Blessed with fine weather and on a day where I could take advantage of it, I headed out to the area around Padley Gorge and the Longshaw Estate one Saturday morning in early November with the hopes of catching some autumnal scenes.
The pictures posted today are ones I shot on a roll of Lomography Color Negative 400 with my Bronica ETRSi. Tomorrow I’ll post another, smaller set, that I shot on Fujifilm Pro 160NS.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE / Zenzanon 150mm f/3.5 MC & Lomography Color Negative 400. Lab developed, home scanned & converted with Negative Lab Pro.
After yesterdays picture of a somewhat worse-for-wear tree trunk, here’s an altogether healthier looking example.
We put our Christmas decorations up today. This has been done with some trepidation as we have two kittens in the house, both of whom have never experienced Christmas before and who, no doubt, the experience will be full of new things to cause mischief with.
One of them had her curious little snout into everything while the tree and the rest were put up, the other is seemingly afraid of Christmas and went upstairs to hide (although she has since come back down and tentatively poked at the festive garland above the fireplace, and also stolen a small sprig of artificial spruce from a display and hidden under the kitchen table with it). The tree is still standing for now, although a length of tinsel was found to have mysteriously fallen off earlier this afternoon.
The outdoor lights are getting whipped around in the wind, and a section of them seems to have blown into the guttering. That can wait until tomorrow to be remedied though…
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE, & Lomography Color Negative 400. Lab developed, home scanned & converted with Negative Lab Pro.
The trunk of this tree looks a little worse for wear. I assume the damage is the result of animal activity – there are lots of sheep and also deer in the area. Plenty of squirrels too, although this amount of impact looks a little severe for those bushy-tailed creatures.
I’m not sure if it’s the result of teeth or horns / antlers, but it caught my eye and I took a picture.
The original is a colour image but it’s one of those frames that, for some reason, Negative Lab Pro had trouble with and the results had a nasty green and purple tint. The conversion to monochrome resulted in a more satisfying image. It’s not the first image that I’ve had these sort of issues with – sometimes I can spot frames that might be problematical – but this was not one of them. Maybe a visit to the NLP forum might help resolve the issue.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE, & Fujifilm Pro 160NS – converted to B&W in Lightroom. Lab developed, home scanned.
There was little information to be had from this booth given that there was no-one inside. That, coupled with the prison-like bars, made me smile and I made the picture. It’s a little like the phrase used on the satirical Scarfolk Council site: “For more information please re-read“.
These shots required a bit of contortion on my part to try and get things lined up how I wanted, particularly the first image. The shape of the building and the water feature have been nicely rendered by the lens and, while not super-wide, the 28mm focal length gave a nice effect.
We awoke this morning to find it had snowed overnight, with about a couple of inches covering the ground. This would have been a great time to go out and take pictures but, alas, as is so often the case when interesting conditions land in may lap, my time was spoken for – in today’s case to visit my dad and set up a new DVD recorder I ordered for him (he has a lot of old discs that he had no way to watch as is old machine no longer works), and then to visit my aunt and uncle to take up some gifts and cards for Christmas.
So photographing today’s snowy, misty conditions was largely out of the question. I did have chance to go out this afternoon but, after doing my visits in the morning and not getting back home until after one PM, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do so. So now I have this vague sense of a lost opportunity having passed me by. Hopefully there will be more days like this (the conditions, not the sense of loss!). Even more hopefully, my time will not be spoken for and I’ll be able to take advantage of them.
As ever with these sort of “diary” posts, the pictures bear absolutely no connection to the words I’ve written. Both images were made in Leeds back in October on a a day where I did get the chance to make the most of the light.
If you’ve read this blog for a while then you may recall the occasional post I make where I moan about what a drag it can be sometimes to post every day (approaching five full years of consecutive posts now). Sometimes I just don’t have anything I want to say. Other times I have plenty to say but don’t have the time (or sometimes, the inclination) to put pen to paper (or, I guess, fingers to keyboard). Some days I’d just rather be doing something else.
I feel like I’ve been having a bit of a run of those days recently. That’s not to say that there haven’t been any longer posts – there have – but I feel like the frequency of the quick posts where I just fart out a sentence or two and have done with it has been on the rise.
I think this is a symptom of a wider issue I have where I feel I don’t have enough time. And this is true – I don’t. But it’s also true that I waste too much of the time I have doing things that probably don’t matter. Most often, this will be reading stuff online – not articles, features, or long-form pieces, but social media-type lightweight content. It’s like junk food – it’s very tempting, but it’s all empty calories.
Maybe there’s a new-year’s resolution in here. To stop wasting time with the stuff that doesn’t really matter – or at least cut back on it. In that half-hour I spend on Reddit (or wherever) I could have read a couple of chapters of a book, a good feature about something interesting and mentally nourishing, or maybe put together a longer blog post.
Ironically, as is always the case when I post about this stuff, I’ve written a lot more than usual, despite moaning about not having the time to do so.
A short post for a Friday evening. It’s been a stressful week at work (and next week isn’t looking much better) due to a task that I don’t really know how to approach just yet, and I can’t think of anything profound to write. I’m just going to try and kick back and play videogames and watch some TV.
