Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
Another Ekatar shot with slightly odd colours. There’s something off with the purples and greens in the shadows and midtones and, for some reason, the foreground road and pavement looks almost monochrome. It’s a shame as I like Ektar as a film and it normally scans just fine, but this roll has taken much more effort to get looking closer to normal.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
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.
Taken on 18 March 2022
A fairly straightforward street photo for today. It works, I think, because the arcade is closed and the blue shutters are down. Had it been opened then the figure would have been lost amongst the background. Lots of blues and a nice burst of colour from the sign look quite nice.
We’ve been hit by storm Eunice here in the UK today, and the southern counties received two red weather alerts, the most serious we get in this country, and not something that happens very often. Wind speeds of over 100mph were recorded in parts of the country. Being a couple of hundred miles north of the worst of it, all we’ve had here is a quite blustery and rainy afternoon. Some of the trees I can see from the house were swaying quite wildly but I’ve not noticed any damage from the limited vantage points I have from looking out of the windows.
A large part of the population seems to have been fixated on this YouTube channel, which has been showing planes landing (or attempting to land in some cases) in the high winds at London Heathrow airport. It had 185,000 viewers when I took a look earlier!
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
Taken on 31 January 2021
Not that one.
This is an arcade in London’s Soho district. It’s been there for quite a long time – it was certainly there in the early 90s, and I expect it was there for quite a while before then. The ground floor is filled with gamblimg machines and is for over-18s only, but the entrance on the left leads downstairs to the videogame goodness for all ages.
Follow the noises
The sound of the underground
Of pixels and sprites
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Lab developed in Xtol.
Taken on 19 August 2021
I tend to find seaside arcades a bit of a letdown nowadays. They mostly seem to contain kiddie rides, prize grab games, slot machines, and coin cascades. These things all have their charm, and when my kids were younger, would be a genuine source of amusement (and a drain on my wallet), but something has been missing for a long time now… Videogames.
It may be a coincidence of my age, but the arcades are largely synonymous with, well, arcade games. Even when I was quite small I remember early games like Pong, Boot Hill, Sea Wolf and Night Driver among others. Then I was around for the real emergence of games: Space Invaders, Asteroids, and a little later, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Defender and a whole slew of others. It was heaven.
The arcades would ring with the electonic sounds of the games, flashing attract sequences, and simple 8-bit tunes bleeping, blooping, and crashing as they drew players into this world of light and sound. A single £1 note would, when changed into coins, provide ten games on the machines. Sometimes this would be gone in a fragment of time if you chose difficult games that you were ill-prepared for, but if you knew your stuff you could play for a long time on such meagre funds.
As the years progressed games advanced in graphical and sonic fidelity. Gameplay became more complex. Multi-player experiences appeared (Gauntlet anyone?), and the cabinets gained features. But as the arcades advanced, so did home gaming systems. For a while they trailed their arcade big-brothers, but in the 90s the advent of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation finally drew level. Now you could truly have that arcade experience at home (well, except you missed tha cacophony of sound, the atmosphere, the groups of fellow games and all the other joys of being in an arcade).
Sadly, this meant the gradual decline of the video arcade. New machines became ever more specialised with light guns, custom cabinets that the player could sit in to fully experience the action, and all manner of other bells and whistles that were difficult, if not impossible, to recreate in the home. And the pricper play increased. Where once that £1 would have given you ten credits, not you got a single game for the same price, often with no guarantee that it would last any longer. Slowly, the arcade floorspace that had once been given over to rows of individual game cabinets was reclaimed by other attractions.
The heritage of the video arcade still remains, and there are nods to the Space Invaders and Pac-Man games of old, with large attractions that, upon gaining a score, spew tickets that can be exchanged fro prizes and novelties. It’s not the same as getting your name on the top of the score table though.
Please insert a coin
To defeat the invaders
You puny Earthling
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Fujichrome Sensia 100 (expired 2003).
Taken on 27 May 2021
Another photo from my trip to Mablethorpe in September – a trip which is now over a full month in the past! Where does the time go?
I’ve already posted a couple of shots I made in one of the arcades, and this photograph here was made in the same place, but this one shot with my OM-2n on Superia 100. Although I had a fast f/1.8 lens attached, even at f/1.8 the shutter speeds were hopelessly slow according to the camera’s meter.
So I decided to make an ICM shot. I closed down the aperture until I got a 1-second shutter speed and then made the photo, panning to the left during the exposure. The bright neon of the Looney Tunes characters resulted in something a little like the effect produced by front-curtain sync when using a flash.
I’ve made Intentional Camera Movements before, but with a digital camera as they’re far more cost effective when it comes to making mistakes, so I’m very pleased with how this film exposure came out given it was the one attempt I made.
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fuji Superia 100 (expired 2008). Grain2Pixel conversion.
Taken on 11 September 2020
A couple of pictures to continue the seaside theme today, albeit with nary a grain of sand, nor a splash of salt-water in sight. Both these were made in that other stalwart of the seaside resort – the arcade. This one has been open as long as I can remeber (it’s definitely older than me), although it’s changed considerably since what was (to me and my own personal nostalgia, at least) its heyday.
Back then it was full of bleeping, blooping video games. At first the older titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Night Driver and such, but later expanding significantly as the craze for such games grew and grew. A few years later it was possible for show-offs to display theit skills on the Don Bluth animated laser-disc games like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, the huge cabinets given pride of place next to the street to draw the crowds.
This arcade is a sizeable place and it used to have some full-sized fairground rides within. A ladybird ride for the younger customers was near the ntrance, but a set of dodgems awaited the bigger kids right at the back of the place. Along one wall were a series of fairground stalls in the form of coconut shies, shooting ranges, ball games, and – perhaps most memorably – a place where you could make artwork by squirting plashes of colourful paint onto a sheet of paper that would then be spun at high velocity on a turntable to create amazing, psychadelic works of art. I remember with fondness the smell of the lacquer that would be applied to hold the image in place, and also the disappointment you’d get when it turned out that some of the paint had stuck to the inside of the card cover, ruining it when you later opened it.
I still love visiting Mablethorpe, and suspect I will for as long as I live, such were the happy memories formed there when I was a child, but each time I go I also feel a certain disappointment that things are not as I remember them in my youth, that the bleeps and bllops of the arcade games of old are mostly gone, the old stand-up cabinets replaced by larger “event” machines offering experiences that cannot be had on home consoles. Much of the floor space is now given over to fruit-machines and devices that let you win lengthy strings of tokens to be exchanged for prizes. It’s not the same as it was. But then, not many things are. Sometimes you really want a time-machine though…
Anyway, one of today’s images shows a couple of retro-games. Not the originals, but still enough to bring a smile to my face when I saw them.
In other news, my zines arrived today! This is the first time (other than the odd print) that I’ve ever had my photos published in physical form. The zines were made ostensibly for me to take part in a zine-swap with a group of other photographers, but I’ve got a whole bunch of them – it was the same price to get twenty-five copies as it was to get ten, so I went for the maximum. I can hopefully use the spares for other zine swapsies (plus I’ve already promised copies to a few people). I’m very happy with the quality of the materials and the reproduction of the photographs – I decided to go with a heavier weight 150GSM paper for the pages, with a 170GSM soft-touch laminated cover and it has a very nice feel to it. There are a few things for me to take away for the next time, but for my first go I’m more than happy.
Canon Sure Shot Z135, Kodak Gold 200. Grain2Pixel conversion.
Taken on 11 September 2020
Steel City Snapper photography 