Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
A mixture of the old and modern fill the skyline in the picture I shot while standing on Lady’s Bridge, which spans the River Don at the edge of Sheffield city centre.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 2 February 2025
The canal basin at Victoria Quays is another place I’ve photographed on multiple occasions. This is because 1) There are many interesting subjects to photograph, and 2) It’s right beside a car park with cheap rates that I often use if I’m exploring this part of town.
There are probably other pictures of these buildings on my blog already, but these are two new(ish) ones, which turned out nicely.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 2 February 2025
I seem to have quite a backlog of photographs to post at present. This is mostly a good thing, and far preferable to having nothing new to put on the blog, but at the same time it can become a little overwhelming.
While film, by it’s nature, will always have some delay between shooting and being able to publish the results (I think I’ve only once shot, developed, scanned, and published a film photo on the same day), sometimes it feels like everything I post is out-of-date. I’m always posting stuff that I photographed weeks, if not months ago.
Part of this is due to the way I blog. Posting at least one picture every day means I need to keep up a ready supply of images, something I’m usually ok to do – I enjoy making photographs, and enjoy seeing them revealed even more, so taking a lot of them is enjoyable and something I feel compelled to undertake. At the same time, often due to time constraints (there never seems to be enough of it!), I’ll often only post a single image at a time, meaning a roll of film can result in weeks of blog posts is I’ve had a good hit rate.
Pretty soon I’m going to start posting pictures shot with a Kodak H35N half-frame camera – which gives at least 72 photos from a 36-exposure roll – so I’m going to have to clump those together or it will be autumn before I’m done.
I think some of my perceived problem arises from the fact that I have a tendency to collect (hoard!) things given the opportunity – maybe some ancient instinctive mammalian behaviour coming through – and this includes photogrphs. Whatever the case, I think I’m going to have to fight my instinct to save things, and push out more photos when I’m in this situation, which is why this post contains a bunch of pictures all taken during a hike from Baslow to Chatsworth house. Ideally I would have written a post about the hike, but instead I’ve spent the time on this outpouring. 😀
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
A quartet of trees I photographed while hiking around the grounds of Chatsworth House a couple of months ago.
I like the first of the four the most as it stands out against the sky and background. The second has a miniature fungal forest to add interest, although the light is pretty contrasty. Not as contrasty as the next shot though, where I deliberately metered for the highlights to throw the shadows into darkness. The final tree caught my attention as it looked like it had an old man’s face in right-hand branch of its trunk, although it’s a little difficult to see in the photo and looks a bit like the face of someone with Proteus Syndrome (the condition that afflicted Joseph Merrick, made famous by the movie The Elephant Man).
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
Just up the road from the houses featured in the blog yesterday is a bridge which crosses Bar Brook, a small river (or, I guess, a brook!) which originates on the moors to the north of Baslow before it joins the River Derwent a little further downstream. The sunlight was casting deep shadow beneath the bridge, which I attempted to capture in this picture.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
Nice oblique sunlight and some interesting houses made for a nice shot at the beginning of a walk to Chatsworth House I undertook back in January.
I was umming-and-ahhing about going out with my camera today. The weather has been nice (it’s been nice for the last couple of weeks, in fact), but I wasn’t sure where to go, and I had some other stuff to do around the house but, in the end, I gave myself a kick up the backside and took a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I shot an old roll of Tmax 100 with the Yashica Mat 124G and (hopefully!) should have some nice pictures to share. I do have a backlog again though, so they might be a little while appearing here.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 25 January 2025
In the early days of the new year, before I returned to work, I had a day free to do some photography. The world was my oyster (well, maybe not the world) and I was beset by the angst of choice paralysis – lots of places I might go, but a major struggle deciding on which one to choose. Quite often in these situations I just end up going to the same places I’ve been before – often into Sheffield city centre, or Kelham Island, or somewhere else close but familiar. However I was able to grasp the mettle and make a decision, and pulled Saltaire out of the, er, air.
Saltaire is somewhere I’ve never visited before. It sits to the north west of Bradford which, while not too far away, is still about an hour’s journey in the car. The village (although it’s now kinda merged into the wider Bradford conurbation), was built and named after Titus Salt to house workers employed at his mill, aptly named Salt’s Mill. The streets in the village are named after Salt’s children and other family members.
The mill and village sit beside the River Aire and the Leeds to Liverpool canal and the buildings are built in an Italianate style, which is very photogenic. As well as the mill and the houses, there are a number of other civic buildings, including a church, hospital, school, and others. The village was granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 2001.
The mill contains art galleries, shops, and a restaurant, and was a very nice place to wander around.
It’s a place I think I may revisit at some point as there is much I didn’t see, and lots to photograph.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 2 January 2025
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 for 8 minutes @ 20°
Taken on 2 January 2025
Steel City Snapper photography 