Twelve Small Squares - a new website

David Kirby, one of the splendid chaps at the Film and Darkroom Users group (FADU), has launched a new website, building on the work of his long-standing blog about film photography.

There's lots of film-related goodness on David's website including tutorials that will be useful for beginners as well as more experienced photographers who want to have a bash at the likes of second pass lith printing (wouldn't mind a go at that myself) and f-stop printing. I particularly like his journal.

David's also an accomplished photographer and you can see a gallery or two of his work, almost all shot on his Bronica SQ-A - hence the Twelve Small Squares title of his website. Here are a couple that caught my eye:

In David's own words from his website about his shed darkroom:

Those muffled sounds you hear from the shed are not the sounds of a man struggling to pot plants, nor the sounds of a man searching in earnest for a saw; they are, in fact, the sounds of me making prints. You see, while many photographers sit at their computers editing away for hours on end, i take the alternative approach. I lock myself in my shed with a red light on and I put paper into chemicals.

Bizarre? To some perhaps. In this digital age why go out with a huge, heavy camera loaded with film, shoot some rolls, and then go to all the bother of developing them, setting up an enlarger and spending countless hours making prints? Put simply - if I didn't then I would never produce an image. I am just not the type of person who can sit at a computer for hours adjusting sliders and clicking buttons - I do enough of that at work.

No amount of computer editing can make me feel like what i see on the screen is something which i have made myself. For me, darkroom printing is far more personal. Not that I have anything against digital cameras of course, it's just for some reason shooting film and making prints in the darkroom just makes more sense and comes more naturally to me.

Couldn't have put it any better.