At the Sheffield end of the Sheffield and Tinsley canal sits the straddle warehouse building at Victoria Quays. Now an office building, it was built around the turn of the 20th century. It’s design was due to there being insufficient space for the buildings around the edge of the canal basin, so the design supported by stilts was constructed.
Office block on stilts Where once cargo unloaded Now there is admin
There are a number of these stone plinths beside the canal near the wharf area. I’m unsure as to their original purpose – perhaps supports for some structures no longer present or something. I’m sure canal afficionados would know.
These have each been decorated with various images of animals – the swan seen here, and also a kingfisher and horses. I’ve a couple of pictures of the horses which I thought might be nice, but there are some odd artefacts on the negatives – possibly a light leak or other camera problem (I shot those using an Olympus Superzoom 160), or maybe a developing issue (I found a bit of loose film leader in the developing tank when removing the film after washing, which I suppose might have caused a problem).
Swan by the canal Graceful as ever it seems But frantic beneath
I’m really happy with how this shot turned out. Again, the vignetting has added some grit to an already nicely gritty scene. I’d just walked beneath the underpass myself and was out the other side when I saw someone going the other way. So I about-turned and grabbed a picture of their silouhetted form as they reached the light at the far side of the tunnel. The 35mm lens focuses pretty slowly for some reason on the F80 so the figure isn’t totally sharp, but I don’t think it matters at all in this picture.
Figures pass below Under the traffic above Echoes of John Foxx
I’ve posted photos of abandoned pubs on this blog on a number of occasions before. So here are a couple more. The Durham Ox and Ye Old Harrow are within a stone’s throw of each other on Cricket Inn Road and Broad Street (these are effectively the same road, but the name changes partway along its length). The Durham Ox is in a sorry state of affairs with most of its roof missing and I suspect it will not be long before it is demolished. The Ye Old Harrow, while looking somewhat rough around the edges with broken windows, boarded up doors, and graffiti, appears to have been sold and will hopefully find new life in some form.
There’s a photograph of the Durham Ok made in 1981 by John Davies, which shows the pub in different times. The city was undergoing a lot of development at that time and over the next couple of dacades as a lot of the heavy industry gradually moved on and the city became more service-led.
No-one drinking now So many pubs are now gone Only shells remain
Although I don’t think it would suit everything, the vignetting caused by using this crop-sensor lens on a 35mm film camera works very nicely on B&W inages I think. It adds a definite mood to the images.
This shot is one of my favourites from the roll. I think it would have worked ok with just the building, but the front of the canal boat really gives it a bit of oomph.
So this lens vignettes Adding mood and grit to shots Centering the eye
This fella was pottering about on the edge of this canal boat and tinkering with the ropes. I have no idea about boats so don’t really know what he was doing – he could have been tidying for all I know.
I used my APS-C 35mm for most of the roll that this picture was taken from. Although designed for a crop-sensor, it has a large enough image circle to work on a full-frame / 35mm camera, albeit with vignetting. The vignetting becomes pronounced as the lens is stopped down, but at wide apertures it’s acceptable (well, to me anyway). The autofocus seemed exceptionally slow on the F80 with this lens though.
Fast lens, slow focus It’s not meant for a camera That shoots 135
Almost a year ago now, I had the idea to try and double-expose an entire roll of film. The idea was to load it in the camera, tighten the roll, and then draw a line on the film where it emerged from the cannister. Then I would close the back, wind the film on until the counter read “1” and commence shooting. After finishing the roll I would then repeat the process, reloading the film so the mark was aligned as before and then shooting all the frames again, hopefully aligned correctly. As this was something of a fun experiment, I decided to use a roll of expired film – some Agfacolor 200 – that I’d acquired with a camera I’d bought. I had no idea how the film had been stored and only a rough guess as to it’s age (which I placed at around 2005 for the original expiry), so it seemed a good choice for this potentially sacrificial mission. On my first outing I shot around six frames, taking care to frame and expose subjects in such a way as to be suitable for double exposures.
Then another set of restrictions hit, followed by another national lockdown.
The camera sat on the shelf, the roll of expired film gradually getting older, and every chance I did have for photography was utilised for stuff I really wanted to do, rather than this potentially fruitless bit of fun. Nontheless, it didn’t slip my mind completely and I always intended to continue when I had more time. So, last weekend, I decided to go shoot the remainder of the roll – ignoring the double-exposure idea for the remaining frames, but with the intent of re-winding the film and double-exposing just the initial six frames I shot last year.
Sadly, in the interim period, my Olympus OM-1n has redeveloped a fault it had before, and which I though was fixed. The problem consists of the shutter locking after making a shot. Normally, the shutter is pressed and the frame advanced, resetting the shutter. Now though, on most frames, it would fire the shutter, but after advancing the film the shutter button would remain locked. The film advance would still work however, allowing another frame to be advanced but also (don’t ask me how) firing off a shot at the same time. It would them be good for another proper exposure. The unintended shots are almost always afflicted by heavy camera shake due to the way they are made when the lever is being advanced and it pretty much means that 50% of the roll gets wasted (although the fault is slightly intermittent and the camera would sometimes work properly for a few frames in a row).
The end result of this is that I had a roll of film (24 +3 exposures) that definitely had a lot of garbage frames and also, possibly, might look like crap anyway becuase of the unknown quality of the expired film itself. As I don’t have the ability to develop C41 film at home – or at least don’t have the chemicals required – I was left with two options if I wanted to see if there were any half-decent pictures on the roll: take it to a lab and pay for processing; or develop it at home using the black and white chemicals I already have. Being a skinflint, I decided on the second option…
A bit of research led me to a number of different develoing methods, many of them involving stand-development, but also some regular development too. I knew that I would be using some Adox Adonal (Rodinal by any other name), so was able to narrow my results somewhat until I found a YouTube video that had some promising looking instructions.
So, following the guidance, I developed my roll of colour C41 film for 15 minutes at 20° in the B&W chems, agitating with gentle inversions for the first minure, and then four inversion at the start of each subsequent full minute. I wasn’t expecting the best results, and was partly expecting the entire roll to be beyond use, but after fixing and washing the negatives I was pleased to see some images, albeit on a very muddy orange looking film base. I dried them for a few hours and then attempted to make some scans.
I wondered if I might have to scan them as colour in order to remove the colour mask, but found that one of the monochrome settings in Silverfast gave me an acceptable, if somewhat flat, result. Importing them into Lightroom I was able to zap them with a bunch of contrast and other tweaks to get much better looking pictures although there was a heavy ammount of grain present – almost like a 3200asa film.
The pictures in this post are the best of the set. While I wouldn’t go out of my way to repeat this process, it’s good to see that it produced salvageable results – results which I’m actually quite happy with.
Oh, and all the double-eposures were complete rubbish and I didn’t even bother to scan them. 😀
Expiry unknown Just what is a man to do? Cross-process of course!
We’ve had a visitor this evening, so just a quick post today. I’ve dug a picture made a couple of years ago during our trip to New York from the archive. It depicts the view north up 10th Avenue from the High Line where it crosses the junction with W 17th Street.
So, New York New York Great place to make some photos Maybe I’ll return?
I like my Holga camera. I find, despite its lo-fi credentials – plastic lens, single shutter speed, being built like a cheap toy etc. – that it can produce some sublime photographs when used to its strengths. It’s notable in my case though, that this generally tends to be where black-and-whitefilm is concerned. While I’ve probably not shot enough colour film with the camera for this to be a fair comparison, I’ve found my non-B&W results to be less impressive.
For this roll, it probably doesn’t help that it’s an expired film with some colour shifts (albeit nothing too bad), and one that I had some trouble scanning to my satisfaction to boot. It might also be argued that the images I made are not my best from a compositional point-of-view either – I’m not sure I was seeking to get the best from the roll, rather than just using it up.
Whatever the case, I don’t think these work as well as they might have done in B&W. I don’t hate them, but the feel a bit “meh” at the same time. I’ll leave it up to anyone who reads this to make up their own minds on the matter.
A plastic piece of junk? Beauty is more than skin deep I think you might find
Steel City Snapper photography 