It’s a bit of a hot day here in the UK today – with temperatures where I live nudging past 30 degrees. That’s not very high compared with other parts of the planet, but it’s high for me and the only consolation is that the humidity isn’t too bad. The forecast is for cooler weather through the rest of the working week, but then it’s predicted that it could soar to potentially record-breaking highs again next weekend.
This big barge of a car was at the Sheffield Steam Rally when I visited. I’m not sure what year this dates from – I would guess late 70s, but I could also be out by some margin thanks to my relative ignorance of such things. It looks nice in a photograph though!
I wrote a few days ago about how I’ve been having difficulties scanning a roll of Velvia 100 that I shot at the steam rally last weekend. I’ve scanned Velvia 50 before and was similarly granted with the same red-cast that I got this time, although on this occasion I’ve also had problems with the actual exposure of the scans – some images looking under-exposed in comparison with the physical transparencies. The under-exposure issue is something that I’ll have to atempt to rectify in Lightroom, but at least I seem to have found a working solution to the red-cast problem.
After carrying out all my post processing in Lightroom, I always open the final image in Photoshop to add a white border. This time, as well as adding the border, I also used the Auto-colour option in the Image menu. I don’t usually find that this does a great job – it tends to be hit and miss on the occasions I’ve used it in the past – but for these Velvia 100 scans it works a treat. Hopefully this will mean I’ll get much more satisfactory images from the roll than I’d feared.
This picture of a slightly rusted Ford Popular has come out very nicely. I used a polariser for most shots on the roll, and it’s really deepened the sky for this photo.
I was wondering what picture to post today, especially as I’ve almost exhausted my current supply of fresh pictures (the ones that are scanned that is – I have a couple of rolls waiting to undergo their analogue to digital transformation, plus three rolls waiting to be developed AND another couple of rolls in cameras with just a handful of frames remaining to be shot).
So, I picked out the two below which have some thematic connection at least.
I’m not sure of the reason – although the humid weather might be a cause – but I’m feeling particularly stressed-out today, a feeling that has increased during the afternoon. Despite this, I did manage to develop a roll of film during my lunchbreak, and also started scanning som 120 Kodak Gold negatives when I finished work (although that process was not going smoothly, so I packed it in before my stress levels increased further).
I’ve not much to say about today’s picture other than this large fibreglass sheep was stood outside a shop I passed when on a day out with my wife last month. It was striking enough to make a picture.
I guess that this is a similar picture to the one I posted yesterday. This one is overexposed though. It’s overexposed because I mistakenly set the 35 RC to an f/2.8 aperture instead of the A (for auto) setting that would allow it to meter correctly in it’s standard shutter-priority mode. As a result this picture (and a couple of others) got far too much light. The other couple I’ve discarded in terms of posting them anywhere but I still quite liked this shot so I did what I could to recover it.
The photo also appeared in Flickr’s Explore section today, which I was a little surprised by. I get pictures selected for Explore on a reasonably regular basis (probably one a month or so) but they are rarely the photos that I think are my best. In fact, they’re often the ones I like the least. I have no idea how Explore selects it’s photos.
Whenever I get a photo in Explore I always get lots of comments from people congratulating me on the achievement. I’m grateful if people like my photos, but these people rarely seem to then venture into my feed to look at the other (arguably better) pictures. It’s almost as though anything not in Explore is somehow sub-par and not worth bothering with.
I don’t tend to look at Explore very often – usually it’s only when one of my pictures is featured and I’m feeling nosey as to how far down the selction it appears. There are a lot of very nice photos featured, but there are also a lot of obvious pictures too, as well as some bizarre choices from time to time. However, if I do find one I really like then I will go and look at the feed of the photographer as sometimes this introduces me to new bodies of work I really enjoy.
I had an appointment this afternoon and didn’t get home until recently, so just a quick post today with a photo of a Tetris-like building in Manchester.
These punchbags were in a room adjacent to one of the leather chairs I posted pictures of yesterday. Although I never saw anyone punching them, each time I went past the three bags would be swinging slightly. Clearly ghosts were to blame. There can’t possibly be any other rational explanation to this mysterious event. 🙂
These two vacant leather chairs were positioned in a couple of the basement rooms of the old warehouse building where the Photo North event took place last month. I liked something about them them enough to take photos.
Back near the start of May I visited the Photo North photography festival in Manchester. Rather foolishly I didn’t allow enough time to enjoy it thoroughly and, to make matters worse, the train there was delayed too. As a result, instead of walking to the location as planned, I ended up grabbing a taxi. The light in the station was really nice as I made my way to the cab rank, and I grabbed a few photos, including the one published here today.
