It’s extremely hot anf muggy here today. Despite having a fan blowing air all day, working hasn’t been much fun. As a result, I’m going to keep it short today so I can enjoy the bliss of a cool shower!
A couple of photographs of Trafalgar Warehouse near Sheffield city centre, a former warehouse building dating to the1930s which now serves as an events venue (presumably closed at present due to the pandemic).
There are 136 glass blocks visible in this next picture, in case anyone is remotely interested. 🙂
14 June was the day before the reopening of non-essential retail stores in the UK. Signs were apparent in windows, both those of retailers re-opening on the 15th, and also those who would remain closed for now. Debenhams, a UK department store, was one of those re-opening it’s doors and there was a sign in the window of it’s cafe area (although I don’t think that this part of the store will resume business just yet).
Elsewhere, there are still signs of the contruction project to renovate and re-develop part of the town centre into a new “retail quarter”. I wonder how the impact of the pandemic will affect the plan, particularly if retail is slow to return to previous levels (if it ever fully recovers)?
While walking around the eerily empty town centre a couple of weeks back, my route took me behing the town hall building. There I noticed a door which looked like it might make for an interesting photograph. The door itself is labled “Town Hall” via a plaque afixed to the wood, but carved into the masonery on the lintel above the entrance is the word “Disinfectants”. In all my years of living here in Sheffield, I’ve never noticed this before.
A quick bit of searching online reveals that this dates back to the Victorian period and formed part of a strategy to rid the city of the disease and vermin which would have been rife in some of the slum conditions that existed at the time in industrial cities. As the poorest members of society would not be able to afford the cost of purchasing disinfectants themselves, these would be given out by the local authority via this entrance to the town hall building.
I had wondered if I might have come to the end of this series of pandemic-related photographs given the relaxing of the lockdown here in the UK, but I’ve got a few new images of scenes in the new, post-lockdown world.
The weekend before last was the final one before non-essential retail was allowed to re-open on the 15 June, so I took a trip up town to see how things looked before the shops returned to life.
The town centre was largely empty, with the largest groups of people I noticed being construction workers and homeless folks. It was a little eerie and the weather – dank and grey – felt more akin to a winter’s morning than one approaching the summer solstice. There were pigeons in the Peace Gardens and I wondered if they’ve been forced to work harder for their dinners given the lack of humans feeding them or dropping scraps?
The city has been given new signage outside some shops (although it seemed somewhat hit and miss as to which shops did – it certainly wasn’t all of them), and benches and the like feature signs requesting they not be used, or to keep your distance from others.
I’ve made a couple more trips since this one (and still have more pandemic-related photos from this roll yet to upload), so I guess this series will continue for a while yet.
My favourite photographer’s quote originates from Garry Winogrand: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed“.
This quote pretty much encompasses why I make many of my photographs. I’ll see something, be it a scene or an object, and I’ll be inspired to see how my camera will render it as an image. How will the lens make it look?; What if I use a different aperture or focal length?; What about the film I’m using – how will it render the contrast / grain / light / colour? etc.
I’ll still make pictures of more obvious, traditional compositions, but even then the impulse is still the same – how will it look as a photograph? It means that pretty much anything might be a suitable subject for a photograph to be made, whether a beautiful landscape, or a dirty, rainwater-filled plastic cup left on a window-ledge after someone’s night out. Anything can catch my eye. Given that all my photos are made with an audience-of-one in mind – namely myeself – everything is good. I’m sure that some people will wonder what the hell was I thinking when I raised the camera to my eye, but all that needs to be understood is that I saw a photograph that, to me, was worth creating.
Today’s photgraph falls firmly into this remit. The first shot on a roll of HP5+ I shot last weekend, depicting the box of “wonky veg” that was sat in the window of a ground-floor flat close to where I’d parked my car. The rising-sun motif, the grain of the wood, the Pepsi can, and the slightly dirty window all caught my attention.
This is the first roll of film I’ve pushed and then home-developed, and the Ilfotec DD-X has done a great job.
Another dip into my (recent-ish) archive with a shot taken at the start of the year which I’d not published on Flickr until a couple of days ago. It shows a weather-worn fencepost beside one of the footpaths near Baslow Edge. Not sure why I didn’t publish it before – I possibly had a surplus of images to upload or something.
I ventured up town again today and finished the roll of HP5+ in my recently acquired OM-2. I felt much more inspired than I did on yesterday’s outing, although I’m still not convinced I have anything great to show for my efforts. I think that, as this has been my first roll through this camera, that I’m subconsciously treating it as a “test” roll and as such didn’t want to invest too much effort in the photos in case there’s an issue with the camera (not that I have any reason to think there might be). Anyway, the roll is shot now and I’ll hopefully get it developed tomorrow.
I had the day off work today and had planned a trip out into the countryside. Alas, the weather had other plans and the day was one of those with a solid sheet of blank grey sky. To make matters worse it also kept raining. Not proper, people-with-umbrellas rain though, but the fine, almost mist-like, rain that just hangs about in the air and gets onto every surface – especially cameras and the front elements of lenses!
So I changed my plans and drove into town instead. Today would be my first trip into the city centre since the non-essential retailers were allowed to open their stores last Monday (and only the second time since lockdown began in March!). Although early, I’d expected more people and traffic that there was – having seen pictures of crowded streets and shops in the media, I thought there might be something similar afoot – but there were very few people about. More than my previous, pre-shops-re-opening visit, but still not many – not even many people travelling into work. The largest groups of workers I saw were construction workers, of whom there were a significant number apparent around town.
Today’s trip was different to the last though in one simple way – I was uninspired. Whereas on my previous visit last weekend I saw photographs everywhere, today I saw few, and the ones I made (I shot around half a 36 exposure roll of HP5+) felt for the sake of it rather than anything I expect to be good when they are developed. Usually, shooting a full roll of film is no problems, but today I left defeated.
It was the first outing for my newly acquired Olympus OM-2 too and perhaps getting to grips with the slightly different fuctionality when compared to my familiar OM-1, had an impact on my photograph making. I’m hoping I might get to finish the roll over the weekend (and I have an extra day off on Monday too) and that the next outing will see me in better spirits.
Today’s photographs are from the dust-spotted Fomapan roll of doom that I’ve spoken about in recent posts. It took me ages to get rid of all the speckles, so I hope someone likes them. 🙂
Yashica Mat 124G & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
I mentioned yesterday how I’d spent ages dust-spotting some Fomapan 100 negatives. A number of people replied to the post, so I thought I’d give a bit of a follow-up today.
I’ve now completed the chore. Well, on the photos I intend to upload, at least. It was an absolute pain in the backside. It would seem that I’d clear all the spots, only to then notice just as many secondary spots, and each image took a good half-an-hour at least of clicking away to remove them – and even then I’m sure there are many that I’ve missed. But I think I’d gone past caring by that point!
As I’ve not had the same problems with dust spots on any other rolls recently (I always dust the work area carefully before scanning and, while some dust always sneaks in, I rarely get lots of it), I began to wonder if it was something to do with the either the film specifically, or perhaps my development. All my home developed films have been processed in Ilfotec DD-X, then Ilford stop-bath and rapid fixer. The developer is always freshly prepped for a one-shot use and, while the stop-bath and fixer get re-used, they should both be fine for a little while yet (they’ve had around 10 rolls through them). A roll of HP5+ that was developed after the roll of Fomapan shows no signs of the same problem.
An example of the issue. This is an enlargement of one of the frames that shows clearly the speckling of white spots.
So I decided to look at the last roll of Fomapan 100 I shot – this was a couple of months back – and found that it too had the same issue with dust. I decided to search online for “white spots on Fomapan 100” and it led me to a few places where people would report similar problems – sometimes going so far as to describe it as a “Milky Way” effect. I’m not sure I would go that far, but I got the gist. One post had some example pictures whic matchen mine very closely in terms of the spotting problem. It seems to be an intermittent issue.
I’ve now come to the opinion that I might have a bad batch of Fomapan 100, which is a bit of a pain as I bought ten rolls of it! I guess I’ll have to try another roll and see what it gets me. While the film is still useable, the post-processing required to get rid of the spots is not something to be relished.
Oh well, there are worse things happening in the world, so I’m sure I can live with this minor inconvenience.
Here’s one of the shots from the roll that has had a lengthy clean-up applied.
Yashica Mat 124G & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
Having just spent the best part of an hour getting rid of thousands of annoying dust specs on some Fomapan 100 negatives, I’m about done for the evening. Therefore this will be a succinct post where I just add this photo of a gravestone with crucifixion design. It was one of several in the churchyard, making it look like some sort of miniature recreation of Golgotha or something.
Yashica Mat 124G & Ilford Pan-F Plus. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
I made a few photos of these flowers. They were beside the footpath I took on a walk a few of weeks ago – this one with the Holga, and a few others with my F80 and a macro lens. I’ve yet to have the F80 shots developed as I still have a couple of frames left on that roll, but I suspect they’ll look quite different to this Holga photograph which has given me a somewhat unexpected, but nontheless pleasant, low-key result.
Although I’ve titled the post (and photograph) “Daisies”, I’m not actually sure if that’s what they are. While the look of the flowers is the same, and the colours match, these are far larger than the daisies that sprout in our garden if I’ve not mowed the grass in a while. I’m sure they must be some relation though. Great Auntie Daisy perhaps? 🙂
