Tucked away from the glasshouse in Sheffield Botanical Gardens sits the Grade II listed bear pit. The pit was constructed in 1836 to house a black bear and, later, two brown bears. Local legend has it the a child fell into the pit and was killed in 1870. It is said to be one of the finest surviving bear pits in the country thanks to it being preserved by it’s later use as a gigantic compost pit!
There is still a bear in the pit, although this one is made of rusty steel, its colour perhaps not dissimilar to a real bear’s fur.
I took a trip to Manchester today to visit the Photo North exhibition. It’s been quite a tiring day.
The exhibition was good, but my planning was not, and it would have been much better had I booked earlier / later trains for the outbound and return journeys as, as it stood, I felt somewhat rushed, especially when the train in the morning was delayed by a half hour! Oh well, I still visited and I managed to attend the screening of a documentary on Picture Post magazine, which was interesting and enjoyable.
I shot about half a roll of film while out – using my Olympus 35RC, a great little camera, but one I’ve not used for a while – but when I came out of the exhibition the weather had changed from bright contrasty sunshine to flat grey conditions, so I held off shooting more. I have another trip to Manchester planned in a month or two’s time, so hope to make more photos then.
In the meantime, and completely unrelated to the rest of the post, here are four photos of Sheffield Botanical Gardens that I scanned this week.
On a wall beside the canal towpath, not far from Victoria Quays, is painted this piece of artwork. I though it would make a good photograph, but didn’t know what it represented.
Googling the words revealed them to be part of a folk song about a highwayman named Spence Broughton. In February 1791 Broughton, and his accomplice John Oxley, robbed the Sheffield to Rotherham mail coach as it travelled across Attercliffe Common. Suposedly the only item of value they were able to get away with was a French bill of exchange with a value of £123, which they had difficulty in attempting to fence. Oxley was later arrested for his part in another robbery and, fearing for his freedom, in October of that year Broughton sought help from another criminal, Thomas Shaw, in London. Unfortunately for Broughton, he was recognised and arrested by the police and Oxley and Shaw both gave testimony against him, although Oxley was later able to break loose and make his escape.
Spence Broughton was found guilty in York assizes and sentenced to be hanged. The following April, after the execution, the body of Broughton was transported back to the scene of the crime on Attercliffe Common and placed in a gibbet. This attracted large crowds – supposedly 40,000 people – and the landlord of the nearby Arrow pub claimed that he was able to make a fortune from the passing trade. Broughton’s boy was to ramain in the gibbet for the next 36 years!
Nearby Broughton Lane is alleged to be named after the criminal, although this is disputed by historians.
It’s fascinating what a walk along the canal can reveal.
I’ve aquired some more expired film, some of past it’s best date by quite some margin – the oldest roll being the Ilford FP3 which is dated 1970! Now, normally I would stay away from old film such as this, but this didn’t cost me too much and I thought it might make for an interesting series of blog posts as I shoot the stuff and present the results here.
For the curious, the batch includes the following (in chronological order – oldest to newest):
1 x Ilford FP3 – 1970
1 x Ilford FP4 – 1981
4 x Ilford HP5 – 1982
1 x Kodacolor VR 400 – 1989
5 x Kodak Vericolor HC – 1991
1 x Ilford FP4 – 1993
1 x Kodak Vericolor VPL – No date on packaging, but I expect 1980s / 90s
1 x Kodak Tmax 200 – No date on packaging, but again probably 1980s / 90s (it was manufactured from 1986 I believe)
1 x Polaroid Polachrome – No date on packaging, but sometime after 1983 which is when it was introduced.
1 x Polaroid Polapan – No date on packaging, but sometime after 1983 which is when it was introduced.
1 x Polaroid Polablue – No date on packaging, but sometime after 1983 which is when it was introduced.
My plan is to try and shoot at least a roll of this each month. The HP5 and Vericolor both have the advantage of there being multiple rolls so I can shoot one and then re-assess exposure times for the remaining film. All the others are something of a crapshoot though, so I’ll be using the 1-stop of overexposure per decade of expiry rule for the colour stuff, and probably the same but with just half as much overexposure for the B&W. I’ve not decided on what chemicals I’ll use to develop the B&W (the colour will go to the lab), but probably not my expensive DD-X. Maybe Adox Adonal, but we’ll see.
The Polaroid film is possibly the most interesting of the lot – each roll comes with it’s own developing cartridge (and the film needs to be processed in a dedicated Autoprocessor device), so I’m looking forward to seeing how that stuff turns out.
It may be that the whole lot is an absolute waste of my time and effort, but I’m going to aim for optimism and, at the very least, there will be some blog posts falling off the back of the experience.
The oldest roll of expired film I’ve shot previously was some Kodacolor Gold 200 which had expired in 1989. While that showed definite signs of deterioration (odd colours and a mottled appearance) I was quite taken by the results, and I managed to win a prize in Expired Film Day from one of the shots. You can see some of those results here. I still have another roll of that same film in the feezer too.
As this post has been about expired film that I plan to shoot, here’s a photo made on some expired film that I did shoot five years ago. That roll was over twenty years expired and still produced lovely images, including this one.
Nikon F70, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & Kodak Tmax 100 (expired 1994 – shot at 50asa and developed for box speed).
So, it’s Star Wars day today, so it seemed apt to publish a photo aligned with that theme. Not that I have many Star Wars related photographs – and even fewer shot on film (two or three at a stretch) – but this one certainly fits the bill.
These two Barcelona manequins must be clones given the headgear they’re wearing. And, yes, that is Darth Vader in a t-shirt lurking in the background…
I thought I’d lump these two photos together in today’s post. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, both shots were made while I walked along the towpath beside the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal, heading back towards Victoria Quays, so there is a connection there.
Secondly, there is (to my eye at least) a visual connection in the shape of the piece of sky in the railway bridge picture, and the chimney in the second shot. It almost feels like, if you were to overlay them that they might somehow intersect and fit together. Obviously it wouldn’t be a perfect fit, but compositions definitely have a synchronicity about them, a kind of positive / negative relationship.
I’ve been tasked with going out to fetch ice-creams, so I don’t have much time to type a post today. I’ve been scanning more negatives which has also taken up time, although they will at least bear some fruit for the blog at some point (there are some nice ones, I think).
Another mini-batch of photographs shot during a trip to Barcelona almost three years ago now. Again, these are all recent re-scans, converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This photo was taken the same day as the canal pictues that I posted here yesterday. Conisbrough is a mile or two down river from Mexborough and there is a nice railway viaduct there which spans the River Don. It was my intention to try and get a photo of the viaduct while I was in the area but, as it was the first time I’d visited and I’d not really planed a route, I ended up in the wrong place with quite a long detour if I intended to reach a spot where I could access the viaduct.
So, instead, I drove back the way I’d come and decided to take a few pictures of the castle. I shot a few frames on the expired TruPrint FG+ with my F80, and a few more with the Olympus XA3 which was, as usual, in my coat pocket. I had a polariser fitted to the 50mm lens on the F80 and, combined with the expired film, it resulted in some wildly vivid colours. I’ve actually toned down the blue in the sky for the shot posted here. The colours were reminiscent of an old postcard of the sort that used to be sold when I was little, with vivid, almost painterly tones.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & TruPrint FG+ (expired 2005). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I’m not actually sure if this stretch of canal has a name. It’s a navigable route that runs beside the River Don at Mexborough, presumably because the river itself is not suitable passage in this area. The canal diverts from the Don just upstream of Mexborough and then re-joins it further along, just before the River Dearne also merges with the flow.
I’d visited Mexborough because I believed therewas a camera store in town, but when I got there the address appeared to be closed. Not wanting to waste the trip I had a wander around and took a few photos. The three here today are all taken close to one another from the canal towpath.
Although all three shots have been converted with the same settings, the first has a different tonality to the others. I’m not sure if this is a factor of the Negative Lab Pro processing in some way, or if it’s down to the camera’s metering of the scene perhaps.
I like all three of the photographs, but they probably would have been much better on non-expired film.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & TruPrint FG+ (expired 2005). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
