Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 18 February 2024
Catchwater drain
Month: March 2024
Farmyard and cooling towers
I have a batch of photos I made during a visit to the countryside surrounding the West Burton power stations, and will be posting some over the next few days.
These two seemed to work well as a mini set though, with a view of the distant cooling towers serving as the backdrop to a farm near Sturton le Steeple.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 18 February 2024
Mud
I went for another hike today, picking a circular route from the Ordnance Survey app that looked like it could be interesting. The full route was around seven or eight miles. I didn’t make it that far though…
I’ll post more about it in a future post but, suffice to say, it’s not a route to take when it’s been raining. The entire part of the walk I managed was claggy with mud, in some places impassable without wellies, and I ended up with wet feet. On a positive note, the hiking clothing I’ve bought recently held up nicely, even when it rained.
The picture below was from another outing a few weeks ago. The ground was muddy in places then too, but not like today!
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 18 February 2024
Battling the storms of a new PC
I got a new PC this week. It’s not brand new – it’s my son’s old PC – but it’s still vastly more powerful than my old machine. It has the luxury of a solid-state drive being installed meaning it boots up fast and the applications I use are similarly speedy to get going. I swapped out the secondary storage drive for a larger capacity model, so I now have a lot of room to add more pictures too.
It’s not all smooth sailing though. I have my files backed up via a cloud service and it’s taken days to download all the files back onto the new machine. I’ve also had headaches getting Lightroom to play nicely with the catalog I exported from the old machine and, while I have my scanning software installed, as well as Negative Lab Pro, I’m having problems getting Epson Scan to work. A lot of people don’t seem to like Epson Scan very much, but I’ve always found it very effective when scanning B&W medium and large format negatives, so I would like to get it working if possible. I can fall back on Vuescan (which I use for scanning colour negatives and slide film anyway) and do the inversions in Negative Lab Pro, which I’ve tried and had good results, but it means getting used to a different workflow. I’m not sure if I can scan multiple negatives in a batch with Vuescan either (although I haven’t looked into it properly yet).
Anyway, hopefully the storm-clouds of getting everything configured to my needs will soon thin and I can enjoy the benefits of a faster PC.
A rare foray into digital pictures for the blog today, with the shot below coming from my Ricoh GR III. These sorts of clouds are very rare hereabouts, so I had to grab a picture when I saw them. I thought we might be in for a huge storm, but they just drifted by without much fuss in the end.
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 7 November 2023
Brick barn
I’m claiming this to be a barn, but I really don’t know. I guess, looking at the doors (and also at the taped -electric? – fence) that it could be also be a stable or something?
What it definitely is, is photogenic. Old, weathered, buildings usually are.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 18 February 2024
Bypass graffiti
Another short post today. I have been out shooting a lot of new photos though! I’ve decided that I’m going to do a lot more hiking this year where the purpose is the walk as much as the photography. I plan on writing about these hikes and illustrating the posts with pictures I made during the outing. I’ve got pictures from three walks in various stages of development, scanning, and publishing, so they will be appearing on here at some point. More about this when I have the first post ready to go!
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 11 February 2024
Electric Washlands
I’ve photographed these power lines on a number of occasions now. It doesn’t take much for me to press the shutter on a pylon in any case, but there’s something about the structures crossing Woodhouse Washlands that draws me to them when I pass with a camera.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 11 February 2024
Back beneath the bypass viaduct
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 11 February 2024
Writer’s block
I’ve been struggling to find things to write the past week or so. Or, in some cases, I’ve had something to write, but not the time to do so. Either way, a lot of my posts of late have been pretty short. This has happened before (and my posts are rarely particularly verbose anyway), so I expect the situation will self-correct at some point. I guess it’s just a side-effect of daily posting.
Anyway, today is not really any different, so here’s a picture of a tree for no reason at all. 🙂
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 11 February 2024
A line of trees
Another shot made possible by having the XA3 in my coat pocket. I did have my Fujica GW690 with me on the day, but that had already greedily eaten all my 120 film in it’s limited eight-shot stomach. So the XA3 came to the rescue for any other pictures I spotted.
I honestly didn’t know if this would be a nothing shot at the time I took it. I spent a bit of effort to make sure the trees all had separation (as much as possible, at least – there’s a background tree hiding behind one of the foreground ones), but the scene didn’t look all that inspiring to the naked eye. However, seeing it appear in black and white, I realise what it was that had caught my eye, and it’s one of the best pictures from the day. There’s something about the way a camera renders a scene that can make it different, and more interesting, than what was seen with the naked eye. The opposite can be true as well, of course, but in this case the camera captured it better.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 27 January 2024
Steel City Snapper photography 