I visited the Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough back at the end of November and shot a couple of rolls of film through my Bronica ETRSi. Things didn’t go to plan and I was beset by a number of problems.

The first roll I shot was some Lomography Color Negative 800. I shot the full roll without noticing any issues (at the time), before loading a roll of Kentmere 400, and it was then that the issues made themselves known. The first was a problem with my light meter, a Sekonic L308s. It was working ok and measuring the light, but I realised after a while that the reading were a little weird and discovered that, to my dismay, that I’d somehow put the meter into cine mode. I’ve no idea how I did this, and it took quite a bit of Googling to find out how to revert it back to stills metering. By this time I’d shot the whole roll of Lomo 800, plus half of the Kentmere, without knowing how long the meter had been out.

It was shortly afterwards that I realised the second, more significant problem… I’d got the dark-slide still inserted in the Bronica! Now, this shouldn’t be a problem as the camera shouldn’t fire if the dark-slide is present but somehow the camera had been firing away without a care in the world, wasting almost half the roll of Kentmere!

I rectified the issue by removing the dark-slide and shot the rest of the roll (correctly metered this time), but I wonder if there’s some sort of fault present (or if I’d managed to somehow bypass the safety feature by ham-fisted means).

The picture shared here today of a tree casting it’s shadow on the side of this house was taken twice, once to no avail because of the above problem, and then this second attempt. I’m glad I returned to the scene as it’s probably the best shot of the day.

Bronica ETRSi & Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE & Kentmere 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4. 11.5 mins @ 20°

Taken 30 November 2025.