My wife and I have been on a coach trip today – something we haven’t done for quite some time, a few decades at least! We normally drive when we have a day out, or rather I drive, and my wife takes the passenger seat, so the idea of someone else doing the work while I got the chance to look out the window and enjoy the scenery without fear of taking the car off the road was an appealing novelty.
We visited Skipton and Harrogate, both towns in North Yorkshire and the day was enjoyable. It’s been a very long day though and I haven’t had chance to upload any new photos or think of much to talk abou , so today’s picture is one from a previous set.
I didn’t take a huge number of photos on today’s trip, but the ones I did will show up here at some point assuming they’re any good.
I already posted a shot of this path in an earlier post – that one shot with my OM-2n on Delta 100. This was made shortly afterwards and a little further down the path.
These clear skies show how the Sure Shot Supreme tends to vignette – something I’ve found to be the case in a number of compact 35mm cameras – but it’s not an unpleasant effect.
Penny Hill turbine Stands rotating in the breeze Making clean power
A couple of weeks ago I went for a walk along a previously unexplored path. The route took me from Aston, a village / district on the easternmost edge of Sheffield, north over the fields towards Penny Hill Wind Farm, then cuting to the east to cross the M1 motorway on a farm bridge. From there, back towards the south, across the M1 at the busy Junction 31 roundabout, and through Aston again to where I began.
There will be a number of photos to come from this walk in the next few days and I shot both black-and-white and colour images. Today’s post features a quartet of photos from the first half of the walk.
This first image is the lane from Aston down to a farm at the bottom of the dip. In the distance, at middle-left, one of the large wind turbines at Penny Hill can be seen peeking above the trees.
Climbing the hill past the farm up to the top of the ridge brings the turbines into more prominence, as well as a mobile transmitter and another antenna of some sort over on the left of the frame – at night this one can be seen lit with red aircraft warning lights.
Approaching the mobile tower, the turbines now take prominence along the top of the ridge, although they are still quite some distance away.
Heading east across the fields towards the nearby motorway, I turn and make a photo of the path along which I have walked.
Out across the fields Feeling the bite of the air Crisp and cold and bright
A short section of the Trans Pennine trail close to the western entranct to Rother Valley Country Park. At the end, it cuts to the left on the park entrance path, crosses a bridge over an active railway line, before dropping back to run alongside the tracks to the north for half-a-mile or so. This area was covered in a lot more foliage until the last year, when some tree felling and trimming has taken place. Just off to the left of the scene where the trail curves around the path is a pile of thin logs that remain from the work.
Curving path heads on Up north and to points beyond And then east and west
I think that this is my favourite shot from the roll I put through the Holga on the recent snowy day (although not the most recent lot though. We had another fall this morning that caused chaos for early morning drivers on their way to work – my wife included).
I like the way the birches lean across the path here and the snow adds a special touch. The lone figure further down the path is the icing on the cake.
Footprints and bike tracks Evidence of exercise On a winter’s day
I mentioned yesterday how I’d spent ages dust-spotting some Fomapan 100 negatives. A number of people replied to the post, so I thought I’d give a bit of a follow-up today.
I’ve now completed the chore. Well, on the photos I intend to upload, at least. It was an absolute pain in the backside. It would seem that I’d clear all the spots, only to then notice just as many secondary spots, and each image took a good half-an-hour at least of clicking away to remove them – and even then I’m sure there are many that I’ve missed. But I think I’d gone past caring by that point!
As I’ve not had the same problems with dust spots on any other rolls recently (I always dust the work area carefully before scanning and, while some dust always sneaks in, I rarely get lots of it), I began to wonder if it was something to do with the either the film specifically, or perhaps my development. All my home developed films have been processed in Ilfotec DD-X, then Ilford stop-bath and rapid fixer. The developer is always freshly prepped for a one-shot use and, while the stop-bath and fixer get re-used, they should both be fine for a little while yet (they’ve had around 10 rolls through them). A roll of HP5+ that was developed after the roll of Fomapan shows no signs of the same problem.
An example of the issue. This is an enlargement of one of the frames that shows clearly the speckling of white spots.
So I decided to look at the last roll of Fomapan 100 I shot – this was a couple of months back – and found that it too had the same issue with dust. I decided to search online for “white spots on Fomapan 100” and it led me to a few places where people would report similar problems – sometimes going so far as to describe it as a “Milky Way” effect. I’m not sure I would go that far, but I got the gist. One post had some example pictures whic matchen mine very closely in terms of the spotting problem. It seems to be an intermittent issue.
I’ve now come to the opinion that I might have a bad batch of Fomapan 100, which is a bit of a pain as I bought ten rolls of it! I guess I’ll have to try another roll and see what it gets me. While the film is still useable, the post-processing required to get rid of the spots is not something to be relished.
Oh well, there are worse things happening in the world, so I’m sure I can live with this minor inconvenience.
Here’s one of the shots from the roll that has had a lengthy clean-up applied.
Yashica Mat 124G & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
Keeping to the theme of gates that I’ve loosely adhered to over the past few days, here’s another one that I made (the photo, not the gate!) during a walk I took on Spring Bank Holiday. It was the first photo I took during the walk and marked the place where the footpath left a field and rose up the embankment of a disused railway line. I’d have made the photo even had the gate been pristine, but I was especially taken by its somewhat tired and well-used appearance.
Normally, when metering for photos with meter-less cameras (the Yashica Mat does have a meter, but I’ve never used it) I take an incident reading. As long as I’m stood in similar light to my subject then it tends to work out well. Today’s photograph is one of the relatively few I’ve made using spot metering. The main reason for this is that I don’t have a proper spot meter. The Sekonic L-208 that I use is fairly basic but accurate in most regards, but the spot meter has an somewhat wide angle of 40° IIRC and no means to aim it precisely unless the subject is right in front of you.
This photo was an occasion where I thought spot metering would give a better overall exposure. The gate and foreground was in full daylight, but the footpath up the embankment was in much deeper shade, so I decided to take a spot meter reading for both and then average it to get an exposure that would give me some details in the shadows without blowing out the brighter parts of the scene. Maybe not Ansel Adams levels of technique, but I think it worked well enough in this case.
Yashica Mat 124G & Ilford Pan-F Plus. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
Back in January 2018 I took this photo. I liked the location, and the area it was taken (the Moss Valley to the southeast of Sheffield) is a very pleasant agricultural area criss-crossed with footpaths and narrow lanes, and dotted with pockets of woodland. Although I’ve re-visited the Moss Valley a few times since then – albeit not as often as I’d have liked – I’ve not returned to the place where the linked photograph was taken until this weekend just gone.
Today’s photograph was taken on the same footpath as that shot, although just a little further down the hill. The main difference between the pictures is the height of the crops in the field through which the footpath cuts. In the previous shot the field shows nothing but early signs of growth, while in the recent shot, the crop (I believe that it’s Oilseed Rape) is almost ready for harvest. Had I ventured here a couple of months ago it would have been in full bloom and presented itself as a sea of vibrant yellow. Maybe I’ll return for that next year.
Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+.
There’s an impressive flight of steps that descends the side of the hill down to the road where this house stands. I didn’t venture down them on this instance though, just took this shot before the roll of film ran out. As it was the final frame, there was some damage to part of the negative and so it’s been cropped to a square format. The light wasn’t great and I shot this wide open, which has resulted in a nice effect from the resulting shallow depth of field on the foreground.
Steel City Snapper photography 