RSPB Scotland’s Paul Walton shares how his love of film photography reflects his encounters with Glasgow City wildlife.
Photographing Glasgow’s urban wildlife
Everyone frequenting these pages knows what it is to love and admire Scottish wildlife. We share the thrill of watching grey seals track us as we move along a lonely Atlantic beach, ringed plovers calling plaintive but hopeful up ahead; of hearing the curlew far-crying his name from the horizon of a high upland ridge; of lingering to watch hoverfies and bees among wildflowers and grasses on a sunny hillside.
Can we find the same wonder in the wildlife of inner cities? Mostly gulls, pigeons and crows, perhaps: but the notes of wildness and movement these birds bring to a landscape of buildings and waste ground, puddles and lamp posts, often just noticed out of the corner of the eye or at the edge of some architectural edifice, these enrich and bring an electricity to my everyday life. The birds of Glasgow are for me an endlessly shifting background of visual urban music.
I have tried to explore this sense with photography. I use an old 1970s film camera, develop black and white negatives, and make prints by hand in the darkroom. Rather than being outdated and inconvenient, I find the process of using photographic film and paper intensely meditative and rewarding. It is slow. Developing the film, making contact sheets, selecting negatives, forming test strips and test prints, timing exposures, ‘dodging’, ‘burning’ and ‘painting with the light’ of the darkroom enlarger, these things do take many hours, and things often go wrong. But in those hours, I am totally focused on a single image, immersed within it, almost - and it all happens under the faint red glow of the darkroom safelight, quietening and slowing thoughts and actions and feelings.
I am, to be honest, in love with film.
Here is a series of darkroom prints I have made of birds in Glasgow, scanned and reproduced for the website. The birds are sometimes small (you may have to look hard!), and you won’t find anything of the quality and finesse of an Attenborough documentary. But that wasn’t the point – these are Glasgow birds as I meet them, fleeting and ever-changing, but always there, every single day.
Now, during this long lockdown, when a trip to that lonely Atlantic beach is out of the question for virtually everyone, I thought I’d share these with fellow admirers of Scottish birds. I know many of you love and esteem the common and the seemingly ordinary as much as you do the fabulous spectacle of a Caledonian pinewood in falling snow, or being at sea in among plunge-diving gannets.
These images are a small lockdown offering for you.
Prints made at Street Level Photoworks, Trongate 103, Glasgow