Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
There will be a number of snowy photographs to come over the next few days – the results of a brief spell of wintery weather where I actually got chance to go out and take advantage of it before it went away. Most of the shots were taken in a rural setting, but this one – in a brief section of my walk that went through a suburban area – turned out particularly nicely, I think.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins 30 secs @ 20°
Taken 11 March 2023.
This is the last of the four large-format air museum pictures that I was able to salvage. The other four are just too much of a PITA for me to try and remedy the light leaks, This is the only HP5+image that I think passes muster – and it’s the one where the light leak is probably most obvious, despite my attempts to hide it. I still think I somehow managed a pretty good rescue attempt though.
The aircraft in the picture is an Avro Shackleton, a post-WWII aircraft developed for anti-submarine warfare and maritime patrol duties. 185 aircraft were produced.
Chroma 4×5. Fujinon NW 135mm f/5.6 & Fomapan 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 12 mins @ 20°
Taken 7 April 2023.
More farm stuff today, this time another silo / tank seen from two vantage points. While I was unsure as to the specific use of the silos and equipment in yesterday’s pictures, the one featured today I feel I can be more certain about.
The silo features the branding of “Yara” which, after a quick search on Google, is a company that specialises in providing fertilizers, including liquid fertilizers (which is what I believe is stored in the tank seen in the pictures today).
I promise more exciting (and incredibly undetailed) farm-storage equipment posts to come, but not for a few days. Don’t get too excited. 🙂
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
As a city boy I know little detail about farming beyond the basics – the sort of stuff that I imagine most people will know. I pick up additional knowledge from watching TV shows like Countryfile on BBC One (although I don’t watch that nearly as much these days), or Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime Video which, despite it’s host’s tomfoolery, has a surprising amount to say about the challenges facing farmers in the UK today.
The structures in today’s photos then are slightly mysterious. There are silos in both shots, and I expect that these will hold harvested crops or possibly silage or animal feed. But I don’t know for definite.
The second image shows a structure that wouldn’t look out of place in a chemical plant, and is to my ignorant eye, even more mysterious. There are a whole host of pipes and ducts, some connected to the barn, and a huge vent poking out the side. What is this for? I’m guessing that perhaps it treats harvested crops in some way, perhaps drying them, or perhaps helping to ferment grass into animal feed. Againthough, I really don’t know.
What I do know is that they can make for interesting photographs.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
I was drawing a blank on what to talk about today, so I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about my picture:
Across a small and verdant field,
A farmhouse stands with pride and yield,
With a fence of white tape that’s real,
Where horses roam and sometimes feel.
The fence divides the field in two,
A line that’s clear and pure in hue,
It’s a place where horses gallop through,
With grace and strength they shine anew.
The farmhouse has seen many days,
Where love and life have found their ways,
From spring’s first buds to autumn’s blaze,
The memories linger and never erase.
With windows bright and walls of stone,
The farmhouse feels like home alone,
It’s a place where peace and joy are sown,
And the heart and soul are fully grown.
So let the horses run and play,
In the field with the fence of white tape,
As the farmhouse watches from far away,
A place of beauty, serenity and grace.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
I have a task to complete. It has to be done by Friday. I have enought time to complete it, and yet…
I seemingly have an inate ability to sabotage myself via the medium of procrastination. Instead of just knuckling down and getting the job done, my mind wanders, I am distracted by less important things, and the time passes while I put off doing the task at hand. At some point (I’m probably already at this stage now) I will start to feel stressed and anxious at the situation I find myself in, worried that I will not be finished in time.
This happens on many occasions and, while I usually manage to get things done on time, I always worry that maybe this time will be the occasion where I don’t suddenly pull a rabbit out of the hat and end up in some sort of trouble instead.
I have a self-diagnosed (always a great thing, thanks Internet!) suspicion that I might have Attention Defecit Disorder – have always had it probably – but it feels more noticeable to me now. Most of the symptoms are bang on the nail. Whether a symptom of getting older, or perhaps because I have more responsibility, I don’t know.
I’ve made decent progress today. Now to see if I can make the most of the relatively free day I have tomorrow.
A random shed picture follows…
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
No photography stuff for me today. I have a roll of film to develop but I couldn’t be bothered with faffing around with that (or rather, all the getting stuff out, and then having to wash it all and put it away again afterwards). The weather has been overcast, although with some definition in the cloud cover, but after walking around Leeds taking pictures yesterday I didn’t feel the need to go out agin today. Yesterday’s trip left me with a full roll of HP5+ (the one I have to develop) and also some Provia 100 to be sent off to the lab (fingers crossed as it’s an expired roll).
So instead, after my dad came over to visit, I spent the day watching TV and YouTube. Sometimes it maked me feel a bit guilty that I didn’t use my free time more productively, but at the same time sometimes a day vegging on the sofa is a productive use of time in terms of re-charging your batteries.
A friend of mine once said the following: “When I say I’m doing nothing, that doesn’t mean I’m free. It means I’m busy doing nothing.“. Sometimes doing nothing is what you need.
Here’s a random photo of a house. Not mine, and not the one I’ve been vegging out in.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 50mm f/2.8 MC & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
Today’s picture is another that would have fit well in my post about converging verticals that I published a couple of days back. It’s another image where the converging lines work well to produce a sense of scale in the composition, the buildings towering over the viewer (and the people in the scene) even though they are relatively low-rise structures.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 50mm f/2.8 MC & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
I posted last week about my ill-fated attempt to photograph some light-trails for a photo competition entry. The following evening I made a second attempt and, thanks to removing the dark-slide this time, this one was successful. I made three exposures and like the one here the best (the first two are very similar to one-another, but you can’t see the mororway snaking into the distance as well as you can on this one).
I exposed the film for 8 seconds at f/22. I used a digital camera to meter the scene which gave me a 4 second exposure, but I had to factor in some reciprocity failure for the HP5+. I calculated it as requiring 6 seconds, but the ETRSi only had 4sec or 8sec setting, so I erred for the longer exposure and it seems to have worked pretty well.
If I’d had enought time to get ist developed before the competition closing date I’d have used colour film instead, which would have been much more effective, but beggars can’t be choosers and I’m pretty happy with the results I got in the end.
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 24 February 2023.
A chap I know who shoots exclusively in large format claimed that I’d damaged his eyes with the converging verticals in the shot below. He suggested I take the picture again with my 4×5 camera. He was joking, of course, but it did make me think about the opposition to this geometrical distortion when it occurs in photographs.
Converging verticals seem to cause quite some consternation when they appear in photographs – the photography club I used to be a member of had photo competitions where, should your vertical lines not be perfectly perpendicular, you would lose points and receive a judgemental comment from the, well, judge. It was this sort of arbitrary nonsense that, in combination with covid shutting everything down for some time, led to me stopping attending, even though the other club members were all very nice people (and I should emphasize, the judges were not members of the club).
Converging verticals are how things appear to the eye though, so attempts to “correct” them is inheritantly false unless the photograph was made from a location where they do not occur, such as ensuring the camera is aligned with the ground, or you are so far away that the effect becomes minimised by distance. Stand at the foot of a tall structure though, especially one with regular features such a an office building with regularly spaced windows, and look up and you will see converging verticals. It’s just perspective. In exactly the same way that a long straight road will appear to narrow to a point in the distance, so looking up at a tall building will show the same effect. And I never hear anyone complain that photographs of roads should have the perspective corrected.
I do think that some shots can work well if the verticals are all perpendicular, especially where the angle of convergence is only slight but, as a counterpoint, convergence can add a sense of scale. The photo published here today does this, even though the buildings are not tall. Combined with the steep street the buildings appear to loom over the viewer.
I am kinda interested in seeing what the same scene would look like “corrected” by the movements on my large format camera though. 🙂
Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 50mm f/2.8 MC & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°
Taken 5 February 2023.
Steel City Snapper photography 