I’ve visited the Kelham Island area of Sheffield many times, but I’d never wandered down through the Little Kelham area before. Here are a few photos I took on my first wander through.
Here’s the main entry into the area with evidence of the area’s industrial heritage.
There are streets of modern housing and apartments, such as this.
Amongst the modern buildings are older structures including this one, now housing a Sardinian restaurant fronted by a row of parasols catching the sunlight.
While the area is occupied by numerous residents, development continues to gentrify the area.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
A couple of photographs of the River Don taken from the Ball Street bridge on a lovely September morning a few weeks back.
Every time I use my Olympus Trip 35 it rewards me with beautiful images, sharp and well-exposed. It’s a camera I really need to use more often and perhaps in conjunction with my XA3 – another Olympus zone-focus model. Perhaps one with B&W and one with colour for flexibility of choice when shooting.
More Olympus Trip 35 pictures to come over the next week or so…
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I received the sad news yesterday that my local film lab appears to have closed down. I last used them about a month ago to process the roll of Portra 800 which I’ve been sharing photos from the past few days and had planned to drop another roll of C41 off in the next week. I took a look at their website the other evening and noticed that it appeared to be offline, just displaying a blank page with no content, but assumed a temporary problem. But then, yesterday, someone else mentioned that there were posts on Twitter about it having been closed when it was visited in person and that the nearby businesses reported no-one has been seen for over a week. Some people on Twitter are concerned because they have posted film to be developed and now have no idea what has happened to their rolls.
I don’t know the precise cause of the closure, but it would appear to have been quite sudden.
I’m sad about this happening. They were a good lab with friendly and helpful staff (to whom I send my thoughts that they are ok). I stopped using them quite as much during and following the pandemic as, when they had to close for a few months as part of the lockdown, I taught myself how to develop black and white film at home, but I still regularly took all my C41 and E6 films there. It looks like I will now have to start using my local camera store for film developing services. While it’s still relatively convenient, being just on the edge of the city centre, it won’t be the same as the short walk I’ve been able to take advantage of these past few years.
I’m not sure if anything will happen to the lab – whether it is closed permanently, or might be rescued in some fashion – but it’s disappointing news for sure.
Today’s picture is from the first roll of film I had developed at the lab back in 2016.
I’ve made a decision today to begin uploading smaller scans to Flickr. Normally, I upload a JPEG version of the original scan at full resolution (this is 2400dpi for medium format negatives scanned on my Epson V550, and 3600dpi for 35mm negatives scanned on the Plustek). These are my raw scans which I then process further in Lightroom and add a white border in Photoshop before uploading to my Flickr account. These scanning resolutions are, to my eyes, the ones that pull the maximum detail from the negatives for these particular scanners without them simply becoming bigger files with no increase in detail.
The downside of these resolutions is that the scans are big. Not just in terms of pixel count, but also in terms of file size. The resulting TIF file for a 6×6 medium format colour negative can be around 150-200 megabytes, and even black and white TIF still come in at around half that size. This means that I’m using a significant amount of drive-space to store these files. Thankfully, the exported JPEG files are much smaller – around 15-20 megabytes for a 6×6 colour image. However, this still adds further space requirements on top of the TIF originals.
What I’ve noticed on Flickr is that, while it’s nice to have the full resolution image on there, after a certain amount of zooming there’s little notable benefit to be seen. In fact, at smaller enlargement sizes, they look sharper and nicer on the eye. So I’ve decided that I will no longer upload a full resolution JPEG, instead limiting medium format images to 3072 pixels on the short edge (a 3k image), and for 35mm pictures, 3072 pixels on the long edge. These pictures look nice on Flickr and still allow for a good, detailed image when zoomed in. They also have a nice bonus benefit of reducing the filesize by approximately two thirds for each image. If I retrospectively re-size my archive of JPEGs I expect that I can reduce the total disk-space required to store them by many tens of gigabytes, which is a worthwhile endeavour.
The picture in today’s blog is one that I’ve gone back and resized and, if you click on it to see it on Flickr, I think you’ll probably agree that the images is plenty big enough.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I thought I’d drop in a whole bunch of pictures today, all taken while in Scarborough a few weeks ago. Scarborough rose to prominence as a spa town where it’s popularity led to visitors from London and other parts of the country making use of its facilities. The actual discovery of the spa waters took place in the 17th century, but the resort bloomed with the coming of the railways in the mid 19th century.
The town spans a north and south bay, seperated by a headland atop which stands the ruins of a medieval castle. The south bay is the more commecrcial of the two and is where the majority of the tourist facilities lie, while the north bay is quieter (although still with plenty of attractions, including Peasholm Park where mock naval battles are carried out on the boating lake). All the photos here were taken in and around the south bay.
Our visit took place on the first day of a three day trip to the region when we stayed near Whitby a little further up the coast.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
I guess even Doctor Who enjoys a day out at the coast every now and then. This police call box in Scarborough is grade II listed and still sits in (or at least very close to) its original location.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Today’s photograph was very much spur-of-the moment with the only real intent being to frame the lady in the pink top in front of the dark doorway. I managed to do this without chopping off the top of the streetlight, which was nice. The thing I like best about the picture though – an I don’t know why – it the lone Costa Coffee cup stood on the floor. It’s a tiny detail in the photograph and yet it makes it much better somehow. Or maybe it’s just me?
The Olympus Trip 35 did another stirling job of catching the composition sharply and correctly exposed.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Grand Central is the shopping centre located above New Street railway staion in the centre of Birmingham. It used to be known as The Pallisades following a redevelopment in the 1980s and, before that, simply Birmingham Shopping Centre when it first opened in the early 1970s.
The ameneties radiate out in various directions with a variety of retail and dining establishments present, but the area in the tow phots here is the main atrium where access to the railway station is present.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This joke shop in Scarborough has been there for a long time, since 1996 in fact. I only discovered this today and it came as a bit of a surprise as, if I’d been pressed, I’d have said it had been there for much longer. I was certain that it was there when I used to visit the town on coach trips back in the 1970s and 80s, but apparently not. Maybe there was another joke shop there (or close by) before that, or perhaps I’d just gotten my memories in a twist soewhere along the way.
The yellow and red of the shop frontage have popped nicely on the Colorplus film, despite the day being somewhat dull and overcast. It’s certainly fared better than the Portra 800 I shot under similar conditions (of which you will see some results in the coming week or so).
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This is where my wife and I got some lunch when we visited Scarborough at the end of July. We’ve always used another chippy on past visits – the Lifeboat Chippy – further down this road at the bottom of the hill as they do very nice fish and chips, but as we were already halfway up the hill when lunchtime arrived, and as we were walking in the opposite direction to the other shop, we decided to give this one a go. We didn’t have any chips as we’d had breakfast sandwiches earlier at the start of the journey and were still feeling a little full, so both of us opted for fish only. The fish was pretty good and I managed to eat it without being attacked by gulls!
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Steel City Snapper photography 