Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
I don’t have a lot to say about this other than it caught my eye. Possibly because of the way it was lit, but most probably because of the big tangle of cables.
Minolta SRT 101b, Rokkor 50mm f/1.7 & Kodak Tri-X (expired circa 2000-ish). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 31 August 2020
Continuing with an irregular theme of churches that I photograph without ever using them for anything else…
This is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon church not too far from Chesterfield town centre and I usually pass it if when visit the town. It’s a modern building, but looks great when it catches some nice light.
Across the road from the Mormon church is Christ Church, a building I didn’t even realise was of religious use until I stopped to photograph it when I saw how it looked in the morning sun. According to Google the main building is a parish centre rather than a church, although the entrance at the south side of the building is clearly labelled as Christ Church, so perhaps it’s multi-purpose?.
Minolta SRT 101b, Rokkor 50mm f/1.7 & Kodak Tri-X (expired circa 2000-ish). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 31 August 2020
A photograph of a woodland road today, taken on one of the rolls of Fomapan 100 that I’ve been having problems with. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (such as this one) I’ve been having issues with white speckles of debris when using this film. I ruled out my development process and chemicals – both worked fine when developing other film stocks. I also tried omitting a chemical stop-bath, replacing it with water, and also adding a pre-wash of the film before developing. Nothing seemed to work and the speckles still stubbornly appeared when I developed each roll of Fomapan 100.
Then, a month or so back, I came across a post on the Photrio forum which seemed to detail someone having the same problem. It turned out that other people suffering the same difficulties all had film form the same production batch. One person in a linked post had contacted Foma themselves and been advised that the cause was a harder than usual anti-halation layer on that run of film and that a specific development process might help. I tried the process myself, but still ended up with the smae spots on the negatives, albeit possibly slightly less pronounced than before.
I decided to contact Foma myself and they replied with some similar instructions, although this time I noticed an additional stage that involved a wash of the developed film in an ethanol / water mixture before the final wetting agent stage. I’ve not tried this process as yet and, I suspect, probably won’t – mostly because ethanol seems quite hard to come by, at least at a price that isn’t prohibitively high. It would likely be cheaper to buy some fresh, unproblematic film, than attempt the ethanol rinse process.
I’m grateful for Foma’s response though, plus they sent me a few rolls of film as a goodwill gesture – two rolls of Fomapan 400, plus a roll of Retropan 320. I’ve never shot Retropan 320 before, so I’m quite looking forward to giving that one a go.
Should anyone else be suffering a similar issue when developing Fomapan 100, the instructions provided to me by Foma are as follows:
In case of your already exposed & processed negatives we recommend to you the following procedure to remove the residues of remaining anti-halo layer:
1) Prepare working solution in minimum with 40% of ethanol (optimally 70%).
2) Put carefully the films into spiral´s developing tank or a spiral with the film into similar transparent container with enough ethanol solution, with emulsion layer inside of the cylinder tank/container.
3) Keep the negatives in this solution approximately 45 minutes and make moderate movement each 4-5 minutes.
4) Wash sheets of the negatives in running water from tap for 2-3 minutes.
5) Make standard drying including wetting agent (FOTONAL).
If you may decide to use also other films from the same emulsion number, we advise you to follow this procedure of processing:
1) Exposed films put inside of the spiral´s developing tank.
2) Pour distilled water or water without minerals into this developing tank and keep the films in this solution for 20-30 minutes. Occasional inversion is convenient. This solution, ca. 600 ml, is possible to use in maximum for 2 rolls.
3) Immediately after pouring the water out you can fill the tank by developing working solution keeping standard conditions of developing, best using more alkaline developer, e.g. FOMADON R09.
4) After developing we recommend to stop process just by water bath, best running filtered water, in minimum for the time of 30 seconds in water´s temperature 12-18° C. Using acidic stop bath like FOMACITRO and others is not convenient in this case, because there are needed alkaline baths to help with dissolving the hardened anti-halo layer.
5) Standard fixing.
6) Wash the strips of the negatives in running water for 20-30 minutes (according to higher or lower temperature).
7) Use ethanol solution and other steps (1-5) as described in previous paragraph.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 23 August 2020
Back when I was a boy, horse chestnut trees such as the one pictured here, would have been bracing themselves for the soon-to-arrive annual attack of schoolboys desperate to harvest their fruit of conkers. Here in the UK (and maybe elsewhere, I don’t know), conkers was THE sport of the school playground come autumn-time.
For those unfamiliar with the activity, a conker is a hard, nut-like seed produced by the horse chestnut tree. They fall from the branches around October time. Or, as used to be the case, they would be knocked violently from the branches by thrown sticks and stones or pulled from branches climbed by brave individuals. Each conker would be safely cocooned in a heavy, spiky outer shell that, when ripe, would split to reveal the brown, polished, wood-like ovoid within. If you were lucky you would find a previously undiscovered tree that had dropped it’s fruit on the floor. Such rarity! Such treasures!
The game is played by making a hole through the centre of the conker and threading it with a length of thread – often a shoelace – and securing it at the bottom with a knot. Two opponents would then face off and take in turns to swing their conker with force, bracing the thread tautly across the top of the back of their hand, with the intent of shattering their opponents conker.
Dedicated proponents of the sport would engage a variety of techniques to harden their “team” of conkers to maximum hardness. Baking them in an oven, or pickling them in vinegar were both methods reputed to give a conker a shell that would challenge a diamond on the moh scale. Champion conkers would be given names and attain legendary status in the schoolyard.
These days the horse chestnut is in reprieve, the sport of conkers largely consigned to history by the youngsters of today. Part of this was down to a series of bans issued by schools fearful of children with conker fractured knuckles or missing front teeth, although nowadays it’s probably mostly because of videogames and the internet. Isn’t everything?
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 23 August 2020
Eight birds sat on some power lines. When I first arrived at this location there were a lot more of them, and they reminded me of musical notation. Sadly, they flew away before I could get a picture – I think I spooked them setting the camera up – so I moved on to make photos of other things. When I got back some of them had returned, so I got this shot.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 23 August 2020
A quick post today with another shot from the Bronica on the roll of expired Provia 400. Maybe not the healthiest tree, but the one that attracted my attention.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fujifilm Provia 400 (expired 2014).
Taken on 23 August 2020
A couple of weeks ago I took an impromtu trip out to the Peak District National Park one evening after work. August is the month when the heather flowers, blanketing the landscape in a cover of purple. For the last couple of years I’ve managed to miss it altogether for one reason or another, or have only caught the end of the season when it’s past its best. So, given the weather looked nice, I decided to take to opportunity. There might even be a sunset!
I took my Bronica ETRSi loaded with a roll of slightly expired Provia 400. I’ve not shot the 400 variant before, but was quite hopeful given the decent results I’d had a few weeks earlier with some 2003 vintage Ektachrome. As I got closer to my destination it became apparent that I wasn’t the only person taking advantage of the pleasant eventing and there were a considerable number of other people and cars about. I managed to find a place to park without too much trouble though and climbed atop Higger Tor to make some photos.
I soon noticed a curious issue with my light meter, which was giving slightly odd-looking shutter speeds like 1/128. I wasn’t sure what the problem might be, but the speeds were all close enough to regular shutter settings to not give me undue concern. After a few shots it became moot anyway when the meter’s battery died – even though it had been on two bars the last time I checked – and I had to resort to my light-meter app on my phone. It was only when I got home and fitted a new battery to the light meter and looked at the manual that I realised I’d managed to set it into cine mode! Given reversal film’s intolerance of poor exposure, I resigned myself to a roll of mostly ruined shots. One receipt on my transparencies a few days later however, it seemed that most of them were not too bad at all – somewhat ironically the worst shots were the ones where I’d used the light meter app!
Anyway, I roamed around atop the plateau making a number of photos although, if I’m honest, my enthusiasm wasn’t high – I felt somewhat rushed due to the last-minute nature of the trip, plus people kept wandering into my compositions. There was no sunset either…
After a pretty successful session scanning my roll of 135 Velvia 100 previously, I jumped headlong into scanning the Provia 400 when I received the transparencies from the lab. And promptly had the confidence knocked out of me. The settings that had worked so well for me in Vuescan for that earlier roll now served to deliver only disappointment. I know that it’s a different film, and I was also scanning it on my Epson V550 – not the Plustek – as that will scan medium format negatives, but I had hoped that my previous settings would at least serve as a good starting point.
The results were awful. Using the Adobe RGB output setting, that works so well on other scans in Vuescan, here served to produce ugly and blocky purple highligts on some parts of the image. Switching to a different output setting resoleved this, but now the images lost some colour and also seemed to vary in quality by a large degree from frame to frame.
In the end, I resorted to using Epsonscan – an application that has given me less than pleasing results when scanning slides in the past. This time though, it beat the Vuescan files – although it took some considerable faffing in Lightroom & Photoshop before I got something I was mostly happy with and which seemed to reflect what I could actually see on the transparencies.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fujifilm Provia 400 (expired 2014).
Taken on 20 August 2020
Given Fuji Velvia’s penchant for rich saturated colours, I couldn’t help photographing a couple of red pillar boxes with it.
Scanning this Velvia 100 took a bit of trial and error to get the colours and tones correct. My initial attempts resulted in slightly flat looking images, lacking in that brightness that you see when viewing a transparency in natuaral light, so I had to create a Lightroom preset to make the necessary adjustments required. Even then, however, the scans still had a very warm cast to them. A little research revealed that scanned Velvia 100 is sometimes nicknamed Redvia due to the red tones in the shadows. It might be possible to remove this in Lightroom, but I found it easier to set up an action in Photoshop to use a curves layer to drop the shadows in the red channel. They look much closer to the original transparencies now, but retain those saturated tones that the film is known for.
I’ve been really pleased with the results from this roll (and the fact that the OM-2n’s meter has proven itself to be dependable even when metering for something as finicky as slide film). I hope the other four rolls I have will be just as satisfying.
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.
Taken on 2 August 2020
After yesterday’s photo of the old Bennett’s shop front, here’s a picture of another shop just a few doors down on The Wicker, this one still in full health though. I’m not sure when the Sheffield Space Centre first moved to these premises, but it was sometime in the 80s as I recall.
I would visit regularly, browsing their wonderful stock, and buying copies of American horror movie magazines like Fangoria or special effects stuff like Cinefex. For a while a harboured a vague dream of becoming a special effects makeup artist in the vein of Tom Savini of Rick Baker or something. I went to work in an office instead…
I particularly like the Batman social distancing poster in the window. 🙂
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.
Taken on 2 August 2020
A number of decades ago, back when I was young, I was interested in fishing. As a teenager still at school and blessed with only limited funds, most of the fishing tackle I owned was either passed down from my dad (including a dated, even at the time, cane fishing rod that snapped in half while making a cast one day, much to the amusement of my friends!), or acquired as presents at birthday or Christmas time.
I did have enough money to buy the other necessities of the pastime though: line; floats; lead shot (long since banned!); hooks; perhaps the occasional bigger-ticket item like a keep-net or something; and, of course, bait, usually in the form of a tub of wriggling maggots, often in a variety of dyed shades to make them more attractive to the fish (the ones at all the places I went must have been colour-blind though…).
At the time, years before online shopping and even the World Wide Web itself would be a thing, there were a considerable number of fishing tackle shops in the city. Some were dedicated to the pastime, others were a sideline, such as the barber’s that I visited as a child where you could have your hair cut and then buy a pike lure or something (while pretending not to look at the girlie mags that were amongst the fishing periodicals on a small table between the seats where you sat and waited your turn).
The largest tackle shop in Sheffield (and the country, so it was claimed) was Bennetts. The shop had been opened back in the 1950s by Harry and Peter Bennet, renowned match anglers and railwaymen who used to organise angling tournaments for thousands of local fishermen.
In later years the store moved to larger premises on Stanley Street just off The Wicker on the edge of the city centre, and it was here that I would drool longingly over the extensive range of tackle that I had no possibility of acquiring, before buying a considerably more affordable packet of hooks or a swim-feeder or something along those lines.
As my teens came to pass so, mostly, did my interest in angling, and I probably didn’t set foot in Bennett’s (or any other tackle shop) after that, although my dad continued to fish on occasional trips with his friends that had been organised by the pubs and clubs he frequents, so I would get the odd fishing story every now and then (usually about how he’d caught nothing!),
In 2010 Bennet’s closed for good, partly as a result of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession, but also as result of the extensive flooding that hit parts of Sheffield in 2007, submerging the store in feet of water.
The main entrance to the shop on Stanley Street has been repurposed now, but the smaller entrance on The Wicker remains, gradually fading away and falling into disrepair.
I wish I had a photo of the shop in it’s heyday, but I’m still glad for the one presented below. It still serves as a memory and I suspect it won’t be there for ever.
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.
Taken on 2 August 2020
Steel City Snapper photography 