Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
This metal sculpure names Brilliance resides on Birley Street in Blackpool and was installed as part of the town’s regeneration by light scheme. It takes the theme of “a continuous ribbon spiralling in and out of the ground” and is illuminated at night.
I didn’t see it after dark but it still made a striking enough subject for a photograph in the daylight hours.
Yashicamat 124G & JCH Street Pan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 July 2023.
A picture without words today (well, except for these).
Yashicamat 124G & JCH Street Pan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 July 2023.
Back to the Blackpool photos for a few days, with a couple of types of thrill rides (although I gues the second could be a bit less thrilling unless you don’t like heights).
Typing the title for this post made me wonder – is the structure in the second photo actually a “Ferris Wheel”, or is it a “Big Wheel”? And is there a difference?
A quick search online brought this interesting page from the National Fairground and Circus Archive, which gives a overview of the history and development of such rides and states that the proper name is Ferris Wheel, even though George Washington Gale Ferris wasn’t the originator of such rides. His biggest claim to fame – at least in terms of building Ferris Wheels – probably came with the construction of the wheel that took his name at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a construction that stood 264 feet tall and could carry 160 riders. It was intended to be an equal to the Eifel Tower.
The fairground ferris wheels that are commonly seen at travelling funfairs (as well as permanent fairs) are known as Eli Wheels, named after the Eli Bridge Company which manufactured them.
Yashicamat 124G & JCH Street Pan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 July 2023.
The colours on these two Kodak Ektar pictures were very strange and I couldn’t get them to look right no matter what I did in Negative Lab Pro, Lightroom, or Photoshop. So, in the end I decided to convert them to B&W, which has worked quite well, I think.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted to black and white in Lightroom.
Taken 1 July 2023.
There will be several more pictures of Blackpool’s famed tower to come over the next few days. You have been warned! 🙂
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
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.
Blackpool North Pier marked the spot where my roll of black and white film ran out (pictures still to come!), and where I switched to a roll of Kodak Ektar. The three pictures here show stuff on the pier, plus one shot of the view north from the pier. I cropped the third shot as there was quite a lot of uninteresting sky in the image and I felt it looked better without.
The colours are still a little off in these frames, but not too bad, I don’t think.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
If you walk along Blackpool promenade in front of Blackpool Tower, you will come across the Comedy Carpet. This is a section of the floor covering 1880 square meters that is packed with jokes, routines, and catchphrases from 850 comedians and writers. You cand easily spend a good hour reading through it all, hopefully letting out a few good laughs while you do.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
In a break from tradition, I’m jumping right to a photo I only uploaded to Flickr today, rather than slowly working through them in a mostly chronological order – I have a whole bunch of other pictures that pre-date this shot (and this roll), but images from those sets will come later.
I jumped to this shot mostly because I didn’t want to write a long post, and this image seems to suit a shorter form blog entry (although I’m already writing more than I often do, so go figure!).
The photo was taken during a recent trip to Blackpool which I took with my wife (although it’s already two months ago!). There was an onshore breeze blowing on this day which, when it hit the sea-wall along the promenade, created an updraft that these gulls were taking advantage of. They were effectvely hovering and it made for a nice shot.
There is something a little funky about the colours in this roll of Ektar. I’m not sure if it was an older expired roll that I’ve not looked after well, or if I maybe underexposed it or something but, whatever the case, the colours looked odd when I put the negatives through Negative Lab Pro. I even went back and re-scanned an older negative to see if I’d somehow messed up my scanner settings, but that one was fine. As a result I’ve had to faff around with the colours in the pictures more than normal, so if any look a little weird, that’s my excuse.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
The Big One was, for a couple of years, the tallest and steepest rollercoaster in the world. It opened in 1994 and was 213 feet tall. It has since been surpassed by a considerable margin with the current world’s tallest rollercoaster being over twice as tall at a stomach-churning 465 feet (Kinda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, USA).
The Big One was branded as the Pepsi Max Big One until 2011.
I’ve ridden on it once, about twenty years ago, when I went on it with one of my sons. It was a great experience riding it, but not the most comfortable of rides. Not as terrifying as the Wild Mouse ride that also used to be present in the Pleasure Beach.
Olympus Trip 35 & Ilford HP5+ . Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 26 November 2022.
Steel City Snapper photography 