Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
I came across this building while wandering. I’ve no idea what it was used for in the past although, as it’s in the midst of some sizeable caravan sites, it might have been a club or something similar. It’s considerably overgrown with shrubs at the front now.
The Velvia blue skies make it look kinda nice though, despite its disuse.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
It wouldn’t be a trip to the seaside without a photo of some chalets or beach huts. Well, perhaps it would for non-photographers, but for me they’re almost an obligation to photograph when I see them, especially as I don’t visit the coast all that often.
This expired Velvia 50 has really done it’s work on that blue sky, hasn’t it?
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
This wheelie-bin for hire advertisement caught my eye (from £35 a day), the bin perched atop a small Ford Ka van, The cones also got my attention, as did the sign afixed to the lamppost which, on first glance, I thought was advertising a flypast but which, upon closer inspection, is actually advertising an RAF Association meeting. There were teas, coffee, and cake involved, which sounds nice. Note also, the “God save the king” attribution at the bottom, this photograph having been taken the day before the funeral of Queen Elizabeth.
It’s a photograph of what might be considered a mundane scene, but these things often catch my eye. I find them interesting and I think it’s valuable to record such things, probably moreso than pretty landscapes.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
I wrote a few days ago about how I’ve been having difficulties scanning a roll of Velvia 100 that I shot at the steam rally last weekend. I’ve scanned Velvia 50 before and was similarly granted with the same red-cast that I got this time, although on this occasion I’ve also had problems with the actual exposure of the scans – some images looking under-exposed in comparison with the physical transparencies. The under-exposure issue is something that I’ll have to atempt to rectify in Lightroom, but at least I seem to have found a working solution to the red-cast problem.
After carrying out all my post processing in Lightroom, I always open the final image in Photoshop to add a white border. This time, as well as adding the border, I also used the Auto-colour option in the Image menu. I don’t usually find that this does a great job – it tends to be hit and miss on the occasions I’ve used it in the past – but for these Velvia 100 scans it works a treat. Hopefully this will mean I’ll get much more satisfactory images from the roll than I’d feared.
This picture of a slightly rusted Ford Popular has come out very nicely. I used a polariser for most shots on the roll, and it’s really deepened the sky for this photo.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 AF-D & Fujichrome Velvia 100 (expired 2011). Lab developed. Home scanned.
Taken on 25 June 2022
This is the second in my series of expired film shoots. You can find a link to the others at the bottom of this post.
This second roll is a little younger than the last one I shot, but not by a huge margin, and it’s still over thirty years beyond it’s expiry date. It’s also a colour film, a fact that I’ve found can more adversely affect the resulting photographs. I find that expired black and white film is generally far more forgiving than colour. There are a number of things that can go awry with either format but, in general, it’s much easier to overlook a change in tonality in black and white than it is in colour. The reason is in the name: colour. While most people probably can’t tell if a greyscale tone is not totally accurate, they are far more atuned to when colours don’t look right, and expired colour film can bring a whole range of potential colour defects to bear on an image, with deterioration of the different dye layers resulting in a range of colour changes that the human eye easily picks up on.
An increase in grain is another thing that can occur with expired film and, again, is something that is less of a problem in black and white than colour. Sometimes grainy colour images can look great – look at Anton Corbijn’s colour pictures as an example – but in my own work, additional grain and colour noise in colour photographs tends to look muddy and unattractive.
Taking these things into consideration, I generally have a lot more trepidation when shooting expired colour film, and the faster the film, the worse these things can become as the addtional sensitivity can increase the possible deterioration.
For this installment I chose a roll of Kodacolor VR 400 which expired in May 1989, so 33 years past it’s recommended best when I shot it. As I don’t know how the film has been stored throughout it’s life I used the generally accepeted rule of thumb to overexpose it for one full stop for each decade of expiry and metered it at 80asa.
As with the last roll of expired film I shot, I decided to use my Yashicamat 124G again. This time though I decided to stay relatively close to home for the shoot and headed out to the local country park, which is about ten minutes away by foot. The weather was nice and bright but as I was shooting at 80asa I took my tripod with me in the event I needed to use slower shutter speeds. I managed to forget a cable release but, thankfully, none of the exposures was slow enough to be impacted by any camera shake from my pressing the shutter button with my finger.
All the shots were made either on my way to the park, at the park, or on the way home, all in the space of an hour or so.
As I don’t develop my own colour film as yet, I took the exposed roll to my local lab. I had a momentary pang of disappointment when I was told that it might have to be developed in B&W chemicals if there was a risk of the old film contaminating their C41 chems, but I was happy to discover colour negatives when I collected the developed film the next day.
The negatives were scanned at home on my Epson V550 flatbed scanner and converted to positive images with Negative Lab Pro. The scans had some noticable colour shifts but this was easily recovered in the conversion process. The resulting images are vibrant with good, albeit perhaps not completely accurate, colours. There is increased grain, most notably in the shadow areas but given the age of the film, nothing too bad.
I was very pleased with the results and managed to get twelve very useable images, with a few that I especially like – the shot of the steps being my particular favourite.
Overall outcome: Success!
Expiriment #3 coming soon…
Yashicamat 124G, Kodacolor VR 400 (expired 1989). Shot at 80asa and lab developed for box speed.
Taken on 28 May 2022
Other posts in the Expiriment series:
A couple more photographs from Low Bradfield.
Fujica GW690 & Fujichrome Provia 400 (expired 2013). Lab developed.
Taken on 30 April 2022
I have a tendency to photograph the same things on multiple occasions, it seems. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
As photographers we can appreciate how a subject can change though time, whether that be over decades of weathering, decay, or environmental change, through the seasons of the year, the time of day, and even minute-by-minute, second-by-second as the light changes.
I’ve never purposely set out (so far, at least) to document such changes to a scene as part of a project, but I do find that things that catch my eye the first time I encounter them will often catch it again on further visits. Today’s post shares two shots of the same house, the photographs made about five and a half years apart on different cameras, different formats, different films, and in different conditions. The viewpoints are different in both, but the central subject remains the same. Maybe I’ll photograph it again on some future visit to this location.
(first picture) Fujica GW690 & Fujichrome Provia 400 (expired 2013). Lab developed.
Taken on 30 April 2022
We have a long weekend here in the UK thanks to the annual spring bank holiday being moved to Thursday (it’s usually on a Monday), plus the extra bank holiday we got yesterday to commemorate the Queen’s platinum jubilee. I’m not particularly fussed about the jubilee stuff but expected that I might use the extra time off work to get some photograpy done. As it stands though, I’ve been feeling pretty uninspired to go out (not helped by the dull weather that we currently have where I live), so have spent the last couple of days just loafing around the house watching TV (mostly Australian Survivor on Amazon Prime – I’m not a fan of reality shows at all, but really enjoy Survivor and The Amazing Race for some reason. It’s just a a shame we can’t see the US version by normal means here in the UK) and playing videogames.
I feel a little guilty for this, but sometimes it’s nice to just veg out and not put any pressure on yourself. I’ve still got enough new photos sat waiting to be published to keep the blog going for at least a couple of weeks of daily posts, plus plenty in the archive in the event I run out (which I don’t expect to), so that impetus is lessened for a while. I had planned on going out today if the sun had shown itself – I had an idea of an area I might photograph – but it will have to wait.
Fujica GW690 & Kodak Ektachrome 100 EPP (expired 2003). Lab developed.
Taken on 30 April 2022
A very quick post today as I’m feeling a little under-the-weather. I’m feeling fatigued and just not myself. I’ve got it into my head that I must have had Covid at some point and am now suffering from Long Covid, but that’s probably just hyperchondrial foolishness on my part.
Fujica GW690 & Kodak Ektachrome 100 EPP (expired 2003). Lab developed.
Taken on 30 April 2022
No-one is bowling here. Not really a surprise as it was only about 8:30am when the photo was taken. There is, if you look closely, a bird on the green though. Maybe it had a tiny set of bowls that I couldn’t make out.
Today’s thrilling post is brought to you by Squarespace I-have-a-headache-and-don’t-feel-like-typing-much (dot com). 🙂
Fujica GW690 & Kodak Ektachrome 100 EPP (expired 2003). Lab developed.
Taken on 30 April 2022
Steel City Snapper photography 