According to the sign, this is Newark’s famous floating pub. I’m not sure of it’s sphere of fame – I’d never heard of it until I visited Newark the other week – but I expect it’s well known to locals and those able to visit it with greater ease.
Whatever it’s fame, it was an attractive subject for some photographs and I’m really happy with how these turned out, even considering the shortcomings of the camera I used.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
The photo in today’s post is a few years old – it was taken on a cold, but bright, February day back in 2018 on the edge of the moorland near Surprise View in the Peak District national park. I don’t think I’ve published this picture online anywhere before now.
I re-scanned it, and the rest of the photos on the roll, yesterday, using Vuescan to make a linear RAW DNG file and then Negative Lab Pro for the conversion in Lightroom.
Now I understand how to use NLP properly (or at least much better – there are still a bunch of controls and sliders that I stay away from!), I’m very pleased with the ease of getting colours that I’m happy with almost straight out of the box. I still tweak things a little, first using NLPs controls, and then maybe some minor tweaks in Lightroom itself (usually adding a little clarity and sharpness), but there has been none of the annoying mental gymnastics where I can’t decide if the colours are “off” in some hard to define way.
Obviously, colours are subjective, whether it be someone sat at home trying to get what they think Portra or whatever film stock they’ve used to look “right”, or a technician in a photo-lab making adjustments in the Noritsu software (or whatever it is they use) on the behalf of the photographer. So far, Negative Lab Pro has given me colours that feel correct with very little faff on my part, and for this I am thankful. I love black and white photography, but this new found ability to get results I’m happy with from C41 film is making me want to shoot more of the stuff (and re-scan some of the photos where I had less than satisfactory results in the past). It’s just a shame I need to sell a kidney to afford colour film these days!
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Portra 400. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
From a shop window full of slippers in yesterday’s post, to one full of newspapers in today’s. It would appear that Ragazza has seen better times. It’s sad to see businesses like this – much better that they be thriving. Nontheless, I thought it made for an interesting photograph.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Two different apsect of Newark market here today. A couple of pictures from outside in the market square where the red and white striped awnings on the stalls glowed vibrantly in the bright sunshine. The third shot taken inside the market hall in a shady, but nicely lit arcade. I’m quite pleased with the interior shot given the somewhat basic (and un-changeable) settings of the camera used – fixed f/11 aperture and 1/100sec shutter speed. The shadows are a little muddy but, on the whole, it’s an appealing photograph, I think.
As is seemingly the RETO UWS’s remit, one of the shots has been photobombed by my fingertip.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Away from pictures of Flamborough now and, for a few days to come, on to some photos from a trip to Newark I took with my wife last month. Newark is a market town in Nottinghamshire, about thirty or forty miles from home. It sits on the River Trent and has the ruined remains of a castle. They have an English Civil War museum there which I would quite like to take a look around, but that will have to wait for a future trip.
The town centre hasn’t yet been fully homogenised by all the same chain stores that you find everywhere else, although they are certainly making inroads. As a result it’s quite a nice place to wander around for a few hours. I’m not a big fan of shopping unless I either have something specific I want to buy, or it’s a shop full of stuff I find particularly interesting, so a lot of the day was spent with my wife browsing inside the shops while I stayed outside and took photographs of whatever I found interesting. This suited me just fine. 🙂
The only film camera I had with me on the day was the RETO Ultrawide and Slim, in which I’d loaded a roll of Kodak Gold. I was chancing things a bit by using a 36exp roll – I’ve heard the slightly flimsy film advance on the camera can struggle with rolls longer than 24exp, but I’d decided to risk it. The film advance definately seemed to be getting harder to turn as I approached the end of the roll, but there were no catastrophic failures thankfully. I do wish I’d taken a different camera though. While the RETO UWS is fun to use, having seen the results, I can’t help but wish I’d used something with a bit more fidelity for a trip like this. I also managed to get my fingers (and even the camera strap) into the frame on several shots, a much worse ratio than my first roll through the camera where I think it only happened once.
Today’s picture is kinda random, but I liked the arrangement of these colourful slippers in this shop window. While my finger didn’t get into the frame on this occasion, my shadow has crept in at bottom right.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Springflower is the name of this decaying boat, pulled high up the bank above North Landing beach. Decaying boats are not something I see often, living in a land-locked city as I do, so I like to make pictures of them when I get the chance.
I think that this marks the end of the photos from my day-trip to Flamborough. On to something else tomorrow…
I’ve been re-scanning some older negatives over the past couple of days – some Portra 400 shots made during a trip to Barcelona with my wife back in 2019. The main reason for the re-scanning (actually not re-scans really, as the originals were lab scans) is to see what they look like when converted with Negative Lab Pro. The answer is… much better than any previous attempts I’ve made.
The original lab scans were fine but I know I can get much more resolution and detail out of my Plustek than the scan sizes the lab provides can offer – even their large scans – with the bonus of it not costing me anything to do so. And I’m finding that Negative Lab Pro is giving me colours that I’m actually happy with!
So today, here are several photos I took inside one of the markets in Barcelona – the Mercat de Sant Antoni, I believe. I guess that British market stalls are just as interesting to look at really, but there’s a definite draw in seeing the different wares on offer in other countries. Some markets in the UK might provide delicatessens akin to the ones here, but they are not commonplace, so it’s always interesting to see the mundane through the eyes of a visitor.
I took a few photographs from this location – including this one shot on the Brontica ETRSi – but this is the only shot where I included the sea arch that can be seen at the lower left of the frame. I think I had the 75mm attached to the Bronica at the time and probably couldn’t include both the arch and the signal station in a single composition with the field of view that lens provides (although I did have the 50mm with me as well, which would have done so easily had I been inclined to switch them over).
The view from North Landing near Flamborough. Although on the east coast of England, because it is on a promontory, this view is actually looking to the north. Setting off on a straight line from here would take you right over the top of the world without hitting land until you reached Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of the Russian mainland to the west of Alaska. It would be a long and arduous voyage for one of the small boats seen in this scene.
I suspect, like many people, I was pleasantly surprised when Kodak recently revealed the re-introduction of it’s Kodak Gold emulsion in 120 format. I’d long wished that Kodak or Fuji might relaese one of their consumer emulsions in this format, so was glad to hear of its imminent release. I was also pleased to see that it would retail for less than it’s other colour films although, given the skyrocketing cost of C41 at present, it still sells for more than Ektar did not so long ago. Nevertheless, I decided to treat myself to a pack of five rolls.
My pack of film arrived in the mail at the start of the month and, last weekend, on a sunny spring morning, I decided to go out and see what I might photograph on a roll of it. I didn’t want to go on a big day out, so decided to head to the botanical gardens in Sheffield with the intent of maybe getting some pictures of the plants in the glasshouse.
After arriving I took a picture of one of the university buildings on the street where I parked my car. It’s not the best picture, but the colours caught my eye.
The next image was of a house with a cuppola near the entrance to the botanical gardens. This shot I’m really happy with. I like how the cuppola is framed nicely with the tree branches, and also the conifer is similarly framed on the right of the image. Plus the light was great.
It was at this point that I discovered that the gardens don’t open until 10am, so I had some time to kill (it was only around 9:20am when I got there). So I decided to walk up the street beside the park and then head over towards Endcliffe Park instead. On this street I noticed a vintage motorcycle and got another photo. I’d have liked to open up the aperture to get more separation of the bike from the background but, even with relatively slow 200asa film, the light was too bright and as the Yashicamat has a maximum shutter speed of 1/500sec, I had to stop it down further to avoid overexposure. It’s a pity about the bins, but what can you do?
Just up the road from the bike was this house with a brightly painted door that I liked the look of.
Close to Hunter’s Bar roundabout, just below Endcliffe Park, is a row of attractive old houses largely hidden from view by large shrubs, but I was able to get a nice angle on them. Again, the light was lovely, and I like the church tower that peeks up behind them in the background.
Just inside the park is this lovely house. It’s the arts-and-crafts style park pavilion and lodge building, dating to 1891. The building has Grade II listing status.
I took a walk up Rustlings Road which runs beside the park – making several photos along the way with my XA3 that I had tucked away in my jacket pocket – before then wandering back through the park itself along the footpath. There are a couple of millponds here – evidence of the area’s industrial past – where I remember catching small fish in a net on a day out with my nan back when I was little. The ponds are filled with water from Porter Brook which runs down the valley before joining the River Sheaf in the city centre close to the railway station. Near the bottom of the park, where the large playing field is, sits a cafe. It was very busy on this sunny morning with many people sitting outside in the seating area across the path.
And finally, after leaving the park and walking up Brocco Bank, I finally arrived at my original intended destination – the botanical gardens. By this time I only had a single frame of the Kodak Gold remaining to be shot, and I made this picture of the gatehouse.
All the pictures were scanned on my Epson V550 flatbed using Vuescan to create RAW DNG files. These were then converted to positives with Negative Lab Pro. I’m still getting the hang of NLP, but I’ve got a group of settings that seem to be producing quite nice results for Kodak Gold (although I do still tweak them further in Lightroom afterwards).
I’m happy with the results I got from this first roll of Gold in 120 format and look forward to shooting more of it.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Gold 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
