Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
Just a pair of brown leather boots, for sale outside a shop in Castleton. Think of this as product photography. 🙂
Yashica Mat 124G & Fujifilm Pro 400H. Lab developed, home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 May 2024
Yashica Mat 124G & Fujifilm Pro 400H. Lab developed, home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 May 2024
Back on the 26th September 2021, I wrote a post marking my one thousandth day of consecutive posting. Today, a little under three years later, marks the two thousandth.
I always find milestone posts like this to be difficult. They’re the sort of thing that would normally be celebrated – in that way that we humans seem to like celebrating things that reach a certain, nicely shaped, number. I’m quite a modest person though, so shouting out about my achievements isn’t something I relish or feel particularly comfortable about. I would probably have had greater success in some aspects of my life had I “bigged myself up” a little more, but I’ve always felt that my achievements should speak for themselves, and not be reliant on too much self promotion.
So here I am, having posted without fail for the last two thousand days, and instead of a party, it’s more of an acknowledgement. I reached a big number, and tomorrow I will surpass it (and why will my two-thousand-and-first post be less worthy of celebration anyway?).
It might be nice if I had some sort of special “2,000th post” image that I’ve saved for the occasion, but I don’t, so I’m going to use a picture I took on a trip to Castleton back in May. It shows a gap in a drystone wall part way up Cave Dale. It feels somehow optimistic in tone – a gateway to whatever might come next, I suppose.
Yashica Mat 124G & Fujifilm Pro 400H. Lab developed, home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 May 2024
A couple more shots of the canal today. Despite the slightly industrial quality of some of the bridges, it’s actually quite scenic down there.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
A couple of photos of the Sheffield & Tinsley Canal in Sheffield.
I publish this while listening to excited chatter on the TV news about a July General Election. About time!
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
It seems that, whenever a new building is being built in Sheffield, that there’s a good chance that it it will belong to the university (or one of the universities, I should say, as there are two). This part of the formerly industrial district of Attercliffe has not escaped, and there are several new buildings in place, some new development underway, as well as a host of sports facilities (which is perhaps as it should be, as the area used to be the home of the now demolished Don Valley Stadium that was originally erected for the World Student Games that was held in the city in 1991.
The building in the background in the above picture is the English Institute for Sport. Below is another view. I wasn’t sure if the masts are a structural feature, or there for show, but a quick online search reveals that they support the building’s roof.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
Last month I took my Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 folding camera for it’s first outing in quite some time – about two years, in fact!
It’s quite a nice camera, if a little slow to operate due to its uncoupled rangefinder design which requires focus to be achieved by means of a dial on top of the camera that operates the rangefinder, and then manually transferring the distance on the dial to the lens itself. The lens is quite nice though and gives good results if you set it correctly. Plus, of course, the folding design means it can be slipped into a pocket (ok, a big-ish pocket).
Transferring the focus distance is straightforward enough but, if you’re not paying attention (or haven’t used the camera in a while!) it can be easy to make mistakes where some of the distances have half marks. This is what happened on this outing, and I only realised after I’d taken four or five pictures. I hoped that my use of small apertures might have reduced any focus issues, but on looking at the scans, a few frames are noticeably soft.
The two shots shared here are ok though, as are some others that I’ll share over the next few days. Hopefully I’ll pay closer attention next time I shoot with the camera.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
The pictures today show The Grey Ladies, a stone circle that stands on Harthill Moor in the Derbyshire Peak District between Youlgreave and Elton.
Also known as Nine Stones Close, the circle dated back to the Late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age and is likely at least three thousand years old. It’s an odd thought to think that, over thirty centuries ago, people stood where I did and built this.
Although named Nine Stones Close, there are just four stones present in the arrangement today (although in the mid 19th century there were still seven – one of these now stands as a nearby gatepost while another lays in a field some distance to the north.). The site was excavated in the 19th century, and some consercation work took place in the 1930s to re-stand two of the stones which had fallen.
Folklore says that the stones will sometimes dance at midday and midnight, and the “Nine” in the name Nine Stones Close may be a corruption of “Noon”, when fairies were said to gather to dance at the site.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 26 March 2024
Finding old, abandoned cars isn’t that easy in the UK. Anything unroadworthy (which includes most old cars) is, well, off the road. In most cases this will mean scrappage of the vehicle. Even scrap yards seem to be a thing of the past. All the old yards, where you could wander between aisles of teetering wrecks piled atop one another, looking for a spare wing mirror or replacement windscreen wiper motor for your own, still functioning, ride, seem to have disappeared. They’ve been lost to tightening of laws and regulations and, to some extent probably, online sales of used parts.
While this isn’t a junkyard, finding these old cars (including a couple of Vauxhall’s – A Chevette, and a Nova) by the side of a footpath, was a pleasant surprise. These scenes may not be pretty but they’re certainly photogenic.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 26 March 2024
Today’s photo is from a hike I took back in March. There will be a post or two about the full hike coming soon, but before then I’ll share some medium format pictures I made with my Yashica Mat 124G alongside the bulk that I shot with my Olympus XA3.
This farm sits in the hilly Peak District countryside between Elton to the south and Youlgreave to the north.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 26 March 2024
Steel City Snapper photography 