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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 🙂
A few odd shots of random buildings of varying ages and styles, all with a lush blue sky as backdrop. All shot on the same roll of expired Kodak Colorplus during my day trip to Cleethorpes at the end of last month.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
I made this picture back in late November I think – it’s on a roll that was shot over the space of a few weeks with my Olympus XA3, which I’d been keeping in my coat pocket. It was taken from the car-park across the road from these buildings on the day I went into town for one of my attempts to get my laptop rebuilt. I was heading towards the stairwell when I noticed the shot and liked the way the buildings stoof against the sky with the central tower flanked by the smaller buildings on either side.
The film was a roll of expired Tri-X dating back to around 2003. I’ve shot a few rolls of this and found that it likes an extra stop of exposure. For the previous rolls I just exposed it at 200asa and then developed it normally, but as the weather was a little gloomy on the day this roll was loaded, I decided to keep the extra stop of speed and push it a stop in development instead. I’m quite happy with the results. The grain is quite pronounced, but I’m not afraid of a bit of grain.
The worst thing about this film is how much the negatives curl when developed. Not only do they coil up like a spring, there is also heavy bow to the film along its full length. This made cutting and sleeving the negatives troublesome, but this was not nearly as problematic as trying to get them into the negative holder to be scanned. The Plustek holders are pretty good at keeping negatives flat – I doubt I would have gotten anywhere with my Epson holders – but you still need to get them in and aligned before it can be closed to hold them in place. Somehow I managed it though, although I’ve only scanned two strips so far.
Olympus XA3 & Kodak Tri-X Pan (expired 2003 – shot at box speed and pushed a stop in development). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
I’ve been out all day today at a steam rally and after walking around the place (and the four hours of driving there and back) am pretty tired, so just a couple of quickly published photos in this post.
It’s hard to think of A haiku when you are tired I hope this will do
The interesting building seen in this picture used to be a synagogue and cloister’s chambers, originally built in 1872. As with so many buildings in the city, it has been re-purposed and now serves as student accommodation.
As time moves along New uses for old buildings Places recycled
