Nik Stanbridge
Analogue photography and printmaking
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How to build an inexpensive and no-frills UV exposure unit
A simple guide to building an inexpensive, no-frills LED exposure unit for photopolymer etching (photogravure) and many alt-photographic processes. It includes a discussion of the design decisions I made as well as the goals of the project and it’s all based on a real-world build. With lots of photos!
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I Always Start With a Preset
If you find yourself spending too much time fiddling in Lightroom, it’s worth looking at the adjustments you nearly always make and trying them out as a preset on all your images. It might take a bit of trial and error, but you may be surprised at how much time and effort it saves. Think of it as a starting point, not necessarily the finished article.
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FP4 type 517 cine: Follow some simple rules to get the best results (and avoid airports)
Type 517 is not a universal stock. It’s not one to throw in the camera and forget about. But give it the right conditions — time, care, a little patience — and it’ll reward you with images that feel pulled from another era. Just… don’t expect it to meet you halfway. This film is very much on its own terms.
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PHOTOBOOK: I’ll Come Over To Yours
I always loved travelling and staying at someone else’s place — especially back in the ’80s. And I loved it when people came to stay at mine. We did it all the time. Mostly arranged by letter or via phoneboxes. We were in our first jobs. We had virtually nothing. No one owned much — everything fit into one sparse room. But everyone had music, and…
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Ilford FP4 Type-517 Cine Film
What’s not to like about FP4 type-517 cine film? Vintage grain, especially with Rodinal. Rich tonality. Controlled contrast. The old fashioned look I want. I’m very pleased I have lots of it left and that it’s still only £3.49 a roll.
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PHOTOBOOK: Somewhere Between The Two
Layers, windows, interfaces. What we can and can’t see. What’s hidden, what’s visible and what’s obscured. Hand made, stab bound photobook. All images digitised from hand-processed 35mm negatives. Edition of 20.
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PHOTOBOOK: First Men on the Moon
Hand made, stab bound photobook based on an expedition through a skylight onto the flat roof of a student flat I lived in with a couple of close friends in the early 1980s. The images are from a couple of rolls of film for which I also had darkroom printed contact sheets.
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The Balkan Spomeniks – Monuments for a new tomorrow (Part 1)
When I first started collecting photobooks, one of my first was Spomenik by Jan Kempenaers. It wasn’t so much the photographs that drew me in, it was the brutal and futuristic structures in the photographs. At the time,I didn’t know what or where they were and the book was quite enigmatic. I eventually learnt that the
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Spectacular Vernacular. Memory and Legacy.
The camera is a memory machine. And a legacy one. Photography is all about recording memories (or creating them) and building, whether you like it or not, a legacy. They, the memories and the legacy, slowly mature to become something bigger and more important over time. They become part of history; they create a historical
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From a 50 to a 35 – How I Changed My Perspective
How exactly did I come to adopt a 35mm focal length lens as my everyday carry having been a devoted user of the ’standard’ 50 for many years? Well, gradually and then very suddenly. For decades, since, well, I started out in photography in the 1980s with an OM-1 and a 50/1.8, I was a one