George Jackson

Traditional Film and Darkroom Landscape Photography

Smerwick Harbour and The Three Sisters 2006 Ilford FP4 Hasselblad XPAN Handprinted onto Ilford MGIV RC paper

I purchased my first 35mm SLR camera in Melbourne in 1989 as I was about to set off on my travels around Australia. I came out of the camera shop and stood on a bridge over the river with a manual Minolta SRT-101, loaded with colour film, a Rokkor 58mm fixed lens and a copy of a Michael Freeman photography book which would be read later. With only very vague instructions on getting the right exposure by adjusting aperture and shutter speed to move the mechanical arm up or down to meet the needle of the light meter in the viewfinder, then focusing using the split screen focus finder, the first few frames I took were handheld, blurred long exposures.
Shortly after I returned to London I joined a part time City & Guilds photography course at Redbridge College, London, run by Karl Wiess, where I was introduced to the black and white darkroom among many other aspects of photography. I was generally taking landscapes using colour slide film at this stage, but following the revelation of what the creative control of film and the black and white darkroom allowed, I rarely took any colour landscapes using film until very recently.

In March 2000, I followed my dream and moved to Dingle, Ireland, where my mother was born and set up as a black and white landscape photographer selling prints and running photography workshops around the Dingle Peninsula. Although various circumstances led me on a different path, away from photography for a few years, I’m pleased to say I’m very much back behind the viewfinder, having launched “Dingle Darkroom” last year which offers photography tours, workshops and holidays on the Dingle Peninsula. Dingle Darkroom very much brings together my love and knowledge of photography and just over half a century of visiting and exploring the Dingle Peninsula.