One more photo from Woodhouse Washlands. This willow tree has suffered some sort of catastrophe at some point, it’s tunk ruptured and folded down to ground level, but such is the tenacity of the tree that it lives on, thriving boughs rising at angles from the fallen section.
I was pleased with the results here. I opened up the aperture to soften the otherwise distracting background, but didn’t have a tripod, so had to carefully hand-hold the shot to maintain focus on the texture in the broken wood.
At the northern end of Woodhouse Washlands, close to the old route of the A57 road, this piece of public art sits beside the footpath. Next time I pass I’ll look to see if there’s a plaque or something with information about it, but I’m presuming its part of the winding equipment from one of the old, now gone, collieries that were nearby at Beighton and Orgreave. It now has the outlines of multiple trout cut into the wheel. I’m not sure if the concrete base denotes part of old mine workings – the sites of extinct shafts are sometimes capped off with large slabs like this.
This hawthorn tree stands beside the River Rother and its twisted trunk made for an appealing photograph. I had to duck beneath the tree’s canopy to get this picture and, as I had no tripod, open up the aperture to get a good shutter speed (and also to throw the river and far bank out of focus).
Back to the black and white stuff (at least for a roll). While taking a walk on the wetlands beside the River Rother not far from home (luckily, Sheffield is a very hilly city, so we’re in no danger of flooding where our house is) I spotted this lone can of Nourishment left atop a fencepost close to the road where I’d parked. I’ve never drank the stuff myself, but I believe it’s some sort of sugary milkshake thing – not sure just how nourishing it is exactly…
I liked how the lone can looked though and made my first shot of the roll.
Ok, maybe not the most autumnal shades here – more a yellow green than fiery shades of red and orange – but it’s probably the last shot from this year’s clutch of seasonal images where the trees still bear foliage. Today, as I type this, most of the leaves have fallen, littering the pavements and roadsides where they’ll release that rich scent of autumn so evokative of this time of year. There are still some late straggling leaves on the limbs of silver birches – some still green in fact – but most trees have revealed the skeletal form of their branches now.
I still have autumnal images yet to come, but they are of the misty, damp, almost monochromatic feel of late autumn as it rolls over into winter.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
The two photographs today show the former Glossop Road Baptist Church, the first with its steeple rising from between autumnal trees in the back gardens of the stone houses (now mostly owned by the University and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals) on Claremont Place.
The church is now owned by Performance Venues, a small group who run this and two other venues (the Octagon and Firth Hall) in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. It is now known as the Drama Studio.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
Early last month, on a bright sunny day, I took a walk around Weston Park, Crookes Vally Park, and the surrounding areas. I took my Yashica Mat 124G loaded with some Lomography Color Negative 100 film, and my Sure Shot Telemax containing some Kodak Gold (the results from which I’ve been posting here over the past week or so).
This was the first time I’ve used the 100asa Lomography Color Negative variant, although I’ve shot several rolls of the 400asa version and liked the results. As is my current process for medium format colour films, these have been home-scanned as linear tiff files with my V550 using Vuescan, and then converted to positives using the free Grain2Pixel Photoshop plug-in. I found that, while the initial conversions looked pretty good, I’ve still had to tweak them to get them looking “right” – or at least as “right” as my own eyes reckon they should be. Grain2Pixel is a very good piece of software, especially given it is free-of-charge, but I do find that I have to remove colour casts sometimes depending on the film I used. The scanner (Epson V550 for medium format / Plustek 8100 for 35mm) can also make a difference too.
Occasionally, certain frames from a roll produce very odd results – oftem at odds with the rest of the shots from the same roll. I tried using the trial version of Negative Lab Pro to compare with the Grain2Pixel results on some of these and it also went slightly crazy – with colour tones looking very odd. All the shots here today were pretty straightforward to deal with though.
Anyway, the three photos today are all from the Lomgraphy 100 roll, shot with the Yashica, and all three made in Weston Park (with the museum visible in the first, the bandstand in the second, and the nearby Univesity Arts Tower in the third). Autum was underway, but the trees still held onto most of their leaves and a good amount of green at this point.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
It’s Friday. Work is done for the week, so time for a shower and some relaxation (ha!). Maybe catch the final episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor and drink a beer.
Not that this photo has anything to do with any of that whatsoever. I just liked it for today’s post and didn’t really have much else to say. 🙂
Most disabled-parking spaces are marked with the usual yellow paint staight onto the pavement. This one, however, looks like a sprite from a 1980s videogame, which is cool. 🙂
Today I present a photo of the University of Sheffield Student’s Union building…
…and a literal stone’s throw away (as can be seen by the looming Hick’s Building looming in the background), and also conveniently for the students, a bar…
Steel City Snapper photography 