Another photo of the Derbyshire County Council complex at Matlock. There’s a very dark and moody look to the whole set, a combination, I think, of the metering on the XA3 trying to find the right exposure between scenes that consist of dark buildings and trees and much brighter foggy skies, and also my use of this roll of almost 20-years expired Tri-X Pan. Pushing the film a stop (while shooting at the 400asa box speed) to compensate for its age has also increased the contrast and grain. It’s a look I’m not unhappy with though.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
The dome in the background of this picture is part of the Derbyshire County Council buildings in Matlock. They stand on the hillside above the town centre and there is some interesting architecture present. The photos on the blog in the coming days will show more views of the place.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
The photo today shows a scene in the centre of Matlock that I snapped when we visited the Christmas market last month. I liked the way the far street rose up the hill into the distance, the wet road catching the dull light nicely. The building and the tree frame the shot, and the couple and the lamppost add some interest. At the upper left can be seen a clock tower. That was close to where we had parked our car and there will be more photos of that building to come over the next few days.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
I have to pick one of my sons up from college today, so I won’t have time to write the blog later (well, I will, but I’ll probably want to do other stuff instead :)). So today it’s a quick and somewhat random post with a picture of the back of the bowling green pavillion that featured in testerday’s post. It was the ripples on the water and the birds on the roof that caught my eye but it’s not much of a shot if I’m honest. Look at me, treating you all with such treasures! 😀
The truth is that I’ve still got most of this roll of film still to scan and am limited on shots to pick until I get on with that. The roll also seems to have some sort of marks on a lot of the frames. At first I thought they were drying marks, but they don’t really correspond to other drying marks I’ve seen. I’m now wondering if it’s something else – maybe I didn’t let the film defrost before loading it and caused condensation or something? Or perhaps it’s just an artefact of the film being almost twenty-years past it’s use-by date. Luckily I’ve been able to photoshop out the worst of it, including this photo.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
The weekend befoe Christmas, we went to visit a Christmas market in the town of Matlock – about a half-hour’s drive away. My eldest and his girlfriend came along and, despite it being a somewhat gloomy day (with heavy fog on the hills), and the market not being as big as we expected, we had a nice few hours wandering around, topped off with some takeaway fish and chips.
I took my XA3 in my coat pocket and managed to grab a number of pictures in the misty winter conditions, including this one of the bowling green in the park where the market was taking place. No-one was out playng bowls on the day.
I remember Crown Green Bowls being a regular fixture on TV when I was younger, although I never had any interest in it, but I’m not sure if it’s still shown these days – maybe on a dedicated sports channel I suppose? I’ve only played the game (which you can find described here) on a few occasions and, as I and my friends were young and foolish at the time, I recall it mainly involved us mischieviously larking about trying to collide with other player’s bowls in the middle of the green than playing it properly.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Beside the Don Valley Centertainment complex – which houses a multiplex, bowling alley & arcade, kid’s play area, and a selction of restaurants – are industrial streets. This is the east-end of the city where, in it’s industial heyday, the bulk of the steel industry resided. There are still steelworks in the area, and more as you head down river towards Tinsley and Templeborough, but much of it has now become history.
I’m not sure what the building in today’s picture used to house – I’m sure my dad would know, and I’ll ask him next time I see him – but it’s now the home of a scaffolding hire and sales business.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
I made this picture back in late November I think – it’s on a roll that was shot over the space of a few weeks with my Olympus XA3, which I’d been keeping in my coat pocket. It was taken from the car-park across the road from these buildings on the day I went into town for one of my attempts to get my laptop rebuilt. I was heading towards the stairwell when I noticed the shot and liked the way the buildings stoof against the sky with the central tower flanked by the smaller buildings on either side.
The film was a roll of expired Tri-X dating back to around 2003. I’ve shot a few rolls of this and found that it likes an extra stop of exposure. For the previous rolls I just exposed it at 200asa and then developed it normally, but as the weather was a little gloomy on the day this roll was loaded, I decided to keep the extra stop of speed and push it a stop in development instead. I’m quite happy with the results. The grain is quite pronounced, but I’m not afraid of a bit of grain.
The worst thing about this film is how much the negatives curl when developed. Not only do they coil up like a spring, there is also heavy bow to the film along its full length. This made cutting and sleeving the negatives troublesome, but this was not nearly as problematic as trying to get them into the negative holder to be scanned. The Plustek holders are pretty good at keeping negatives flat – I doubt I would have gotten anywhere with my Epson holders – but you still need to get them in and aligned before it can be closed to hold them in place. Somehow I managed it though, although I’ve only scanned two strips so far.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
This small white building is situated in the small town of Eckington. It’s opposite the road that leads to Chesterfield and often catches my eye when I’m driving back from there. In the right light, it’s white painted walls really light up.
I believe the building is a church – St. Luke’s Mission Church – although I think it is closed now – it certainly has a disused air about it, and the billboard beside the path has clearly seen no messages posted for some time. Looking at the Google StreetView historical photos it looks like it might have been disused for a decade or more, although it only looks like the grounds have become more overgrown over the past few years.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
It’s the last day of the year, so time for a roundup of my favourite photos from each month.
January
I remember on the day we got this snow that I felt the urge to go out and make photographs, but also feeling quite cosy inside our warm home. My wife had a letter that needed to be posted though, so I went out. I wasn’t sure what camera to take, especially given the large, heavy flakes of wet snow that were falling, so in the end decided on the Holga. It’s plastic body and lack of any delicate components was a pretty safe choice given the conditions, but more than that, it’s cheap plastic lens once more produced a set of images that had a distinctive look that I felt really suited the day.
February
Back in mid-february on a cold and frosty day. remnants of snow still on the ground in many places, I went for a good long walk. I shot two-and-a-half rolls of film that day with the Yashica Mat 124G and my Canon Sure Shot Telemax. There are several that I like, but this one is my favourite – the power-lines, wonky fence, and potholed farm-track adding character to the scene.
March
March is a hard month to choose a photo from as there are several that I really like – I must’ve gotten out with the camera quite a lot that month (and I think it was when the winter Covid restrictions were lifted, allowing me to travel further afield again). The shot I’ve chosen is packed full of atmosphere, but the grainyness was unintentional. Most of the frames on the roll show far less grain but a couple – mainly shots with a lot of low-contrast fog – really emphasise it. I’m not sure if it’s a factor of the scanning or post-processing or a combination of things, but in this image I think it really benefits the picture.
April
In April the Covid restrictions were loosened to allow people to meet up outddors, so I went out for walks with my dad on a number of occasions, mostly taking a long looping path near to where he lives that traverses what used to be Orgreave pit and coking plant – the one that gained infamy as the site of the “Battle of Orgreave” during the miner’s strike in 1984. The area is now an area of parkland, gradually taking on natural growth as the years pass by, but the area to the north-west is now the site of the Waverley housing estate. This estage has been developing over the past decade or more now and is pretty big – effectively a district in itself, and new homes are still being constructed. This photo shows some of the work that was ongoing back in the spring, and I liked the “New Topographics” feel of the scene.
May
The firs half of 2021 was definitely top-loaded with photographs – my Lightroom catalogue has 232 images from May alone – a volume of output which would slip later in the year – but more on that when we get there… Again, there are many photo’s I could have picked from this month, but this one reminds me of the day it was taken most of all. You can read the full story here, but to say it was a relief when I got to the point when this picture was made cannot be understated.
June
The image here was made at the country park at Pleasley. As with Orgreave (mentioned above) this is another former coal mining area reclaimed to nature and outdoor pursuits. In this case though the mine workings have also been preserved as a museum. While I didn’t have time to visit the museum, I wandered around the park and made a number of photographs, including this one.
July
While I mostly shoot film, I do still have my old Nikon D3200 DSLR and a few lenses knocking around. One of the lenses is the 35mm f/1.8 DX. This is designed for use on crop-sensor cameras, but I’d read that it would also work on full-frame cameras with some mild-ish vignetting if the aperture is opened up. As the lens is small, light, and very sharp, I decided to give it a go with my Nikon F80 film camera. The vignetting was noticeable, but not distracting and actually gave a nice feel to a lot of the images. The main downside was that the auto-focus was very slow on the F80 for some reason, meaning a few shots were a little soft. This was my favorite image from the set.
August
August’s film photographs are mostly from three trips – one to a steam-rally in Cheshire, one to Bakewell in the Peak District with my wife, and another trip with my wife to London. Looking at the photos in Lightroom against the ones on Flickr there are loads of shots that I never uploaded. This one I did though, and it’s here as a reminder of the day we visited Notting Hill to see the Portobello Road market. The market was notable by the fact that it was very underpopulated on the day in question – this is what you get for visiting during a pandemic I suppose.
September
Again, the only film photos from this month are from a couple of day trips, this time to Mablethorpe and to another steam rally in Cheshire (I visited both these steam rallies as the ones close to home had been cancelled this year, but also because a bunch of folks from an online photography forum I’m a maber of were atending too). This shot was from my annual day-trip to Mablethorpe though. The ice cream wasn’t intended to be offset, but I forgot about parallax when focussing on close objects (it was held at arm’s length). In the end it was a happy accident though as I quite like the way it is framed.
October
So, we reach October and the first month where I made no film photographs at all. The reason was that we had a new kitchen fitted in September and them moved straight into having the whole upstairs of the house re-decorated and re-carpeted. This meant that not only were most of my cameras boxed up while we shifted furniture in and out of rooms, but that when I did have the opportunity to go out and do some photography, I was too tired to make the effort. I did not enjoy October very much.
November
And if October was bad, November was the worst. On the 13th our young cat, Stan, was hit by a car and lost his life. Most of my posts in November following this sad event were about my grief over his loss and were the first time that I posted digital photos on here. I found that speaking about how I felt – literally pouting out what was on my mind – was helpful and therapeutic. I did take a few film photos at the start and very end of the month though and the one below is the one I like best. Perhaps its somewhat melancholy air suits the month in which it was made.
December
And so we reach the final month of 2021. Again, not many photographs were made this month and, of the ones that were, I still have a lot of them to either upload or even develop yet, so they won’t see the light of the blog until 2022. Of the ones I did upload though, this shot of a wet rhododendron bush in the back garden is the one I like best.
Well that’s the roundup done for another year. I hope that 2022 brings better times for the world and that we can start to come out of the pandemic. Whatever may happen though, I wish you all a very happy new year. See you in 2022!
I’ve been out all day today and haven’t had chance to upload a photo to Flickr, and I now don’t have much time to write today’s blog post either (mostly because I’m hungry and my belly is demanding precedence…). It’s been a very foggy day today though, so I’ve dug out an old foggy day photo that I don’t think I’ve posted here before (I hope).
It was shot on a roll of Rollei Retro 400s which, despite me shooting it at the advertised box speed of 400asa, came out very underexposed. Some of the shots were pretty much ruined, but a few – like this one – I liked. This is the original scan from my V550 flatbed, so it’s a bit mushier than usual.
Olympus OM-1, Rollei Retro 400s. Lab developed in Xtol.
