Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
A very quick post today as I’ve only just gotten home after a very long day (mostly due to an injury I’ve sustained). I’ll maybe post more details tomorrow, but for now, here’s a mock Tudor house I photographed a few weeks back.
Olympus 35 RC & Kodak Gold 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 20 June 2022
I’m kinda eking out some of these Kodak Gold photos at present. This is not because I’ve run low on stuff to publish, but because most of the shots I’ve processed recently have been from a visit to a steam rally and I figured I might as well pop those on the blog all at once rather than via my usual drip-feed approach, so those should be up here tomorrow.
In the meantime though, heres a picture of a big white house looking resplendent in the summer sunshine.
Olympus 35 RC & Kodak Gold 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 20 June 2022
This quaint old building sits in the Attercliffe district of Sheffield and is the home of a picture framing business. In a past life it used to be a post office, something perhaps hinted at by the post box that still stands in front. I’ve photographed it before using black and white film, but these colour shots are much nicer.
This whole area used to be a busy shopping area with all manner of businesses catering to the local populace – which, back in the mid 20th century lived in row after row of terraced houses, many of them employed in the thriving steel industry or other trades that made up a huge part of the city’s economy back then.There are still shops and businesses there now, but it is massively changed and is a shadow of the way it once was, with much of the original population gone.
While much of the housing that once stood in the area close to this shop has now been demolished, a lot still remains not too far away and now provides homes to many of the migrants who settled in the city in the latter half of the last century. Shops still abound in the area where the housing stands, albeit many of them of new, different, and more multicultural varieties to what stood there before.
Olympus 35 RC & Kodak Gold 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 29 June 2022
The building in the foreground is a branch of the Wetherspoons pub chain, but the towers and dome behind are part of the Turkish baths. The light falling on the buildings looked nice, so I made the shot.
Olympus 35 RC & Ilford FP4+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°.
Taken on 11 May 2022
I guess that this is a similar picture to the one I posted yesterday. This one is overexposed though. It’s overexposed because I mistakenly set the 35 RC to an f/2.8 aperture instead of the A (for auto) setting that would allow it to meter correctly in it’s standard shutter-priority mode. As a result this picture (and a couple of others) got far too much light. The other couple I’ve discarded in terms of posting them anywhere but I still quite liked this shot so I did what I could to recover it.
The photo also appeared in Flickr’s Explore section today, which I was a little surprised by. I get pictures selected for Explore on a reasonably regular basis (probably one a month or so) but they are rarely the photos that I think are my best. In fact, they’re often the ones I like the least. I have no idea how Explore selects it’s photos.
Whenever I get a photo in Explore I always get lots of comments from people congratulating me on the achievement. I’m grateful if people like my photos, but these people rarely seem to then venture into my feed to look at the other (arguably better) pictures. It’s almost as though anything not in Explore is somehow sub-par and not worth bothering with.
I don’t tend to look at Explore very often – usually it’s only when one of my pictures is featured and I’m feeling nosey as to how far down the selction it appears. There are a lot of very nice photos featured, but there are also a lot of obvious pictures too, as well as some bizarre choices from time to time. However, if I do find one I really like then I will go and look at the feed of the photographer as sometimes this introduces me to new bodies of work I really enjoy.
Olympus 35 RC & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°.
Taken on 7 May 2022
I had an appointment this afternoon and didn’t get home until recently, so just a quick post today with a photo of a Tetris-like building in Manchester.
Olympus 35 RC & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°.
Taken on 7 May 2022
These are the same blocks of flats that featured in yesterday’s post, but shot from a different vantage point – this time from the Broad Lane roundabout.
When I first saw the developed negatives I thought that this frame had some sort of damage – and odd, white splotch. It turned out to be the street light. 🙂
Olympus OM-1N, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Agfa APX 100. Adox Adonal 1+25 6mins @ 20°.
Taken on 15 April 2022
One of the more noticable structures in Sheffield is the university Arts Tower. While it is not very tall when compared with towers in other cities (it’s not even the tallest building in Sheffield) at a mere twenty stories, the fact that it sits partway up the hillside beside Western Bank means that it is visible from far afield. It should be noted that far afield in this case is probably still not that far – Sheffield is a hilly city (said to be built on seven hills, like Rome) so the best views of the Arts Tower are from the north east where it can be seen from further down the flatter area around the Don valley. It can be seen peeking over the top of hills from various locations as well though.
The building opened in 1965 and housed the Departments of Landscape, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Biblical Studies, and Architecture. There were eighteen arts departments located in the tower originally although, as the university and student body has grown, some of these have moved to new locations.
One of the most well known features of the building is the paternoster lift system, with many a tale being told of people going right over the top of the looping elevator system. Most of these are from people unaware of how a paternoster works and under the assumption that the unfortunate passengers would be somehow flipped upside-down as the lift reached its apex. They do make for better stories though. 🙂
It being such a focal point in Sheffield’s skyline, I’ve taken a good number of pictures of the tower which can be found here.
Yashicamat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 16 April 2022
The same buildings that could be seen in yesterday’s post, but this time focused on the reflection.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & & Ilford FP4+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 15 January 2021
After yesterday’s post about how I really don’t enjoy the process of developing film, and how I’d put off developing a roll for a somewhat weak reason, today I pulled my finger out and got the job done. It wasn’t urgent, so I could have left it another week – after a period where I was running out of new photos to use in the blog, I now have three full rolls of stuff, two of which were waiting to be scanned even without developing this new roll – but if I’d left it, then the job would have been hanging over me like a cloud, and I might even have ended up with a backlog if I shoot more stuff in the interim.
Anyway, it’s done now. All developed. All cut and sleeved. All the equipment washed and tidied away for next time.
I got rid on my stop-bath and fixer today too. They’ve had 15 or 16 films through them and the stop-bath was starting to change colour slightly. I might have eked a few more rolls out of both batches but I’d rather not risk a ruined roll, so I’ll need to make some fresh solutions next time.
I also managed to drop the freshly washed roll onto the shower cubicle floor while squeegeeing the moisture off it, necessitating my re-dousing it with the remaining wetting agent. Thankfully the shower floor was pretty dry and not covered with soap bubbles or anything like that, and the negatives look ok on first glance now they’re dried. I said some profane words when it happened though. 🙂
Today’s picture is of Globe Works in Sheffield. Should you be interested, there’s another photo of the building along with a bit of information about it in this post.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Fujichrome Provia 100. Lab developed.
Taken on 23 January 2022
Steel City Snapper photography 