Outside Leeds Art Gallery there are a number of brightly coloured “loungers” for people to sit and, well, lounge upon. I took a couple of pictures, but the first is the best because the couple on the red lounger make a nice counterpoint to the Henry Moore “Reclining Woman” sculpture on the plinth above.
Something good that happened today…
It’s Friday, which is almost always good, so I’ll go with that today.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
These four photos were all taken around Leeds Combined Courts Centre. I found the brickwork and the architecture made for interesting photographs, and the nice weather didn’t hurt where the expired slide film was concerned, either.
Something good that happened today…
I’ve had a busy day at work, mostly taken up with meetings. Sometimes days like this can be frustrating because there’s insufficient time between calls to get on with the work I need to do. While that was still the case to an extent, all the calls I was on felt productive, and I came away from them feeling like something had been achieved, which is good.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This sculpture was stood in a corner of the main entrance gallery in Leeds Art Gallery. It would be incredibly impressive in scale if those were full size bricks, but in reality the figure is not much larger than a normal person. It was a photogenic looking character though, regardless of size.
Something good that happened today…
The robin was on the garden this morning again while I sorted out the cat litter tray (always a delightful task…). Today it flew over an alighted on the wall a couple of feet from where I stood, before quickly shooting off to hide in the laurel bush. At this time I hadn’t yet put out any bird food (the current breakfast for them is a selection of sunflower hearts and toast crusts) and in my mind I imagined that this small display of bravery was a polite nudge for me to hurry up and put some food on the grass.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Given the brilliantly lit white facade of this building, I’m happy that the slide film caught the detail without blowing it out. I guess the dynamic range across the whole scene is not too large, but I still wondered whether this would be a success or not.
It would have been nice to have a tilt-shift lens to capture the scene. While I don’t hate converging verticals in photographs, sometimes, when they’re only slight as is the case here, they bother me more for some reason.
Something good that happened today…
I managed to find some time this lunchtime to develop a couple of rolls of Tri-X that I’ve shot recently, so I have another 24 images waiting to scan. I’m always glad when I’ve gotten film development done because I find it a chore. It’s easy enough to do, and I’m relatively successful at it, but I don’t get the enjoyment from it that some other photographers do. On the other hand, I do quite like scanning, which some other photographers hate!
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Another of the expired Elite Chrome photos. The Light is a retail and leisure centre in Leeds and contains shops, bars, restaurants, and a cinema among other things. The name seemed fitting for this picture as “the light” really was quite nice.
Something good that happened today…
I missed my “Something good…” bit yesterday because I published an Expiryment post, but I’m back today.
My son started his new job today, and while we haven’t had a “debrief” with him about it yet, he seems happy enough, which is good.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week or so now and have already posted a few pictures from this roll, but here is the bona-fide “Expiryment”.
This time around, I had a roll of Kodak Elite Chrome 200 which had expired in 2003. It’s not the first.time I’ve shot a roll of this film from this vintage, although I didn’t write anything specific about it at the time apart from how well I thought it had held up.
Given the nice results I got last time, I was fairly confident that I would have a similar experience this time around too. Alas, it wasn’t quite the same and, although the two rolls were the same brand, the same age, and had been stored in the same way since I acquired them, this time I encountered some problems.
My chosen method for shooting slide film is to expose it at box speed, no matter how expired it is. While expired reversal film usually benefits from extra light in the form of exposure, slide film seems to maintain its original narrow exposure latitude and any significant deviation from this will quickly result in blown highlights or crushed shadows. Of course, while the latitude may remain the same, this doesn’t mean that other things haven’t changed, and the dyes can degrade, resulting in colour shifts. This is what had happened with this roll.
Upon receiving the sheet of positives back from the lab they looked fine on initial inspection (holding them up to the window), but it quickly became apparent that all was not well when I began to scan them. A very noticeable purple cast was visible on the images, particularly where there were underexposed shadows.
Thankfully, despite the problems with the colour, modern technology is able to come to the rescue, and with some careful editing in Adobe Lightroom (mostly using he colour curves adjustments), I was able to remove the bulk of the purple caste and get relatively pleasing results. The image comparison slider below shows a good example of the before and after states of one of the images.
Some images fared worse than others, but none were a complete write off due to the colour issues – the ones I didn’t upload to Flickr were as a result of other, more mundane problems, such as soft focus or them just being photos I thought were uninteresting.
A selection of other shots from the roll are below, all after post-processing to remove the colour cast.
Overall then, while there was a definite issue present for this roll, it wasn’t insurmountable, and post-processing produced very acceptable results. I wouldn’t want to risk shooting film like this for something important, but for the fun of it, sure, and I still have plenty of expired rolls left (including some more Elite Chrome in both 100asa and 200asa variants). Further Expiryments to come…
Overall outcome: Partial success!
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I went out for a drive with my son who starts his new job on Monday. As it’s a considerably longer drive than to his previous place of work, I chaperoned him on a test run to make sure he was happy with the route. All went well.
At the rate I’m posting images from this roll there won’t be any left for an “Expiriment” post!.
Something good that happened today…
I received an email from a colleague today that might lead to roles for some of my colleagues affected by the job losses on our team. I’ll have to find out more next week, but it sounds promising, so I’m hopeful it will prove fruitful for them.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I was reading a blog post yesterday afternoon on Shawn Granton’s Urban Adventure League site. In it he spoke about “The Lighthouse”, a wooden lighthouse that stood in the back yard of one of the properties he sometimes cycled past. On a recent bike ride he had a chance to go past the same location but it was no longer there. The Lighthouse was ephemeral and no more.
This triggered a memory. Not of a lighthouse, but of the Wellingborough T-Rex.
About thirty years ago I, and other members of the team I worked in, would attend meetings in London. The East Midlands Main Line between Sheffield passed through Wellingborough en-route and there, before you got to the station, the line went past a scrapyard. Nothing particularly interesting about that. Except for the T-Rex.
The T-Rex stood tall, peering over the scrapyard fence at the railway line. The dinosaur was clearly modeled on the older, tail-dragging depiction of dinosaurs that became extinct when Jurassic Park and its ilk arrived on the scene, but it was a T-Rex nonetheless.
It stood there for years until, one day on a trip to London, it had gone. I felt a bit sad at this. It was a familiar landmark and one which I hoped to always be there. But it wasn’t.
However, today, after reading Shawn’s blog post featuring The Lighthouse, I searched online for “Wellingborough dinosaur” and, lo-and-behold it was right there before my eyes. Not only did I find a picture of it in the scrapyard, but also discovered that when it had disappeared it was because it had made a new habitat for itself at The Muslo Arms, a pub in a nearby village called Finedon.
The pub has now closed and been converted into flats. I don’t expect the T-Rex lives in one of them and I have no idea where it may have gotten to now, but I hope it’s somewhere out there still.
This little trip down memory lane has made me quite happy.
Another photo of the Leeds General Infirmary building, or at least the Victorian part of the building.
While a hospital has stood on the site since the late 18th century, the part of the building shown in the picture was built a century later during the Victorian period. A number of additional hospital wings were added through the 20th century. The small section that I posted a photo of yesterday can be seen at the far right of today’s image.
Something good that happened today…
The Robin was back on our garden again this lunchtime (although, to be fair, it could be a completely different robin to the other one I’ve seen). Today it snagged itself an earthworm from the lawn and was busily gobbling it up when I spotted it. One of our cats had also seen it and kept a close eye on it from the utility-room window until it eventually noticed her and hopped sideways on to get a better view. It then began a series of loud warning chirps before making an exit.
I’m glad on these occasions that our cats are house-cats – I can only imagine the threat they would pose to the local bird population otherwise! – and it’s good to see that the robin, and the other birds that come to our garden, feel safe to do so.
Olympus OM-10 & G.Zuiko 35mm f/2.8 on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 (expired 2004) . Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Steel City Snapper photography 