Don’t have much time tonight, so just a slightly random couple of images from the roll of Velvia 100 I shot recently.
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.
Taken on 2 August 2020
Tag: Film photography
Colour!
A few weeks ago I spotted someone selling a single roll of Velvia 100 on eBay. It had a single bid, but it was still at £1 (plus postage), so I waited until the last minute for a sneaky snipe and managed to buy it for the princely sum of £1.04. With postage it came to less than £4. It was listed as expired, but as it was unboxed there was no way to know how expired it might be and, for that matter, how it might have been stored. Still, for the price, I wasn’t too worried and even entertained the idea of having it cross-processed. In the end though, I decided against it, and just shot it at 80asa.
When I got the developed transparencies back I was very happy. The whole roll apperared to be well exposed (chalk up a win for the OM-2n’s meter!) and the colours practically leapt from the sheet with richly saturated tones. To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the roll of film was fresh stock.
As with other rolls of E6 film, it took some tweaking during the scanning configuration and in Lightroom (and Photoshop) to get the scans looking like the actual transparencies, but I think it was worth the effort (and I now have the settings saved for future use – I’ve just bought four more rolls of expired Velvia 100!).
I’ll be posting a whole bunch of the results here in the coming days, but for now, here’s a photo of a car tail-light that was catching some morning sunshine. It might not be the best composition ever, but man, look at those colours!
Olympus OM-2n, Zuiko Auto-S 50mm f/1.8 & Fujichrome Velvia 100.
Taken on 2 August 2020
Chapel in the grass
Another view of the chapel at North Wheatley, as seen in my post from last week.
Different camera and a slightly different angle.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 8 August 2020
Power and pylons
Long time subscribers of this blog will know that I enjoy making photographs of power lines. It’s a fascination that goes back to my childhood, probably borne out of watching the old Play Safe public information films that were screened on the television here in the UK warning of the dangers of overhead power cables and electrical substations.
I’m not obsessed by them, and don’t go out with the purposes of “pylon spotting” or anything like that, but I find the way they traverse the landscape quite evocative and find they make for interesting photographic subjects.
The three images presented here today feature not only pylons, but the source of their power as well in the form of power stations. After I visited North Leverton windmill, I drove towards the nearby village of Sturton-le-Steeple which is adjacent to the large West Burton power station. One of the public footpaths near the village provided a great vantage point to see the (still quite distant) facility. Another station, Cottam, is visible in the distance to the south in the final of these three photos. These, and other power stations, sit beside the River Trent from which I believe they draw water for cooling.
They are impressive structures, dominating the landscape from miles around.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 25 July 2020
Three more windmill photos
These three shots will probably mark the end of my North Leverton windmill photos for now. I still have a few more, but they’re quite similar to what I’ve already shown, so will probably stay in the archive for now.
I think these three are pretty nice pictures though (despite the over-developing problems) and the last of the trio is maybe my favourite of all the photographs I made at the location.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 25 July 2020
A windmill, a door, and a door bell
Three more photographs of North Leverton windmill today (there will probably be at least a few more to come in future posts too). Today’s pictures were made with my Sure Shot Supreme compact. While it doesn’t provide the same detail as the medium format Zeiss I used for my earlier photos, the 38mm lens was a much better focal length for geting the whole mill in shot.
This next shot is my favourite of the three here. I like the simplicity of it, but there are nice details to be had if you look for them too – the shadow of the windmill’s blades on the left tof the frame, the shed to the right, plus the bell (and what appears to be some sort of cat-flap – although I could quite easily be wrong about this) on the door.
And finally, a detail shot of the bell itself.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 25 July 2020
Down a back street in Retford
Another photograph from my short stop-off in Retford after visiting North Leverton windmill. I was just wandering around looking for pictures when I spotted this back street behing the town hall building that looked like a nice shot.
Overdeveloped again (from the same roll as yesterday’s photo), but I think it works pretty well still.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 25 July 2020
Man in an (overdeveloped) trilby
The first shot on this roll of HP5+. A roll that I’m pretty sure I’ve overdeveloped. From the point of hanging the negatives to dry I had a feeling something was amiss as they looked noticably denser than I might have expected. Once scanned it became apparent that the highlights were much brighter than they should have been and there was more grain than expected along with the loss of some fine detail.
The reson for this, I believe, was my developing the roll on a hot day where controlling the temperature of the developer was difficult. By the time I was ready to start the process, it had risen from 20 degrees to 22.5, so I had to consult the Ilford compensation charts to see how that would affect the time. While the charts are very helpful, they only show compensations for whole degrees, so I made a best guess to put my time somewhere between those quoted for 22 and 23 degrees. I think I should probably have shaved another 15-20 seconds from the time.
I’ve managed to save pretty much every frame with some post-processing tweaks in Lightroom, but they’re not what I’d planned. Still, everything’s a learning experience, eh?
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 7 mins 45 secs @ 22.5°.
Taken on 23 July 2020
Moored on the Cuckoo Way
I took this shot while using up the final frames on this roll of Shanghai GP3. The walk along the towpath beside the Chesterfield Canal is known as The Cuckoo Way and can be followed from Chesterfield all the way to the point where the canal enters the River Trent, approx 50 miles away.
Although it was a very hot and bright day, the place where this canal-boat was moored was in shadow from the trees beside the canal towpath and I had to open the Zeiss to it’s widest aperture to get a decent shutter speed on the 100asa film.
I don’t normally shoot the camera wide open as it performs better when stopped down, plus the uncoupled rangefinder design can make it a bit of a best guess for fine focusing.
In this case though, the boat was far enough away for the focusing to not be too much of a concern and I quite like the way the lens has rendered the scene. It’s hardly some kind of “bokeh monster”, but has given a nice hint of seperation in the focus.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Shanghai GP3. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 10 mins @ 24°.
Taken on 31 July 2020
Another church – Grove St Methodist church, Retford
After mentioning yesterday that I seem to photograph a lot of churches, here’s another one. I didn’t realise that this was a church until just now, when I looked up the location on Google maps. On the day the photo was made, I just noticed an impressive looking building. I didn’t actually go around the front of the structure, where the purpose of the building would have been revealed, instead turning right and heading towards the town centre after taking the shot.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Shanghai GP3. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 10 mins @ 24°.
Taken on 25 July 2020
