People in a gallery

October 21, 2019October 21, 2019 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

I visited HIP Fest at the weekend – Hull International Photography Festival. This is the third year I’ve visited and there are always interesting things to see, both in the exhibition spaces and also in Hull itself.

The photos in today’s post were taken as I was browsing the work of Claire Armitage, who has a series of self-portraits on display in the main atrium area of the shopping centre where most of the exhibitions are placed. I quite liked the framing of the photos on display and people walking past the white wall in the background, so took a few shots.

While I don’t dislike these images – the first one is my favourite – I really should have been patient and waited for further opportunities as the second shot would have been better taken a second earlier, and the woman in the last one is ever-so-slightly out of focus. Alas, I only had a few hours to spare and felt the need to hurry to cram in the other things I wanted to do while there.

This was also the first time I’ve ever pushed film. While Silverfast seemed to want to overexpose all the scans (I got better results using the Pan F 50 setting than HP5+), the one’s I’ve scanned so far have come out pretty well, and the faster shutter speeds that I was able to use were very useful when shooting indoors or in the dark and overcast conditions outside.

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Ilford HP5+ (pushed to 800asa).

Taken on 19 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Sir John Betjeman

October 18, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

This statue of Sir John Betjeman stands in St Pancras railway station, London. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. As well as a lover of railways, he was a vociferous voice in the preservation of ancient buildings and was instrumental in the saving of the St. Pancras station and hotel which had been scheduled for demolition. The station was secured and is now the London terminus for both the Midland Mainline domestic route as well as the international Eurostar service to continental Europe. This sculpture was commisioned for the re-opening of the station following its redevelopment in 2007.

You can watch him talk about railways in this film.

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 9 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Barbican Centre

October 17, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

B B B B Barbican Centre.

A quick post today, but I hope you’ll note how I attempted to align the sides of the forground structures with those of the tower in the rear. Not perfectly, but close enough. 🙂

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 9 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Bench-land

October 14, 2019 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

I guess today’s picture serves as a direct sequel to the one I posted yesterday, given that the two people on the foreground bench appear to be the same couple who were walking through the scene in the other photograph. This wasn’t intentional and I only realised it to be the case after scanning the negatives. but I quite like how it turned out though.

I’ve not photographed the Barbican Centre much before, but it’s a wonderful urban location. Amazing brutalist architecture that is very well maintained and with a wealth of compositional possibilities. I only had a spare 10 minutes to take some photos while passing, but I could happily spend hours there.

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 9 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Three figures at Lauderdale Tower

October 13, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

On my way to a meeting in London recently I was a little early and so managed to grab ten brief minutes of photography at the Barbican Centre, which was on my route. Here’s one of the photographs.

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 9 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Three’s a crowd

October 12, 2019 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

I have to say that I’m very happy to have my Olympus OM-1 back from its repair. I’d not used it for a while and it had developed a shutter issue. The repair cost me around the same as it would have done to buy a new OM-1 body from a reputable dealer, but this is my OM-1, and it’s worth the money to keep it in good working order. It’s probably my favourite 35mm camera, and while I’m still not too keen on the shutter speed selector being on the lens mount (which I find a bit fiddly), it’s otherwise a very satisfying piece of kit to use. It also looks gorgeous – a proper camera if ever there was!

I loaded it with a roll of HP5+ and shot half in Sheffield, and the other half in London (while travelling between the railway station and the meeting venue). This is one of the Sheffield photos.

Olympus OM-1, Zuiko 28mm f/3.5 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 6 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

F. G. Thomas

October 11, 2019 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

My photo today is a street shot, but the intent was mostly to capture F. G. Thomas, which I noticed has now closed it’s retail premises.

The shop had been there as long as I remember (it had actually opened there way back in 1925) so it came as a bit of a shock to see the empty window and for-lease sign. It appears that, as the lease was up for renewal on the premises, the current owners have decided to move their business online as their footfall in the shop had been gradually declining.

I’ve racked my mind, but I can’t honestly remember ever having gone in the shop, much less bought anything, which makes me feel oddly guilty. On the one occasion I bought a fountain pen (they were a requirement for some unknown reason when I started comprehensive school in the 80s), I think it was from WHSmith, just around the corner on Fargate.

I’m glad to have captured the signage of the shop, even if the windows are now empty – the little man with his “is it a globe, or is it a hairnet?” hairstyle was a nice thing to see.

Olympus OM-1, Zuiko 28mm f/3.5 & Ilford HP5+.

Taken on 6 October 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Best before 2007

August 18, 2019August 18, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

A couple of photos today from a roll of expired 200asa film that I shot to test my OM-1 which seems to have developed a fault. The film is branded as Dixons, but a bit of research has led me to believe that it’s Agfa film hiding under the label. Whatever the case, I’ve shot a roll or two of this before and not been unhappy with the results. This time however, there was a much stonger purple cast on the images and I ended up converting most of them to B&W in Lightroom.

A few are ok with just minor tweaks however, including these two, where the reds are quite striking.

Olympus OM-1, Zuiko 28mm f/3.5 & Dixons 200asa film (expired 2007).

Taken on 12 August 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Flower display

August 7, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

I got my OM-1 off the shelf the other week thinking that I haven’t used it for a while (since my holiday in Sorrento last summer, in fact) so I fired off a couple of shots just playing around and noticed that the mirror was staying up when the shutter was fired. I decided to investigate and discovered a partially used roll of Ektar still in the camera! Shutting the back as fast as possible, I quickly realised that this was the roll that I thought had gone missing at some point, clearly having forgotten that I’d loaded it on holiday and taken a few shots.

I decided that, given that the holiday shots were probably ruined, I might as well finish off the roll and see if I could resolve the shutter / mirror business. The same problem kept occuring intermittently, so I was sure that I was losing multiple frames – I’d have to wind on twice before the shutter would cock again – and expected them all to be blank.

What I actually ended up with was several frames that are badly out of focus where the camera had mis-fired in some fashion. All the other frames were ok, and even the holiday snaps hadn’t suffered much in the way of light-leak damage from the opened back (although most of them are nothing to write home about anyway). After removing the roll of film, I test fired the camera at multiple speeds, but couldn’t get it to re-occur. Loading a test film caused it to happen once or twice, but nothing like as much as before.

So I now have a roll of expired film in the camera to test it out properly. So far, fingers crossed, it’s been fine (12 shots in). Maybe the camera was sulking due to my inattention? 🙂

Here’s one of the shots from the roll of last year’s Ektar.

Olympus OM-1, F.Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 & Kodak Ektar.

Taken 3 August 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Sorrento mixer

April 11, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

Here’s a splash of colour to break up the black and white stuff. I’m currently in the process of re-scanning last year’s holiday photos with my newly acquired Plustek 35mm scanner. I was really disappointed with the original scans that I made on the V550 – no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the colours in the Ektar negatives to look right. They all has strange colour casts that I could never fix to my satisfaction.

I’m not sure if the Plustek and Silverfast are giving me accurate Ektar colours (I don’t have any lab scans to compare to), but they’re a quantum leap ahead of my earlier efforts and I’m really happy with them now.