Of all the photos I took while in Venice, I think this might be my favourite. It’s the view east to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and it just looks so wonderfully Venetian. It has the lagoon, the architecture, gondolas and moorings, and even some of those smart looking wooden speedboats (which always remind me of the chase sequence from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – even though that was filmed in London’s docklands area), and just enough people to add interest but not make it look too crowded..
I was very happy when this one came off the scanner.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I sometimes find that my eye sees photographs without always realising what is in the frame. Sometimes, when I see the result, I’ll notice that someone was staring at me intently without me having realised at the time. Sometimes there will be something in the scene that I didn’t want.
It’s not that Im not paying attention – I am! I think it’s more that sometimes my brain will focus on some element that I think will make a good photograph while filtering out certain elements. The things I mentally remove don’t usually spoil the resulting picture, but I do sometimes wonder how on earth I didn’t spot them at the time.
The picture today is a case in point. I spotted this intrument (a double-bass?) partially obsured by foliage and the edge of a marquee while musicians played beside the Grand Canal in Venice. I saw the instrument, the leaves, the white fabric, and the woman with the violin, but somehow completely missed the fact that someone was stood playing the doble-bass! Perhaps they were not playing their part when I took the photo and the bow was still, but I still failed to notice the peson’s legs just behind.
I wonder if, had I been alone when taking the shot, and not with my wife, whether I would have noticed more? I always find that taking photos when I’m not alone is a much more difficult prospect as I’m concious of not being selfish and going to the same lengths I might normally take when getting a photograph.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I’m not quite finished with the Venice pictures (although there are maybe only a couple more to come) and here are a trio I took in St. Mark’s Square showing the basilica and campanile.
I will once again heartily recommend the Olympus Trip 35 for this sort of visit. It’s the perfect film camera for this type of touristy scenery and the results are excellent.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
As promised yesterday, here are the two large format photographs of Mother Cap, a gristone outcrop on the moorland above Hathersage. Looking at them closely, both have focusing issues, and I’ll leave the yellow filter off the lens until after the shot is composed and focused in future as it did make it more difficult to view the scene, but they both look fine if you don’t investigate them too closely.
I had a day off work yesterday and decided that I would take my Chamonix 045N-1 for a second outing. After my initial test a couple of weeks or so back, I felt confident enough to take a slightly longer trip out into the Peak District. By some miracle, the weather was actually good too – warm, with plenty of sunshine and cloud. There was a risk of rain predicted but not until later in the day.
My initial plan had been to visit a few locations but, in the end, I only went to a single spot as I soon discovered that, despite everything else, there was still sand in the gears (not literally!).
I drove out to Surprise View car park in order to photograph Mother Cap, a large gritstone outcrop, and then to photograph the birch woodland in the same area. Although Mother Cap isnt too far from the car park, it is quite a bit higher and the footpath requires some scrambling over rocks – nothing too challenging, but still enough to work up a sweat when you’re carrying a big tripod and a heavy backpack.
The first two shots went well, I thought, although I found focusing a little difficult because I had fitted a yellow filter to the lens (note to self, focus before fitting the filter enxt time). As it turned out, I managed to get some camera shake on the first shot, probably because the tripod was stood on springy heather covered ground and wasn’t stable enough.
The next shot was taken on firmer ground but the issues with the filter meant that there are a few minor focusing problems where I hadn’t set the camera movements as well as I might. It was at this point that my cable release also broke, the threading on the end somehow coming undone slightly, so the next shot had to be taken using the shutter release on the lens without the benefit of the cable. It was at 1/60sec though, so it came out ok. I’ll post these two pictures tomorrow.
The final shot I took was of the birch woodland. This time the camera was placed in a stable spot, and I managed to finagle the cable release enough that it functioned properly again (although I’ll be using a different one in future AND taking a spare). Despite this, a new problem came to bear…
Because it was a warm day with hot sunshine, and because I was quite hot from hiking around with my gear, I now found that beiing under the darkcloth for more than about ten seconds resulted in my spectacles completely steaming up, rendering any attempt to focus of check the scene nigh on impossible (and made even more difficult by the yellow filter).
I did my best with it, but it wasn’t good enough, and the resultant image has a number of problems with soft focus in various parts of te scene. Thankfully it’s not terrible, but it’s not what I wanted. I do like the resulting picture though and it might be worth another visit to try and get a technically better result.
Here it is. It probably looks fine on a small screen, but it loses a lot of sharpness when viewed large.
I was going to write about today’s trip out in today’s blog but my computer is being a complete dick once again and preventing me from doing even the most basic of tasks in a timely fashion, so now I’m in a bad mood and not feeling like writing anything. I’m very sorry.
So here’s a picture of a bright red bus at a bus station. I feel like getting on that bus and just letting it take me away someewhere.
Maybe I’ll be allowed to post something better tomorrow but you’d better ask my computer though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Another Venetian church, this time San Giacomo di Rialto which is supposedly the oldest chuch in the city, dating back to the year 421, although this may not be the case.
The clock seen in the picture is from the 16th century and is apparently considered a standing joke due to its inacuracy.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I’ve been out for a visit to the seaside with my wife today, which has been nice, but tiring. I shot almost a full roll of HP5+ with my Olympus OM-1N while there, so once I finish the final few frames, I’ll get that developed and scanned. I’m currently at one of those points where I have a decent backlog of images to upload (and even scan), so it might be a while before they apear here on the blog.
Here’s another shot from Venice with a very busy canal.
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Another photograph of a Venetian canal, but one where I took two photographs of the same scene – one with my Olympus Trip 35mm film camera, the other with my Ricoh GR III diigtal APS C compact.
I like both pictures. The the digital shot certainly has the edge in terms of resolution and the 28mm lens gives a different POV (as well as being in a different orientation), but I think I prefer the colours from the film shot. They’re less contrasty and rich, but feel more like what I saw on the day (although this is probably subjective).
Which do you prefer, and why?
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
