It’s been a nice day today. Blue skies with hints of high altitude clouds and slowly spreading contrails from passing aircraft. It was cold, with a frost that required clearing the ice from the car before I could drive.

While I’d hoped to do some photography, I hadn’t planned on going out especially early, but I woke just before seven AM and after procrastinating within the warmth of the bed, decided that it might be worth getting up and making the most of the morning light.

I’ve been wanting to get out with the large format camera again after the disappointment of the last outing, and the day would have been ideal as, in addition to the good light, there was also little wind, something that can be a hindrance when shooting large format cameras. However, I also had two partially shot rolls of film in other cameras.

I sometimes find that partially shot rolls are a distraction. It”s perhaps just the weird neurodivergent way that my brain works, but I like to finish a roll before starting another one, so having two rolls with un-shot frames waiting to be used was pulling some strings in my head. One was a roll of Portra 160 that I’d half shot a couple of weeks ago with the Bronica ETRSi (on the day of the large format disappointment, in fact) which had about half the fifteen frames left. The other a 35mm roll of Kodak Gold that’s been in my Canon Sure Shot Z135 for a while (since the end of October, maybe) which still had about a third of the roll still to be used. While it’s not always possible, I much prefer to finish a complete roll of film than to have some left over. At the same time I don’t want to waste film on “nothing shots” just to use it up. Rock, meet hard place…

So this morning I decided to forgo the large format stuff and instead finish at least one of these partially consumed rolls of film. I had no real plan on where I would go (sometimes this is a problem all of it’s own that leads to me going nowhere due to not being able to make my mind up) but I remembered a scene that I’d passed a few weeks previously but been unable to take advantage of – some blocks of high-rise flats lit by the early sunshine. Not far from this is another location that I felt might be promising at this time of the day too, and from there I could drive out into the countryside and just see what might catch my eye. Not the most structured plan I’ve ever had, but certainly better than complete indecision.

In the end the morning turned out quite nicely and I managed to finish the roll of Portra, although about half-a-dozen frames remain on the Kodak Gold, so that one will keep nagging at me for a while longer, especially as I’ll hold out on getting the first roll developed as it’s more cost effective to send multiple rolls of film to the lab than to post them individually.

Sadly I can’t show you any of these photos today for the aforementioned reason, but they’ll appear at some point (although the way my backlog is, it might be sometime in 2024!). So, instead, here’s another picture from London. It’s a curiously old-fashioned looking picture showing the rear of the Apollo Theatre that (apart from the 20mph sign and the double-yellow lines on the road) probably wouldn’t have looked much different had it been taken in the 1950s.

Olympus OM-1N, G-Zuiko Auto-W 35mm f/2.8 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 @ 20° 9mins.

Taken 9 September 2023.