Brian Lavelle » www.brianlavelle.org

Here are my first efforts with this camera. The film is Ilford Delta 400 and these are scanned from prints, which were developed locally. They’re straight scans, without any processing or cleaning.

I’m not sure I like the tints which the developing process has added to some, although not all, of the five I’ve posted here. I’ll need to investigate developing at home!

There were quite a few of the photographs I wasn’t happy with; I certainly need more practice with the camera, but these five at least confirmed my FED-2 seems to work well enough and the FED 50 lens is clear. More soon.

I’ve always enjoyed what I consider—no doubt pretentiously—to be rather unusual musics. There, I’ve said it.

At school, I came across a group of strange individuals performing under the name Ring. There’s very little about them on the great interweb, perhaps reflecting how individual and obscure their music was at the time. They had an early demo tape (untitled) which was released in 1984 on the anarcho-punk label BBP Records and Tapes (a sticker on the cassette proudly proclaims their motto “DIY not EMI is our game”). Ring’s first “real” (ahem) album, again on tape, was O De Dun Dun, self-released in 1989. Both were wonderful. There is, apparently, a Levitation connection in their guitarist Bic (Christian Hayes) who went on to form that group with others. I’ve never heard them.

And then there was this tape—Nervous Recreation—their third and last outing, which was just extraordinary in so many ways I find hard to express now.

I dug it out tonight, from amidst a huge unlit pyre of magnetic media, just to see if it was as magical as I’d remembered, despite nearly two decades of unreliable nostalgic mist. Its cover is still as odd to me now as it was then. The music is complex, playful and accomplished, and as the site above notes, in thrall to the genius of Tim Smith and Cardiacs. That, in my book, is A Good Thing. It’s incredible to think, in fact, that this material was recorded on a four track cassette recorder.

And, remarkably, listening to it for the first time in probably 15 years or more took me back again to happy (if frustrating) times in 1989, sitting in the refectory at school, trying to explain the last track on the album, “Some Fish Have Teeth”, to anyone within earshot, even those who thought Iron Maiden were the pinnacle of invention in music and hairdressing.

But especially I tried to explain this music to Judith, to whom I was in thrall. I failed to explain it, probably, but at least I tried. Not that she ever knew I was in thrall. I think. It just seemed to me, at that point in time, that there was never more of a beautiful truism than “some fish have teeth” to the point where it became something of a mantra. That all seems a bit silly now.

And Judith, if by some quirk of fate you’re out there and reading this, do get in touch. I think I know what the song means now.

There’s a positive little review of The Petrified Forest in this week’s edition of Vital (issue 631), which had this to say:

Brian Lavelle recently surprised us [with] ‘Supernaturalist’, and the two pieces here were recorded just before that and show the best side of his: manipulating field recordings and very much altering them into microscopic detailed pieces of ambient drones. Slowly changing patterns of what seems to be rain fall, deep bass sounds in ‘The Wood Turned Dark And Silent’ and more synthetic in ‘This Twisting Glade’, which sounds like a church organ being dissected. Very nice. (FdW)

Thank you Frans!

I’ve just received a beautiful new (well, really quite old) FED-2 rangefinder camera made in the former Soviet Union some time in the 1950s. The FED-2 was the first and very successful attempt by Soviet camera makers to improve upon the original and vastly more expensive Leica II and IIIg designs.

The camera above is unusual because it’s finished in black enamel, so this is an opportunity to see how the FED-2 would have looked if that finish had ever been available on a camera out of the FED factory. It never was, and this finish is in fact the detailed modern enamelling work of a skilled restorer from Odessa in Ukraine.

The story of the FED factory is an interesting if unpalatable one. The factory (???) in Kharkov was an orphanage-turned-work-commune named for Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the original Soviet Secret Police, the Cheka (later the NKVD).

And the origin of the title of this post? It’s from an old Soviet song about war journalism:

With Leica and with notepad
And sometimes with machine gun
We passed through fire and frost.

Stephen Rothery has a controversial conspiracy theory that the early Leica I and II models were clones of the first FED rangefinder (the FED-1 or Fedka). He posits that the Leica in the song was simply a genericised trademark and that, for some time in the 1920s to the early 1940s, Leica in Russian was a synonym for a 35mm camera. I’m not sure about this, but it’s a good story…

Anyway, these are rugged, inexpensive machines that take great photographs, on good old fashioned film. I plan to use this pretty much exclusively for black and white photography; perhaps I’ll post some shots here after I’ve used it for a bit.

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[Edit: 23 June 2008: I worked out the camera is from 1955 and is the type 'a' version of the FED-2. I've added a wonderful little wrist strap from Gordy's Camera Straps. Elegant, simple and rugged. And very reasonably priced too! The camera, which is heavy enough, feels safe hanging on it. Highly recommended.]