Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
I’ll be posting pictures without commentary while my mental batteries take a break and hopefully recharge. Please feel free to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. 🙂
Normal nonsense will resume shortly…
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 9 July 2024
I’ll be posting pictures without commentary while my mental batteries take a break and hopefully recharge. Please feel free to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. 🙂
Normal nonsense will resume shortly…
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 19 June 2024
The sun was setting and the sea lapping gently on the shore when I took this. The beach area was quiet, the visitors gone for the day, and this water slide was gated closed for the evening.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 28 May 2024
I wasn’t sure what to upload today. I have a bunch of film shots but they’re going to be part of a longer post that I haven’t written yet, and I don’t have a lot of other stuff uploaded and ready to go (although I have a huge backlog of stuff to develop and scan – the best part of 200 photographs!).
So I’ll upload a digital picture today, another from my recent holiday in Dubrovnik. Dubrovnik is very popular with Game of Thrones fans as it was a key filming location, mostly as the site for the fictional city of King’s Landing. Dotted through the old town are many shops selling GoT merchandise, and there are guided tours of the filming locations.
The place in today,s photograph was used at least once in the series (in a scene with Sansa Stark and Lord “Littlefinger” Baelish), and can be seen here on this webpage of the filming locations. The jetty that featured in the show is just to the left of frame in my shot – I avoided its inclusion predominantly because there were at least two tour groups crowded onto the narrow strip. I’m surprised someone didn’t fall into the water!
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 29 May 2024
I’ll be back to posting mostly film photos again soon – maybe tomorrow – as I have a large backlog forming. I’ve one full roll of 135 developed and processed on the PC, but which I’ve published nothing from as yet. Then I have four rolls awaiting development (three 135, and one 120), and four further rolls in cameras with just a few frames left to shoot on each. Add to that some stuff that’s already on Flickr but which hasn’t been seen here and I’m going to be spoilt for choice when it comes to feeding the blog!
In the meantime though, here’s another picture from the little Ricoh GRIII digital compact that I took while walking the city walls that surround Dubrovnik’s Old Town.
I bought this camera because I thought it would be good for street photography (it’s what it’s probably most used for), but it’s great for lots of other stuff too. The lens is amazingly sharp! I sometimes wish it had a flip-out screen and / or a viewfinder, but I guess that’s being greedy.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 29 May 2024
Another digital shot today. As mentioned yesterday, I’ve been out all day today meeting up with some film photographer friends. We met up in the village of Castleton in the Derbyshire Peak District and spent the day wandering the village and surrounding area. We were all shooting film, but I also had my Ricoh GRII with me, and took the photo you see here today. The picture here today is of Cavedale, a gorge just to the south of the village. Up at the top on the left is the keep of Peveril Castle, which we climbed to earlier in the day.
I shot a roll of 120 Tri-X, plus most of a roll of 120 Fuji Pro 500H and 35mm Ilford HP5+. The HP5+ was shot using my new 28-300mm zoom lens, so it will be interesting to see how those turn out (and if I’ve managed to mess any of them up…). I’ll post any worth sharing once I have them developed and scanned.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 18 May 2024
Another handy digital post. I’ve been traveling for work today, so still haven’t had time to start my next “Walk With a Camera” post yet. Maybe tomorrow…
So here’s another shot from Malaga last year. I liked this scene because the three groups of people seemed almost in formation.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 19 August 2023
Film stuff will be back soon, I promise. 🙂
This picture was taken in Malaga last year. The place was heaving with crowds of people as the annual Feria de Malaga was taking place while we were there. Everyone was drinking Cartojal, a local sweet wine, and many of the women and girls were wearing flamenco dresses.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 20 August 2023
I have another of my “Walk With a Camera” posts coming soon, but I haven’t put virtual pen to ink yet, and I don’t plan on rushing it today. I’ve been out mist of the day, firstly seeing The Fall Guy at the cinema with my wife, and then’ when I got home, on a shortish walk to Rother Valley Country Park to test a new lens I’ve bought.
I’ve bought a Tamron 28-300mm zoom lens that will fit my Nikon F80. I think it will be a good choice for when I go on future hikes as it should give me a lot of versatility. The F80 can make use of the image stabilisation on the lens (although I’ve found, slightly annoyingly, that only with a half-press of the shutter, and not with my preferred back-button focusing method). This should prove useful when using the longer focal lengths.
A zoom like this is never going to beat a prime, but as it’ll be used with 35mm film – probably 400asa – then I’m hoping any noticeable shortcomings will be minimal. I only took two shots with it today – all that remained on the roll already in the camera – but they’re at 200mm and 300mm, so should give me some idea of what I can expect when zoomed in. I’ll try the wide angle end on the next roll. I’ll give my thoughts and post some pictures once I’ve gotten them developed and scanned.
Anyway, in lieu of a film photograph today, here’s a digital shot from my trip to Malaga last summer. It’s been hot and humid here in the UK today, so it brought back memories of Spain.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 20 August 2023
I got a new PC this week. It’s not brand new – it’s my son’s old PC – but it’s still vastly more powerful than my old machine. It has the luxury of a solid-state drive being installed meaning it boots up fast and the applications I use are similarly speedy to get going. I swapped out the secondary storage drive for a larger capacity model, so I now have a lot of room to add more pictures too.
It’s not all smooth sailing though. I have my files backed up via a cloud service and it’s taken days to download all the files back onto the new machine. I’ve also had headaches getting Lightroom to play nicely with the catalog I exported from the old machine and, while I have my scanning software installed, as well as Negative Lab Pro, I’m having problems getting Epson Scan to work. A lot of people don’t seem to like Epson Scan very much, but I’ve always found it very effective when scanning B&W medium and large format negatives, so I would like to get it working if possible. I can fall back on Vuescan (which I use for scanning colour negatives and slide film anyway) and do the inversions in Negative Lab Pro, which I’ve tried and had good results, but it means getting used to a different workflow. I’m not sure if I can scan multiple negatives in a batch with Vuescan either (although I haven’t looked into it properly yet).
Anyway, hopefully the storm-clouds of getting everything configured to my needs will soon thin and I can enjoy the benefits of a faster PC.
A rare foray into digital pictures for the blog today, with the shot below coming from my Ricoh GR III. These sorts of clouds are very rare hereabouts, so I had to grab a picture when I saw them. I thought we might be in for a huge storm, but they just drifted by without much fuss in the end.
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 7 November 2023
Steel City Snapper photography 