The original entry for my weblog illustrated by the image above related how I’d been pacing the streets after losing patience with my wife. Regular readers will know of the difficulty Trish has suffered for around twenty years with multiple sclerosis... and how it’s not fair of me to complain about anything when I compare what I have to do and what she can’t do but clearly wants to. I can get my relief in many other ways whilst she, because of her disabilities, can’t.

So like my daily cycle rides (except it was too wild and windy that day) I surfaced for air... and took a walk around the block. As I remind myself from time to time, and sometimes in my writings, photography is like gardening (or is cycling like gardening?) in that by doing it you can easily forget everything that's nagging and churning around inside your head. Turning soil with a spade and then breaking crumbs of it between your fingers is very therapeutic... just as a few hundred meters of standing on the bike's pedals with your ass off the seat and reaching the top of a steep climb feels exhilarating not only whilst you’re doing it, but when you’re massaging the stiff legs afterwards... which again is something Trish would love to experience but never will, ever again, with her helpless legs.

So I gain some relief and freedom using a totally manual camera; one without any automatic controls to take one single technical decision away from you - the image creator and photographer in charge.

Even in this digital age I’ll still say there’s nothing better for photographic satisfaction than loading a film into a manual camera and, if necessary, wasting that film. The satisfaction is not just about seeing an image... it is, to a shrinking band of photographers, increasingly more so in this automated age the satisfaction in doing it yourself... estimating the exposure... setting the controls and focusing carefully by hand... pressing the shutter release... you can almost throw the film away if you feel good after going through that exercise... as I did to clear my head.

But no... there's always a latent image waiting to be developed and possible printed. Which is what I did on that day... scanning a negative and using PhotoShop to “sepia tone” an image made up of electronic zeros and ones. Since then I have printed the negative properly and the above abstract of mortar-filled cracks and lichens on a neighbour's garden wall is the result. The captured scene was about 40x30cms in area and several different exposures were made, each framed carefully in the 100 per cent accurate viewfinder of my favourite manual and meterless Nikon F2 camera. Concentrating on the correct and most pleasing framing is important as I try more and more to print full-frame without any cropping at the the enlargement stage in the darkroom. For this shot I used Ilford Delta 100 Pro developed in Kodak Xtol at 1+1... the resulting negative requiring a 9.13 second exposure filtration for a grade 3.8 (yes, I revert to auto-mode in the darkroom with a computerised Durst Laborator Multigraph enlarger set-up) using Bergger Prestige CB fibre paper which was finally sepia-toned with the excellent Fotospeed prepared chemistry.

Of course none of these selected vignette-type image ideas are new... one sees them in any number of photo magazines as we photographers try to be arty, clever, abstract, different... but I frequently do this exercise to train my selective eye and calm my confused brain. I’m reminded of Brassai's classic book "Graffiti" and Aaron Siskind's "Road Trip." Sometimes, though, when I’m looking at such examples I wonder how many photographers are really nascent painters trying to discover their preferred art form.