Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
Standing on Bramall Lane, just across the road from the Sheffield United stadium, The Railway Hotel caters to fans on match days. Only home fans though, as the sign says.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+ (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 24 April 2024
The River Porter is one of several rivers flowing through Sheffield and it’s surrounding area. It’s source is on Burbage Moor and the river descends over one thousand feet as it flows into the city. This descent enabled the construction of water-powered industry in the city’s past.
When the river gets closer to the city centre, so it’s passage is hidden more and more by a series of culverts which take it beneath buildings and roads until it eventually joins the River Sheaf beside Midland Station.
There are plans to reveal Sheffield’s covered rivers, including the Porter, and this has taken place in some areas, such as the section in the photo below where, just beyond the bridge in the picture, a section of the culvert collapsed where it went beneath the car-park of the Decathlon sportswear store. Decathlon were persuaded to keep the newly revealed stretch of the river uncovered.
A little further downstream from this location, a pocket-park has been constructed to allow people to sit and enjoy the riverbank.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+ (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 24 April 2024
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+ (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 13 April 2024
I posted some other photos of bridges spanning the Sheffield and Tinsley Canal recently – those shot with my Zeiss medium format folding camera. The ones here were shot on the same day with my Olympus XA3 along the same stretch of water in Attercliffe, Sheffield.
I think I said in the earlier post that this is now a pleasant stretch of the can to walk along. It has a high embankment on both sides which shields it from what is otherwise quite an industrial part of the city. The spring foliage also brings a pleasantly arboreal feel to the place.
When I was much younger the canal was horribly polluted. I remember crossing it on the bus route that took me into the city centre and the water was a vivid orange colour, presumably due to pollutants from the steel industry in the area. Now the water is clear and sustains fish and other wildlife.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+ (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
This factory, along with it’s distinctive logo, has been around for as long as I remember. When I was a kid I always thought it was a Roman centurion’s head depicted, but the name of the place – Spartan Works – shows I was wrong.
The building is, I believe, currently subject to a planning order that will involve demolition, erection, and conservation of buildings on the site. I hope the Spartan remains.
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+ (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
A couple more shots of the canal today. Despite the slightly industrial quality of some of the bridges, it’s actually quite scenic down there.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
A couple of photos of the Sheffield & Tinsley Canal in Sheffield.
I publish this while listening to excited chatter on the TV news about a July General Election. About time!
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
It seems that, whenever a new building is being built in Sheffield, that there’s a good chance that it it will belong to the university (or one of the universities, I should say, as there are two). This part of the formerly industrial district of Attercliffe has not escaped, and there are several new buildings in place, some new development underway, as well as a host of sports facilities (which is perhaps as it should be, as the area used to be the home of the now demolished Don Valley Stadium that was originally erected for the World Student Games that was held in the city in 1991.
The building in the background in the above picture is the English Institute for Sport. Below is another view. I wasn’t sure if the masts are a structural feature, or there for show, but a quick online search reveals that they support the building’s roof.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
Last month I took my Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 folding camera for it’s first outing in quite some time – about two years, in fact!
It’s quite a nice camera, if a little slow to operate due to its uncoupled rangefinder design which requires focus to be achieved by means of a dial on top of the camera that operates the rangefinder, and then manually transferring the distance on the dial to the lens itself. The lens is quite nice though and gives good results if you set it correctly. Plus, of course, the folding design means it can be slipped into a pocket (ok, a big-ish pocket).
Transferring the focus distance is straightforward enough but, if you’re not paying attention (or haven’t used the camera in a while!) it can be easy to make mistakes where some of the distances have half marks. This is what happened on this outing, and I only realised after I’d taken four or five pictures. I hoped that my use of small apertures might have reduced any focus issues, but on looking at the scans, a few frames are noticeably soft.
The two shots shared here are ok though, as are some others that I’ll share over the next few days. Hopefully I’ll pay closer attention next time I shoot with the camera.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Tri-X. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°
Taken on 7 April 2024
Over the last few weeks I’ve posted a whole bunch of photos taken with my Olympus XA3 on Ilford HP5+, which I pushed a stop to 800asa.
Or so I thought…
After receiving a comment about one of my posts using this setup, where I was asked if there was a reason I was shooting the film at 800ASA, I replied that it was to aid me during the low light conditions that are prevalent during the UK winter. Given that the camera has no manual control of shutter speed or aperture, this is a logical thing to do to get faster speeds and avoid camera shake.
But after replying, a small exclamation mark began to flash above my head. So I took a look at the camera manual and, lo and behold, it turns out I’ve not actually been shooting at 800ASA at all, but at 400ASA – HP5+’s box speed. Although the XA3 allows the ASA setting to be changed, it turns out that it will automatically override this if a DX code is present on the film being used. The manual control is just for non-DX coded films!
So in actual fact, I’ve been overdeveloping my film by push processing it!
Fortunately for me, the shots are all perfectly usable, and it’s a testament to Ilford’s HP5+’s resilience to these sort of damn fool mistakes that this is the case.
Anyway, here’s a random shot of one of the impacted frames, proving that if you ever accidentally push your HP5+ by a stop in DD-X, you will likely be forgiven your mistake…
Olympus XA3 & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken on 20 January 2024
