From the River Bank — Kentmere 400 and the Alchemy of Shadows

There’s something ceremonial about loading a fresh roll of Kentmere 400. The way the light retreats as the back of the camera clicks shut — as if the film and I have made a pact. This project, From the River Bank, began not with intention, but with a whisper. The kind that coils around your ear in a half-sleep and leaves you with mud on your boots the next morning.

The river called.
Not loudly — more like a murmur stitched into the wind.
I followed it.

Kentmere 400’s grain is like smoke from a black candle — soft, curling, never static. Perfect for the kind of images I was looking to summon: images with edges frayed by mist, compositions torn between clarity and the void. I wandered to the riverbank with old optics and a heavy heart, thinking of rites long forgotten, of the things submerged beneath surface and time.

Each frame felt like a spell cast. Each exposure, a silent incantation.
Are these negatives... or offerings?

I kept returning at dusk. The hour where light falters, and water becomes a mirror not of the sky, but of the self. I started seeing things in the frames I hadn’t noticed in person — veils, figures, symbols etched in reeds and reflection. Maybe just tricks of the light, maybe not. Maybe photography is the trick. Maybe it’s a ritual disguised as art.

What do the waters remember that we forget? What sinks into silver halide that never shows in the print? What ghosts are we really capturing?

The river does not speak, but it reveals. The film, too, speaks in whispers — of process, patience, and the presence of something other. There is divination in developing. Each agitation of the tank is like stirring a cauldron, waiting for shadows to emerge from the void.

This is not a finished project.
It is a séance.
And I’m not sure I’m the one in control.

Kentmere 400 — cheap, but never simple.
From the riverbank, I’m watching.
From the riverbank, I’m asking.

Who watches back?

Fictional Clarity in Shadows – Wrestling with Pan F 50

There’s a stillness in Pan F 50 that deceives.

A promise of clarity, of razor-fine detail and smooth tonal gradients, but underneath lies a fragile tension. Shooting with it is like asking the light to slow down — and then blaming it when it trips. In the darkroom, it’s even worse. The film curls like it's trying to escape, fighting the reel, fighting the water, fighting me. I used to think the distortions came from the lens. From the scanner. From the chemicals. But I’m starting to realise the distortions are mine too.

I watch as the negatives dry, their pristine, hyper-real edges betraying how difficult it was to coax them into being. There’s something about Pan F’s almost clinical precision that makes the imperfections louder — any tremor in exposure, any lapse in development, shows up like a scar. Highlights blow like flashes of memory I wasn’t ready to look at. Shadows pool with too much weight, holding shapes that never existed.

It messes with my head. The slower ISO forces me to be careful, patient — and I hate how it reveals my own restlessness. The images are almost perfect. Almost true. But I see ghosts in them. Warped limbs where the light bent wrong. Halos where my mind must’ve wandered during agitation. Maybe I didn’t invert it properly. Maybe I didn’t invert myself properly.

There’s a kind of distortion that’s not visible in the grain — it’s embedded in the act of trying to control something that resists control. And that’s what Pan F does. It resists. It punishes. But when it cooperates, it sings in this impossible frequency that feels more real than reality. It’s addictive.

Still, every time I process a roll, it feels like a ritual with no guarantee. Like summoning something delicate and volatile from under my skin. Every frame is a test. Not of the film. Of me.

And sometimes the image that comes out isn’t the one I shot — it’s the one I deserved.

— Negative Ritual

St. Ives, Cornwall

Negative Ritual | April 2025

The sky over St. Ives split in layers—slate grey clouds bruised with violet, shifting like smoke over the sea. I arrived beneath a low tide and a higher pull. This town isn’t just light and coastline. There’s something else humming beneath the cobbles and behind the salt-stained walls.

As I stepped onto Porthmeor Beach, I felt the drag in my gut—a familiar weight, like being watched by the sea itself. The wind carried whispers that weren’t wind. I walked to the far rocks, the ones tourists avoid. There, I found circles of broken shells, almost deliberate, like offerings. The sand was cold even under the midday sun. I pressed my hand to the surface, and it was like touching the skin of something dreaming beneath.

Later, I wandered to the back alleys near the old fisherman’s chapel. That’s where it got strange. My camera wouldn’t focus properly. Blurs formed in the corners—misty figures that evaporated when I turned. I wasn’t scared. It felt like a welcome, in the way only the old dead can welcome. I shot three rolls of black and white, each image taken with breath held. I haven’t developed them yet. I’m not sure I want to know what shows up.

One place pulled the hardest: the overgrown path behind the Barbara Hepworth garden. There's a stone there. Not listed on any map. Smooth, dark, warm to the touch. A pivot point. I stayed there until dusk, just listening.

The energy in St. Ives isn’t loud. It’s subtle. A slow tide, ancient and humming low. It finds you when you’re still. It asks questions in a language you don’t know you understand. I left with salt on my skin, sand in my boots, and a dozen unanswered invitations echoing behind my eyes.

I’ll be back. Something buried still wants to be seen.

— Negative Ritual

The ritual always begins with silence.

The ritual always begins with silence.
Before the pixels. Before the page. Before the flicker of a cursor.

Lately, I’ve been deep in the sigil process—those small, charged glyphs I weave not only into notebooks or paper scraps but into metadata, filenames, alt text. Symbols masked in plain sight. In an age where screens eclipse the sun and data bleeds into every waking moment, magic has to evolve. The spell is not only spoken or scratched—it is encoded.

Each sigil is a condensation of intent. Made slowly, with intention, often sparked by dreams or the stray repetition of a word whispered by the wind while walking at dusk.
I’ve started hiding them in my photographs—barely-there carvings etched into walls, clouds, negative space. Most won’t notice. But those who need to will feel it. That tingle. That pull.

This week, I uncovered three forgotten relics. Not objects—images. Buried deep within a corrupted hard drive, misnamed folders, and digital ruins I had abandoned years ago. Grain-heavy landscapes warped by time, street scenes blurred by breath and motion. Forgotten spells waiting to be spoken again.

I restored them with care. Not cleaned. Not perfected.
Just... respected.

These were once discarded offerings. Now, they feel like warnings.

Navigating the digital world as a dark sorcerer is not about control—it’s about distortion. Disruption. The internet is flooded with clarity, filters, gloss. But I prefer noise. Glitch. The moments where the code forgets itself and the machine reveals something raw, something real.

I work in layers. Obfuscate meaning. Bury it like bones.

Let the viewer dig.

So if you’re reading this and feeling the weight of your own forgotten files, your unfinished edits, your "failed" images—pause. Look again. There’s something sacred in the remains. Something powerful in the fracture. Not every photo is a masterpiece. Some are relics. Some are rituals.

You just haven’t carved the sigil yet.

— Negative Ritual
📁 process_log_0425.sigilx archived

The negative ritual

Negative Ritual is a body of work rooted in landscape, memory, and the quiet pull of the in-between. It blends black and white street photography with nature studies, fine art processes, and self-developed techniques—each image unfolding like a fragment or trace. Themes of absence, time, and stillness run through the work, often circling back to familiar places seen through a changed lens.

Portraits and commissions are approached with the same quiet intensity, favouring atmosphere over spectacle. There’s an undercurrent of ritual in the way the images are made and chosen—less about the moment and more about the echo it leaves behind.

Some say the work carries a charge, that viewing it too long invites visions or stirs something buried. Portraits are rare and often unsettling, as if they reveal more than the subject offered. Each image is a fragment of a larger pattern, though no full picture has ever been confirmed. Whether artist, archivist, or quiet conjurer of the in-between, Negative Ritual leaves behind no answers—only traces.