketchBookOfWales

Three guys on the beach looking at the surfers, offsetting the horizontal arrangement of stones, sea and sky. Random figures provide a sense of human scale, though they can also suggest anonymous representations of ourselves. /21

#SketchBookOfWales

A relaxed dialogue between two men in the music business taken at the Small Nations Festival, Llandovery, 2010. Lines and textures help a composition, but tonal contrasts are a favourite: white shirts, white ropes, white tarp. /22

#SketchBookOfWales

I've had an interest in the environment since the early seventies. Concerns about pollution and the destruction of natural habitat are widely shared, but not everyone has as much regard for our planet or the wildlife that might be affected by vandalism. /23

#SketchBookOfWales

Taking a car up into the mountains, trashing it, and burning it out is an exemplar of ignorant callousness. I never did that, but from time to time there are others doing it. The failures of education that these acts imply are too numerous to mention. /24

#SketchBookOfWales

Truly creative and positive individuals quickly discover how their own personal language can dovetail with the perspective of others around them, and as they grow they become very productive people. The pairing of the two portraits is not accidental. /25

#SketchBookOfWales

The first is a singer/songwriter and the second an audiologist. (Geddit?) A minor detail is that I used a Meyer Optik Orestor 100/2.8 M42 portrait lens from the 1970s, for both. Sharp where it matters but it maintains a soft glow. Shot on Fuji Acros. /26

#SketchBookOfWales

The Pal y Cwrt valley in Carmarthenshire is a site of Special Scientific Interest, but it’s of historical interest as well given that these hillsides near Carreg Cennen Castle have been grazed by domesticated herds for several thousand years. /27

#SketchBookOfWales

Maen Llia standing stone is an interesting object in its own right, but here it acts as a foil to the cloud against the valley slope. The cloud bank is as much the subject as the stone itself which is often seen under these low pressure weather conditions. /28

#SketchBookOfWales

On one trip up Pen y Fan at dawn in winter I didn't make it to the top, but I did catch the only glimmer of sunlight that morning. This was taken with a reloadable 35mm camera with colour film, but I used a black-and-white developer to enhance the grain. /29

#SketchBookOfWales

Degrading the emulsion in this way is a handy technique if you want to drift your vision backwards a hundred years. The last man down, against the bleak clouds and the peak of Pen y Fan, makes appropriate use of the technique, but it is a subjective view. /30

#SketchBookOfWales

That's 30 shots posted ... just another 70 to go to complete this cycle of daily (quarantena) images.