Welcome to Pictorial Planet

A website dedicated to the art of Black and White Film Developing and Photography

by John Finch

New book here:

Select this link to see more about my new book,

The Art of Black and White Photography

I now have two different books to cover two different aspects of photography. Please click the link to read about my books.

The Art of Black and White Developing covers getting the best from your negative and paper development.

And the new:

The Art of Black and White Photography shows the methodology, the tricks and the tips that help make great wall hanging photographs with your equipment.

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My New Book

280 Pages
Spiral bound
Soft Cover

“As a child I sat for hours in the library, staring at the photographs in books. To me they were sublime. How was I ever going to make photographs like them?”

You can make photographs of the highest standard on a humble camera. It’s absolutely achievable, easy, and very affordable.

It’s been a long, repeated myth that we have to spend a lot on equipment to achieve the best quality, but this just isn’t true. Some believe that we must use large format cameras to have any chance of emulating the eminent artists of photography, others that we need the very best, modern nano coated, aspheric, apo-chromatically corrected lenses. 

This just isn’t true! 

By the 1970s, the quality of cameras and lenses had far surpassed those of the hero photographers that I followed as a young lad. By the 1980s and 1990s, we had peaked in lens design for film. So, those beautifully crafted, glowing prints on the walls of exhibitions, that I dreamt of making, are now easily within our grasp. 

Yes, quite achievable, once you know the simple techniques, equipment, and workflow the masters used to make them.

In this new book, I describe my journey to emulate the masters. I talk about me difficulties as a young photographer, striving to get the very best from my camera, lens, and film - and often how I failed. Eventually though, I learned the methods, tricks and tips that made beautiful prints to hang on my wall. By relaying the experiences that worked for me, the methodology and great tips I learned through 55 years of film photography, all in a no-nonsense practical way, I hope to provide valuable knowledge and examples that will help you make the very best photographs to hang on your wall.

Old Building : Altyre Estate, Moray, Scotland
Processed in DiXactol Ultra

About this site:

A couple of years after this was taken I was developing film!
I never stopped :)

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