Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
A mini theme today, with a couple of shots of trees at the Port of Malaga. That cruise ship in the background? Yeah, you’ll be seeing more of that soon.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f.3.5-5.6 AF-D & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro
Taken 18 August 2023.
Following on from yesterday’s post about typos, after a bit of faffing about in Firefox I now seem to have a working spell checker when typing blog posts. Hopefully, from now on, there will be fewer spelling errors in my posts!
I have to thank adventurepdx for suggesting that Chrome has a spellcheck feature which might need to be switched on. While I currently use Firefox rather than Chrome, his comment pushed me to see if that browser had a similar feature and if it also needed to be activated, and it did! I now get a bunch of easy-to-spot wiggly lines beneath my many typos, making them much easier to spot and fix.
So, thanks adventurepdx for throwing me a life ring. 🙂
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f.3.5-5.6 AF-D & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro
Taken 18 August 2023.
One of my pet peeves with writing this blog on WordPress is the number of typos that end up in my posts. It’s kinda embarrassing to see them because, generally speaking, I can spell words correctly. Sure, I might have to look an unusual word up sometimes, but most of the time I’m just fine.
So off I’ll go, clacking away on the keyboard, the words falling onto the screen while, unbeknownst to me, I’m actually sprinkling a load of misspelt crap in there at frequent intervals. What makes things worse is that I often don’t notice this until after I submit the post, sometimes only when I re-read a much earlier post, whereupon I feel duty bound to correct them and hide my shame.
Back when I first started this blog, WordPress had a very handy spellchecker built into the editor which would highlight any errors. But then, for reasons unknown, they removed it. I guess there might still be spellcheckers available as plug-ins, but last time I looked (admittedly quite a long time ago) there were only premium versions available. Maybe I’ll look again.
Anyway, I can only apologise for my lack of editorial care and make some sort of half-hearted promise that I’ll try to do better in this regard.
I have checked this post carefully for typos. 🙂
The picture today contains no typos. I like the abstract nature of it.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f.3.5-5.6 AF-D & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro
Taken 18 August 2023.
Back at the end of July my wife and I visited The Great British Food Festival at Hardwicke Hall in Derbyshire. Although the event took place in the grounds at the rear of the hall, there was no entry to the building itself, so maybe I’ll make another visit to see that sometime.
But it was the food festival that we were attending, to which my wife had bought tickets months earlier. It’s not something we’ve done before, so I didn’t know quite what to expect, but it was essentially a whole range of stalls selling all manner of produce, including meats, pastries, ice cream, biscuits, alcoholic beverages, crisps – loads of stuff. In addition to this there were a bunch of food vendors selling pizzas, burgers, gyros, jerk chicken, hot dogs and a variety of other walkaround foods. There were also live cooking demonstrations on a number of topics throughout the day, and also live music and children’s entertainments.
The weather on the day was forecast to be a mixture of sunshine and cloud, but around lunchtime we were also paid a visit by a short-lived but sqally rain shower, necessitating me eating my lunch beneath an umbrella kindly held over my head by my better half (she’d already eaten her pizza while I was waiting for my jerk chicken to be served).
The rain came down pretty heavily during the shower, forcing people to seek shelter wherever they could find it, including, amusingly, beneath some oversized deckchairs, which I managed to photograph. The wind became quite gusty too, at one point blowing a free-standing flag out of the ground and depositing it atop a tressle table where some people were determinedly trying to eat their food in the rain!
After the rain passed, the sun soon reappeared and the rest of the day was bright, warm, and pleasant, although you can still see the slowly retreating rain clouds in some of the pictures.
After lunch, we spent some time watching a barbeque cook-off in one of the marquee tents in the centre of the field, the format based on the TV show Ready, Steady, Cook – each chef given a selection of ingredients and then making something from them. One of the chefs made skewers of chorizo and vegetables which was very nice (we all got so sample a small piece), the other a marinated pork dish which, while also nice, didn’t pack the same flavour punch as the Spanish sausage.
On the whole, apart from the spell of rain, it was a nice day out. We spent quite a lot on produce from the stalls, including some delicious Portugese custard tarts. I suppose you might as well spoil yourself if you’re going to attend these things, hadn’t you? 🙂
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f.3.5-5.6 AF-D & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro
Taken 29 July2023.
I’m back with the third of my expired film adventures. When I started this series (and I use that term in a loose sense) I think I might have mentioned doing one every month and, for the first two at least, I was true to my word. But it’s now been almost five months since the last entry, so apologies to anyone who was waiting with baited breath. I do still intend to keep doing these though, and hopefully more frequently.
This roll is the youngest one featured to date, being a sprightly nineteen years over its expiry date of 2003. It’s another colour film, this time both in 135 format, and also, I think it’s fair to say, a consumer grade stock. I have actually shot another roll of this previously and you can see some posts containing the results here. I shot the previous roll at box speed and, while I got some nice results, they were somewhat grainy and more than a little vivid, so for this roll I decided to overexpose by a stop and shoot it at 100asa.
But first a little background on the film, and how I got it.
Truprint were a mail order photo processing outfit where you wuld post your rolls of film out in a special envelope and then, a couple of weeks later, you would receive a set of prints AND a free roll of film to shoot more. The Truprint brand was still in business as a photo printing outfit up until fairly recently until it was bought out by Snapfish. Truprint provided a variety of films in the usual 100, 200, and 400asa varieties but these were, I believe, re-branded stocks from other manufacturers. The Big Film Database shows Agfa and Ferrania as the most likely originators of the film stocks used by Truprint. The roll I shot here was Truprint FG+ – a 200asa film, and one which appears to have been manufactured by Ferrania. Although the Big Film Database doesen’t specify this, other sources seem to indicate this particular stock was Ferrania Solaris.
I got hold of my two rolls from a lady who had found them in their fridge in her garage and who had asked online if they would be of any use to anyone. She told me they had always been in the fridge since purchase, which was a good sign, and was the main reason I chanced shooting the first roll at box speed.
I decided to shoot this second roll partially for some multiple-exposure photography I was attempting, for which I didn’t want to risk wasting a more expensive roll of film, but as I had no intention of using the whole roll for this purpose, I also went out on a sunny autumn morning to shoot a bunch of other frames of whatever subject matter I could find. I ended up in the Attercliffe area of the city – a former industrial area home to Sheffield’s once vast steel industry, but which has now become home to service businesses, retail, and entertainment outlets (although there is still a lot of industry in abundance, including steel foundries). Most of the pictures feature Sheffield Forgemasters, a heavy engineering firm that has been in existence since 1805. In the 1980s the company attracted controversy for it’s part in the Iraqi Supergun Affair, and in 2021 was nationalised because of it’s importance to the nation’s defence industry.
So, on to the results.
This roll came out very nicely indeed, possibly due to the overexposure, or perhaps it had just fared better than its companion roll. Whatever the case I would not be disappointed with these if they had come from a fresh roll of film – the grain is minimal and the colours look natural with just a hint of warmth (and that might just be in the way I processed the pictures in Negative Lab Pro and Lightroom). I’m very happy with the photos and would happily shoot more Truprint FG+ (if I had any).
Overall outcome: Success!
Expiriment #4 coming soon (I hope…)…
Nikkon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D, Truprint FG+ (expired 2003). Shot at 100asa and lab developed for box speed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 22 October 2022
Other posts in the Expiriment series:
I didn’t go inside this cafe on this visit to Mablethorpe, although I have on previous trips. There’s something comforting about sitting in a cafe with views out over the sea, with a hot drink, and maybe a snack as you contemplate the world outside.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
Facing East North East, this vantage-point looks out across the North Sea towards Denmark which lies approximately 350 miles away.
Like many fences and railings in touristy places, the cables have been decorated with “love locks” and the odd bouquet of flowers. I wonder how many of the people who place these padlocks remain in the relationships they represent, and whether they ever come back and remove them if they don’t last? This is assuming that they can be removed of course – I suspect a good squirt of WD-40 might be needed in a lot of cases, especially where the salt air has had time to do its work, and I also wonder if love struck couples don’t just dispose of the keys anyway, another symbol of everlasting love?
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
Almost a year to the day I took the last one, here’s another photo of the fire station at Mablethorpe. I think the Velvia has done this one proper justice.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
I came across this building while wandering. I’ve no idea what it was used for in the past although, as it’s in the midst of some sizeable caravan sites, it might have been a club or something similar. It’s considerably overgrown with shrubs at the front now.
The Velvia blue skies make it look kinda nice though, despite its disuse.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
It wouldn’t be a trip to the seaside without a photo of some chalets or beach huts. Well, perhaps it would for non-photographers, but for me they’re almost an obligation to photograph when I see them, especially as I don’t visit the coast all that often.
This expired Velvia 50 has really done it’s work on that blue sky, hasn’t it?
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Fukichrome Velvia 50 (expired 2011). Lab developed & home scanned.
Taken on 17 September 2022
Steel City Snapper photography 