For the past few months I’ve kept an extra camera slung over my shoulder alongside my go-to kit. It’s a Zorki 4K; a Russian rangefinder that I stumbled across in a vintage store at a price that made it good value as a bookend, let alone a functioning camera. The Zorki 4K is a soviet-era copy of the Leica II produced by the KMZ factory (Krasnogorsk Mekanicheski Zavod, which translates as “Krasnogorst Mechanical Factory”), and even takes Leica L-mount lenses although it comes with the acclaimed Jupiter-8 50mm f/2 lens (a Zeiss-Sonnar clone). It was introduced in 1973 as a successor to the Zorki 4 which had been produced since 1956 (featuring improvements such as a modern film advance lever rather than a knurled metal knob), and was widely exported to the west until production ceased in 1978. The camera is fully manual and has no light meter, so I’ve been making a best guess every time I’ve used it over this past spring. As was to be expected, a few of the frames from that first roll of film were slightly over-exposed although I think that might partially be down to it being quite difficult to accurately set the shutter speed on my camera (you have to lift a small knob, twist it to match the desired shutter speed and let it fall into place, which mine doesn’t always do particularly convincingly), however I’m pleased with the sharpness of the photographs that I did expose correctly. Below you’ll find a selection of the best of those photographs from the first film through my Russian-rip-off-rangefinder. I hope that you like them.
I am an awful fly fisherman. I started “picking up” new hobbies to compliment surfing at around the same time that I started to get really busy with work (perhaps as some sort of subliminal rebellion against me giving up more and more of my own time), so not only do I not have enough opportunities to indulge and perfect them but they also all require fairly similar optimum weather conditions. I should’ve taken up past-times more suited to stormy winter evenings such as wood-turning or learning to play the guitar properly.Instead, a handful of times each year, I go out and wave a stick around the air with an ornate bit of fluff and a hook tied to the end of it. Invariably I fail to catch a fish, but I enjoy myself and that is why I do it; learning to cast a fly and becoming proficient at it is a very zen-like repetitive process that requires a great deal of concentration and practice. The “fishing” part when the fly is on or in the water trying to trick your prey into taking a bite is proportionally very small when compared to the total amount of time that you are fishing. My flies spend most of their time in midair, whizzing past my right ear in ever-increasing loops as I try to build up enough line to cast out to where the fish (might) be. Once I’ve got good at that I’ll worry about how they “present” or land on the water, which is a whole other issue.I don’t catch any fish but that’s not why I do it: In just the same way as I rarely bring home dinner when I go spearfishing, the catching element of fly-fishing for me is just a possible pleasant by-product of spending a few hours under, on, waist deep in or next to the water. I did once unknowingly fly-fish for sea bass alongside the Prime Minister (he didn’t catch anything either) so I at least have a “fishing” story to tell in the pub, and of course there are all of those monsters that got away… If I ever land one then you’ll be the first to know.
Flashback to the middle of winter: I am bloody freezing. My hands are doing that claw thing where they get so cold that you can’t close your fingers together and that, along with a thick, heavy wetsuit, makes paddling anywhere more mission than movement. Crossing my arms and hugging my numb paws into my armpits just hurts, so I decide that holding them under the water and keeping them out of the wind is a better idea. The light is flat and grey and there is a band of rain being carried towards me on the onshore wind; I watch the opaque curtain envelop the headland a mile away and wonder what’s keeping me out here scratching around for waist-high onshore mush? A small part of me is secretly hoping that the angry bull seal who took up residence here last winter, and who’s developed a reputation for bullying surfers back to the beach, will turn up so that I have an excuse for catching a wave in.
I’m not living some sort of cold-water surf adventure right now; there are no scenic mountains when I look inland, the beach isn’t covered in snow and there are no killer whales cruising the line-up or bears stalking the shoreline. Just our territorial seal whose intentions none of us are ever absolutely certain of when he surfaces within kicking distance of one of us. But it’s plenty cold enough and to be honest once your extremities are numb I’d argue that the difference between the water temperature being 7 degrees and 5 degrees Celcius isn’t noticeable, particularly once you factor in the wind-chill. Cold is cold, it’s as simple as that. And this is the reality for an awful lot of surfers. Life isn’t one long boardshort advert.
So what keeps so many of us in the sea for so long when often it’s uncomfortable and not the most productive use of our time?
What is the “S” factor?
There’s a strong case for the argument that those surfers who you see bobbing around the line-up on a distinctly average day in mid-winter, or obsessively hopping from look-out spot to look-out spot searching for waves just because it’s the weekend, have another thing driving them. It’s that little something that separates them from the multitude of humans who have caught a wave at some point in their life but not succumbed to the obsession and let it take control of their day-to-day. It stands to reason; if every person who learnt to stand up on a surfboard had this then the line-up would be just as crammed on a dreary onshore morning in mid-winter as it is on the sunniest day of the summer holidays. But it’s not. It’s just the select few who have mastered the ability to turn the key in the car door when their hands are too cold to function properly or who often don’t get the feeling back in their toes until the end of the evening news, long after dark has fallen.
Take yourself as an example: Have you ever made a decision where the dominant influence in your choice was surfing? A big decision perhaps, like where you live or what you do to earn a living? Could you blame surfing for a less than desirable financial situation or the break-up of a relationship? You see?
The simple answer would be to blame this sort of behavior on some kind of addictive behavior trait. But that’s too obvious to ring true. If that was the answer then regular surfers would display those sorts of behaviors in other areas of their lives, but the vast majority of us don’t. Some surfers are happy to forego daily surfs unless the waves are actually good, preferring to survive off memories of better waves and just to scratch the itch when absolutely necessary, on a weekly or fortnightly basis when a new swell shows up on the charts. Others just have to get in as soon as there’s a lump of water to paddle into; a bad surf is better than no surf sort of attitude, regardless of how frustrating it is.
Call it stoke, call it sensation seeking, or scientifically attribute it to varied levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin in surfers. Both dopamine and serotonin help our brains to regulate mood and emotion, are responsible for levels of arousal, and determine how we perceive reward. It has been put forward that many surfers display behaviors indicative of heightened levels of dopamine, but whatever it’s down to, regular surfers can’t seem to get enough of it in one way or another which is why we keep going back. The best things are often the most difficult to explain and we all have our own reasons, so don’t worry that when somebody asks why you insist on paddling out whilst everybody else retreats indoors to the comfort of their favorite chair, you struggle to come up with an answer that comes anywhere close to explaining why. You don’t have to.
In these digital times a culture is often defined by the imagery that portrays it, and the way that it is presented to the wider world. By and large, modern surfing imagery is action-oriented, so what happens when an acclaimed photographer with no previous connection to surfing decides to document it in a decade long photography project? SurfSite Tin Typehappens, that’s what.
Joni Sternbach is a Brooklyn based photographer whose tintype portraits of surfers, made using nineteenth-century “wet plate” techniques on large-format field cameras, have broken the mold for surf images and seem to have captured the essence of her international subjects, all of whom share surfing as a common bond. This is civil war era photography that involves setting up a darkroom on the beach, and Joni has travelled to California, Australia and finally to Europe to produce her images for her exhibitions and book. That’s where I caught up with her, and after helping her to carry her dark room kit across the beach I sat down to ask her a few questions about her work.
Joni, your “Surfland” images are remarkably different from the sort of high-octane digital images that surf media is saturated with these days. What inspired you to embark on creating this series of images?
Well, I learnt how to make a tintype in 1999 and I didn’t really intend to embark on a ten-year project with that process. I just went to a guy’s log cabin in upstate New York to learn about what it was and just fell in love with it immediately. You were on the beach with us the other day and watched us pull a plate; you saw the way that people reacted to seeing their image fix on the beach, it just never fails to delight. And so the immediacy of the process and the hand-made nature are these two things that work so brilliantly together to create…I don’t know, the kind of image they create feels a little more soulful – they look a little more tactile and real; they remind you of something that you’ve seen but not exactly. You know what I mean? So, they have this familiarity and yet they’re completely new and unknown. I think those combinations of opposites work so well together to create an object that people find compelling.
How did you first come to have a surfer “sit” for your camera?
Well, my first surfer was shot from the same bluffs that I was shooting at for the previous five years – I was working the same landscape for a long time, I’ll just say that – and I ran into somebody on the top of the bluff and I asked him if he was a surfer, he said he was, I asked him to pose and he said no. His girlfriend hit him gently in the head and said “of course you will” and he did. So he ran down the bluff while I coated my plate and by the time he got down there, into his rash guard and posed, my plate was ready. There was no communication between us at that point –he was way far away on the beach and there were no directions given. He stood still and was ready to move only when I gave the thumbs up or whistled that the shot was done. So he stood there and we made a picture and he’s tiny in this great big landscape. It was like, “holy crap, this is beautiful”. It was a completely overcast day, my chemistry was probably really crapped out too, and he is this strong, white solid object in this very misty and mushy landscape. My assistant and I looked at each other and said, “We’ve got to do this” and then we made our way down to the beach and started talking to people. I was terrified!
Why surfers – what is it about surfers that interests you?
Exactly, why surfers! There is absolutely no reason why surfers except, in 2002, I was out shooting a landscape of the sea and sky (this was a series I was working on) and I had my camera all set up. It had been a really stormy, cloudy day the day before and foggy. If you were to imagine the sun coming through here, all dark clouds and then the sun sends down these rays onto the ocean, where there just happen to be about 20-30 people in black wetsuits out on the water. They’re not going anywhere, right? And snap, you make this picture and the light goes off in such a way that gives you goose bumps and makes you think that you have experienced heaven. So I took this one picture, and it was not a picture about surfing or surfers, it was a landscape picture. But at that moment, I felt like I had a connection to all those people in the sea because, it was like I could hear them from the bluffs. We all went off on this thing together. I don’t know who it was in the water – I may know them now but I didn’t then, but we all experienced one of those most divine moments of light and ocean. So the reason why I went back to the bluffs to photograph a surfer was because of that moment.
What is your take on the surfing tribe, as an artist making a study ofthem (us)?
Well, it’s funny that you should ask. So, I had no idea about anything about surfing. It wasn’t until two years into the project that I even looked at a book “History of Surfing,” right, I just went in blind and decided that blind was the best way to be. Because, there’s an innocence to ignorance, right, and I wasn’t really like a surf enthusiast, I was just interested in this collection of people that have one thing in common but otherwise may have nothing in common. And, they’re all different types of people and I could go to this one location with this very elaborate chemistry and set-up and find a huge cross-section of people and the uniting force is surfing. It was, for me, this group of people that fit in so perfectly with this process that I was using. Like, they were a tribe but I didn’t know anything – I didn’t even know that surfing really had such a history!
The “tintype” images that you produce require large, antiquephotographic equipment (although not as antique as I originally thought) and an almost alchemic knowledge and skill. What are theprocesses involved in making these photographs?
Most people who shoot with wetplate, like to use the actual period equipment and materials – it’s beautiful stuff, don’t get me wrong, it’s just very limited and doesn’t really work for what I’m doing here. I do use period lenses in some instances, but if I didn’t have a shutter on my lens then I don’t think that I could make these pictures that I’ve been making. In terms of the process, which everybody likes to put center-stage, is to me a little bit like pulling the rabbit out of a hat. This trick that I could pull out, but to me the project is not so much about the process, yet the process is the thing that pulls everybody in to the project. So there’s a little bit of a magician thing going on there. So basically what it is, is a piece of blackened metal that you pour this substance called collodion on. Collodion is gun cotton, ether and alcohol combined with iodides and bromides to make it have tonalities. You pour this on the piece of blackened metal and you sensitize it in a bath of silver nitrate and while it’s wet you take the picture and while it’s wet you develop the picture and while it’s wet you fix the picture (or you can just fix it later if you take it away wet and fix it at your studio) and then it’s washed. The whole thing has to stay wet from start to finish so that’s why my dark box has to come with me to the beach and that’s why I have to haul around so much crap!
And how does this process translate to the beach environment?(Logistical problems with sand and humidity etc.?)
First of all, wind is probably the biggest factor. Wind is not your friend with wet plate. It puts lines on your plate of collodion and it dries your plate out and makes you a little crazy because of everything blowing everywhere, so to me that’s the worst part. Working on the sand is really not so bad – having your office be on the beach everyday and shooting is really the best part, it’s just that you often have to carry your gear over a lot of territory, then it’s hard work.
Recent images that you made in California (Horse-mounted rancherscarrying surfboards, and the Malloy brothers with their outrigger canoe for example) bring to mind a “pioneering” aesthetic similar tohistoric civil war era photographs. Has this been a conscious decision or do you think it is an unavoidable link because of the tin–type process?
That’s a really good question! I would like to say that I was channeling Timothy O’Sullivan and all of those forefathers when I made those pictures, but I don’t really know. When I’m in places like that, I try and feel around the landscape and connect to certain parts of it. When I was photographing the Malloys with their big red plastic canoe, it looked at first a little ridiculous in the landscape. However, when I pulled the plate, the colour of the canoe went dark and the green landscape was kind of misty and so it looked strangely like they were in Asia somewhere! It suddenly went from being California to Asia and, I don’t know, it just had this very out of time feel that I though was really quite amazing. And it was like 40-second exposure – it was a really long exposure, it was really quite dark out. When I first met Chris he told me about it and he wanted to have a picture with his brothers with it, and we thought about all these places to take it, but it was really like the back yard was the best spot because that’s really where it lives until it goes somewhere for real.
Have you travelled specifically to shoot work for this series or has it been a sideline series?
Oh no, you have to travel specifically; there’s no sideline. This work is all about planning and preparation, and in order to go somewhere you need to source your chemistry, you need to source out all of the stuff that makes “your” kit and for me my kit is very specific now. You know, I went to Australia and had to figure it all out there, and it takes time to figure it out. You have to be somewhere a while, you can’t just “pop-in” and make it happen, at least I can’t! It takes a lot of prep – even just finding distilled water here was a pain! If I’d known then I would’ve ordered it in advance.
How do you select your subjects?
Sometimes they select me!
Explain how you have come to photograph some of the most famousnames in surfing?
Well, they all showed up in different ways. I have a friend in New York who introduced me to Kassia Meador and I took her picture in New York but I didn’t think that it was good enough, so when I went to California I got in touch with her and told her I’d love to shoot with her again. She said, “Ok, why don’t you meet me at Donald Takayama’s shop, so we met there and Donald also came out for his picture and it was just one of those incredible days. I just loved photographing him; he was so much fun and a real sweetheart. I feel really honored that I got to take his picture, particularly since he died so soon afterwards, he was too young for that.
He struck a very classic pose as well.
He posed purposefully, that ‘first surfer’ photograph that struck me, also captivated him, he really wanted to embody that pose. So that’s how I got to photograph him. When I was in Australia I was at a gallery opening and I met Dave Rasta and his American girlfriend, and they invited me out to their farm and that’s how I photographed him. Not to forget that his girlfriend, Lauren gave me my first surf lesson. I photographed John John and Jordy for O’Neill, and after the job I snapped off one of my own!
There are some people that I’ve sought after who are really big. I photographed Robert August and Wingnut from Endless Summer. I recently met some amazing shapers in San Deigo, Jon Wegener and Rusty Priesendorfer. I met Tom Curren in California but the shot didn’t come out well, but then I met him again the next time and we did another shot and got to hang out a little bit. I might be able to take a decent picture of him now that he’s more comfortable with me but he’s not somebody that is comfortable having his photograph taken.
What is the most rewarding thing about this body of work?
I think that the most rewarding thing is…it’s like the day in Santa Barbara when I was shooting this guy I’d never met before on this ranch that I had never been to before with this group of people who I had no idea who they were, and there’s a kind of choreography that happens, a kind of flow of events that takes place while you’re shooting that leads to endlessly amazing pictures and at one point they guy that I was photographing said to me, “I don’t know if you noticed, but I think that we made a little bit of magic today,” and, we did. It happened the other day at Towan too. It’s just a series of people come in and things just flow – you move over here and you move over there and at the end of the day there’s this incredible feeling coupled with good pictures. So whatever that is that I just described, I think is the best part of it. You can meet people that you’ve never met before, make a little magic with them that’s called a photograph and everybody is just so happy.
Do you have a favorite image? Why?
I do, I have a bunch. Some are different than others. I photographed Izzy and Lucy Kirkland and also Lucy Thorman the other day. They were up against these rocks and they just, I don’t know, there’s something about this picture. It doesn’t look like any other picture I’ve ever taken. It’s these two women who are caught in time; I don’t know how to describe it. It kind of kills me. Sometimes there are expressions – if you look at Izzy’s eyes, she has super light blue eyes and they went white, so it’s freaky the way that she looks and yet there’s a softness and it looks like if Woodstock were on a beach in 2014 this would be it. They look like free spirits.
Where do you see this project going – will it be an ongoing documentary or does it have an end point?
It probably does have an end point, but it’s not yet. I thought I was done with it – I used to tell everyone that not only am I done with this but also I’m done with collodion! You have a very short collodion life because it beats you up. But I might have a gig in South Africa and I might do a trip to Hawaii, and I think that if I went to those two places and maybe the North of Spain, south of Biarritz, maybe somewhere like that, then it could really be an important document, if I could make it broader. I don’t know if it has an end, it probably does.
Are you tempted to capture Surfers now on different, more modernequipment or using colour photography techniques, or do you think that would spoil your relationship with photographing surfers?
I’ve started to shoot them using film as well; I don’t think that it just has to be collodion. I mean I don’t know if the film will end up being fabulous in the same way that the collodion is, but I love shooting film and it’s nice to be able to make prints.
Joni’s new book, Surf Site Tin Type is published by Damiani Editore and is available to purchase here.
Throughout the 17th Century, back when stockings were the height of fashion, the highest fashion stockings that your guineas could buy were made on the island of Guernsey. Word has it that Elizabeth I wore them, Admiral Lord Nelson endorsed them as part of Naval uniform, and that Mary Queen of Scots wore Guernsey stockings at her execution. When stockings fell from favour however, the fishermen’s wives of the Channel Island Bailiwick stepped up and saved the island’s knitwear industry with their classic and practical jumpers.
Yours truly, rowing ashore with the help of my navy blue nautical knitwear.
Originally hand-knitted using tightly twisted woollen yarn that was rich in lanolin, the guernsey was and is a warm and practically waterproof (thanks to the waxy lanolin) garment, with a symmetrical front and back so that it can be worn out evenly. My friend Matt who was born and raised on Guernsey claims that the “back-to-front” style meant that fishermen could wipe their fish-gut caked hands on the front and then just turn it around, so that they could carry on as if they weren’t covered in blood and slime. The distinctive ribbed pattern at the top of the sleeves represents a ship’s rope ladder, the garter stitch panel along the bottom depicts waves breaking on a beach and the stitching on the shoulders represents pebbles, stones and sand. Guernseys are still produced on the island by a team of six or seven people at Guernsey Woollens, and whilst you can purchase one in a range of colours most people apparently still choose navy blue – and why wouldn’t you? There are some classic items of clothing out there that have long stood the test of time and will no-doubt continue to do so, and this is surely one of them. If you ever find yourself having to pack one jumper, and one jumper alone, then try your best to make it a guernsey.
Les Hanois Lighthouse off the coast of Guernsey was constructed using Cornish granite with the blocks dovetailed together both laterally and vertically so that once set in place they could not be separated without being broken.
Ten days ago the second annual Approaching Lines Festival of Surf (presented by Reef) wrapped up, following 3 nights of surf films on an enormous cinema screen and a single fin surf contest that went down in classic conditions. I was fortunate enough to be there as event photographer again, which meant that in between squeezing through the crowds to photograph everyone enjoying a beer in the intermission, I also got to sneak in and watch a few great movies from the back of the auditorium. It’s really great to see the various Approaching Linesevents gaining so much popularity within the surf community, as British surfers continue to get behind the sort of events that bring us all together and break our bad habits of sticking to our own crew at our local beach. It’s a real pleasure to be a part of it all, regardless of the surf movies and complimentary beers…
Here’re a few of my favourite shots from across the 4-day event, held in Newquay. Hopefully I’ll see a few more of you there next year.
Life size surf movies, and then some.
Shakas for Deus’ new movie “North to Noosa”.
Beards and beers, both courtesy of the fine folks at Sharps.
Event Director Chris Nelson, broadcasting.
There were sell-out crowds throughout the festival, not least for Kai Neville’s latest shred-fest “Cluster” which had crew queuing out the door.
Not least because the man himself was there to present his latest offering and do a Q&A after the credits stopped rolling, along with Saffa ripper Brendon Gibbens who features in Cluster.
Trying to make a multiplex look nice with light trails at dusk and all that…
James Parry about to paddle out for his heat in the Reef classic single fin invitational.
Sam Lamiroy running down the beach in front of the Headland Hotel.
A loomer rearing up out back.
Sam Lamiroy launching off the end section. He stuck some solid moves in heat 1.
Heat 1 contestants (L-R) James Parry, Sam Lamiroy, Gee Piper, Toby Donachie, Neil Holland and Tom Anderson.
Heat 2 contestants Archie Cross, Sarah Bentley, Alan Stokes (Victor), Sam Boex and John Eldridge.
Alan Stokes did about 8 of these on the same wave, all the way to the inside at Little Fistral. If I had been shooting film I would’ve burned through a whole roll on this wave alone.
Sam Boex took out the “Most Stylish” award, and rightly so.
A few years ago I listened to a documentary on the radio about sibling harmony – the singing sort though, not the sort illustrated by two brothers restraining themselves from punching each other. It looked at how the combined vocals of siblings produced a much more natural and almost inseparable harmony than that produced by any other group of singers, no matter how good their individual voices. One of the main reasons for this is because siblings share so many physical features, such as the shape of their noses or the colour of their eyes, and so it stands to reason that their voices will be similar too. Add to that the fact that these voices resonate within physically similar chambers in the mouth and nose which amplify and colour the tones, so that the singing of brothers and sisters is of a similar timbre. That’s nature taken care of, but “nurture” factors such as accent and vocal intonations will also play their role in ensuring that when family members sing together their voices blend together as one. Just think about the number of famous singing family groups since the 1940s. And then add the Staveley-Taylor sisters to your list, better known as The Staves.
A few summers ago I had the pleasure of photographing The Staves at an acoustic gig on a beach here in Cornwall, organised by my oldest friend Alex. He recently worked with the singing sisters again to produce a couple of Take Away Shows with French music videography pioneers La Blogothèque, and the results are wonderful. Take a listen, and a look too.
Man, machine, and a whole lot of mud. Whether the challenge is to coax a vintage car non-stop up a series of muddy hill stages, or manoeuvre a motorbike over boulders and through rivers without putting a foot down, trials events require great technical skill, mechanical know-how, and an intimate connection between a vehicle and the person controlling it. I’ve attended a couple of trials events over the past couple of months, carrying a couple of old cameras (one 35mm SLR and a 120mm TLR) loaded with black and white film with the intention of shooting some of the more interesting (read: old) vehicles that I spotted. I got the roll of 35mm back from the lab a little over a week ago, and wanted to share a selection from my winter wading around the woods in gum boots following the noise of engines.
A couple of years ago I read an article in an Australian magazine about a lady in Melbourne who had left her job to make terrariums for a living. Until that moment I had no idea what a terrarium was. It turns out that a terrarium is my kind of gardening, ultra low maintenance and an opportunity to let your imagination have a bit of exercise. Essentially, a terrarium (or “bottle garden” as they’re otherwise known) is a plant or collection of plants in a glass container that is usually sealed thus creating a mini biosphere. Condensation forms on the inside of the glass and then trickles down to water the plants in a continuous and completely natural cycle. I have a patchy track record for keeping plants alive, so something that doesn’t require any input from me gives the greenery the best chance of survival.
You can also create scenes in terrariums, kind of as you would in a goldfish tank, adding ornaments or figures to make the whole thing a bit more engaging. If you’re making a terrarium as a gift for somebody then this aspect of it allows you to tailor it to the recipient. I’ve made a few now – two as gifts and one for myself just because I’d collected too much moss and felt bad about throwing it away, so I stuffed it in a kilner jar and carved a little Easter Island Moai from a lump of foam to make it more interesting before sticking it on my shelf.
Want to make a world in a jam jar? Here’s how:
Find a suitable (lidded) glass container that has an opening large enough to get your hand into so that you can actually plant stuff in it.Charity shops are great sources of weird old glassware, or you could use a kilner jar, old coffee cafetierre etc etc…
Put a layer of small pebbles or gravel (I would never condone pinching a pocketful from a driveway…) mixed with “horticultural charcoal” (I crunched up some charcoal rescued from the bottom of our fire) about 2cm deep at the bottom of the jar.
Cover this with a piece of fine metal or plastic gauze so that the soil doesn’t just fall through and fill in the gaps. Sourcing this is probably the most difficult part of the entire process.
Add 5cm or so of moist potting soil on top and tamp it down a bit.
Go and buy some plants. You need to select plants that are preferably “dwarf” and prefer high humidity and low light, so stuff like ferns, fittonias (nerve plants) dwarf ivies and miniature orchids. Don’t go for cacti or succulents if you’re putting a lid on it.
Forage some moss to fill in the gaps (probably wear a pair of gloves), but don’t import any creepy crawlies into your miniature world.
Make some holes in your soil and plant in your plants, tamping the soil down around each one.
Add some interesting “stuff”. In the past I’ve put in a little sandstone Buddha head statue with a couple of turn of the century “explorer” railway figurines stuck to the top, pulled a broken camera lens apart to use the aperture movement as a gateway for zombies, and modelled an Easter Island moai. Let your imagination run with it, do something that will make you smile, and don’t blame me if you end up with an account at a model railway shop or a permanent digital record of the fact that you once googled “nazi zombie figurines”…
Water the plants lightly with one of those spray bottles, and then close the lid. If condensation forms on the inside of the glass then it’s working nicely.
Place your terrarium out of direct sunlight – most of the plants inside are probably “forest floor” plants so don’t like direct sunlight much.
Every few weeks take the lid off to let a bit of fresh air in. When you put the lid back on check to see if condensation forms again, and if it doesn’t then give it a little squirt of water. Basically, your terrarium will let you know if it needs a drink.
Enjoy your maintenance free indoor garden!
You can find a load more information about terrariums here.
Very often the only time that I read any of the one newspaper that I buy each week during the winter is when I am tearing it up whilst laying a fire each evening. This week, one small article in the Saturday Telegraph (not my preferred broadsheet, I must admit) caught my eye, titled “The world is drowning in plastic waste”. I paused in my fire building and sat back on the lounge floor to read it.
It reported that each year more plastic is being dumped in the oceans than was produced worldwide in the 1960s. That is the equivalent of five shopping bags full of plastic waste being thrown into the sea for every foot of the world’s coastline. Shameful, huh? The world produced 299 million tons of new plastic last year but a new report by Washington’s Worldwatch Institute claims that in Europe we only recycle a quarter of our plastic waste, burning another third for heat or power. In the USA less than 10% is recycled. And what becomes of the rest? Thrown away.
Clearly we have a significant problem on our hands, and one that’s true impact has yet to be revealed.
Riz Boardshorts are all too aware of this ticking time bomb, and have set out on a mission to become the world’s first 100% recycled and recyclable boardshort brand – a worthy mission in my eyes. Their aim is not just to use recycled polyester for all of their products, but also to utilise recycled plastics in all of the other components that are often overlooked by companies producing “recycled” clothing – elements like trims, zippers, buttons and Velcro. They aren’t stopping at a recycled item of clothing that you can send back to them when worn out to be recycled again, however, and want to take it all one-step further. Their plan is to take plastic bottles collected from beaches and turn that marine litter into a pair of boardshorts. They’re currently coming towards the end of a crowdfunding campaign to help them achieve this, and are just a short way off their target with a week to go. Please check it out and if you like what they’re doing or fancy any of the rewards that they’re offering in return for pledges then please go ahead and support them.
I’ve harped on enough in past blog posts about the various things that you can do to reduce the amount of plastic that you use and tackle the problem of marine plastic pollution, so I won’t repeat myself. I will say, however, that the Surfers Against Sewage Big Spring Beach Clean series is taking place again this March, over the weekend of the 28th and 29thwhich is the first weekend of the school Easter holidays. I’ll be helping out with the Polzeath beachclean on Sunday morning organised by Cornish Rock Tors. If you can join us there (11am start) that would be wonderful, or if you can attend another beach clean event or simply do a #2minutebeachclean next time you visit the beach then it all counts just the same. Every little helps, after all.
Images of James Otter of Otter Surfboards, shot for Riz Boardshorts. James and Riz recently interviewed each other about their respective companies attempts to reduce their environmental impact. You can check out James interviewing Riz here, and Riz interviewing James here.
Trying to make a multiplex look nice with light trails at dusk and all that…
