Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
Fishing boats rest upon the muddy harbour bed waiting for the tide to raise them once more.
Fishing boats waiting
While gulls forage the harbour
Soon the tide will turn
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°.
Taken on 27 May 2021
Gotta be quick today, so here’s a photo of some rope on a harbour wall.
On the harbour wall
A great heap of rope lies coiled
Like a sleeping snake
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°.
Taken on 27 May 2021
Following on from yesterday’s photo of the lobster pots, here’s the same location from a different point of view – this time a little further north up the shore. This was taken on a roll of Colorplus that was in the camera before I switched over to the Superia 100 that I used for yesterday’s shot.
I don’t live particularly close to the coast (although that’s probably not saying that much in the UK where it’s never more than about 70 miles to the sea (as the crow flies at least), so enjoy grabbing photos when I get the chance to visit.
The large building at the upper left of the frame is the Grand Hotel which, when it opened in 1867 was the largest in Europe. When viewed from above, it can be seen to be in the shape of a letter V, a tribute to Queen Victoria.
Pentax Espio 140M & Fuji Superia 100 (expired 2008).
Taken on 13 July 2019
The Pentax Espio 140M that I bought for the princely sum of £1 at the steam rally the other week seems to work ok. It’s sharp (although maybe not quite as sharp as the Canon Sure Shot’s I own), and is very compact. The lens still seems pretty decent even when zoomed, and it has a range of metering and focussing modes that neither of my Sure Shot’s have.
It also has a panorama mode. At last, I can get those Hasselblad X-Pan type shots I always dreamed of. Well, kinda. Panorama mode here, like many other 35mm compacts with the feature, is actually achieved by way of a mask that blocks part of the frame, so all you’re really getting is a standard 35mm shot but with big black bars obscuring the top and bottom of the image. The same mask is visible in the viewfinder when the setting is activated, which does make composing the shots straightforward.
While it won’t give the resolution that an X-Pan (or a medium format camera with 35mm back) will provide, the results aren’t too bad, even if they could easily be achieved with any other camera by just cropping your image.
So, without further ado, here are four panoramas taken with the camera. Can you guess which two are actually just crops of a full 35mm frame done in Lightroom because I’d badly composed the images in-camera? 🙂
Pentax Espio 140M & Fuji Superia 100 (expired 2008).
Taken on 13 July 2019
Steel City Snapper photography 