Harthill scarecrows

August 2, 2020 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

A few weeks ago we drove through the village of Harthill (the same day I made the photos of the person magnet fishing, the house with the pointed roof, and Shireoaks station) and noticed a whole series of “scarecrows” dotted about the place. I call them scarecrows as it seems a reasonable term, although that wasn’t their purpose. They had been installed as part of the village carnival – held virtually for this year – in celebration of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I didn’t have any film left in the camera or on me when we encountered them, so I drove back out to the village later that afternoon to photograph some of them before they were removed.

Yashica Mat 124G & Fujifilm Provia 100F.

Taken on 12 July 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Further expired Ektachrome photos

July 16, 2020 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

A few further shots from the roll of expired Ektachrome I posted about yesterday.

This first shot has had the most tweaking of the ones presented here today and it still has more residual purple tones than the others. I had to take care to not reduce the colour of the foxgloves while removing the tint.

The next shot is of the Wilkin Hill Outdoor Centre, or rather the former outdoor centre as it appears to have been abandoned for quite some time. It does appear to have a new roof though, so perhaps it’s under development.

The final two images are of Agden Dike, one of the main water sources that feeds Agden reservoir. The expired Ektachrome has performed remarkably well on the first shot, giving a broad range of tones with only a few issues on the brightest sunlit silver birch trunks in the background.

The last photograph here is probably my favourite from this roll. I’m unsure if someone has placed this branch and fern into the river (it looks wedged in by rocks) or if it’s actually a small tree-stump that a fern has colonised. Whatever the case, it looks like a miniature palm tree. I’m pretty happy that I was able to focus accurately with a narrow aperture and up-close with the Zeiss’ uncoupled rangefinder focus. It isn’t a problem on more distant subjects and with the wider apertures I normally choose with this camera, but manually transferring the focus from the rangefinder to the lens in a shot like this takes care, and I’m glad to have gotten it pretty much on the nail.

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Ektachrome E200S (expired 2003).

Taken on 22 June 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Surprisingly nice expired Ektachrome from 2003

July 15, 2020 fishyfisharcade4 Comments

A few photos today from my hike around Dale Dyke reservoir that I posted about a few weeks ago. I mentioned in that post about taking the Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 on the hike along with the Yashica Mat 124G. I’d loaded it with a roll of Ektachrome E200S that had expired back in 2003. I can’t remember where exactly I’d gotten the film from now, but I had no idea as to how it had been stored. I shot the first of the rolls with my Holga back in October last year. That roll had a severe purple cast. I was able to remove it to a large extent but it left nasty purple speckles in the shadow areas. While I would be shooting this second roll in a camera with more control over aperture and shutter speed, I was still not holding out high hopes for the film.

I decided to over-expose it a little given it’s age. Normally I follow the 1-stop per 10-years of expiry rule of thumb, but I’ve heard that E6 film works differently to colour negative film in this regard, so I decided to shoot it at 80asa. My mistake here was that I’d forgotten I was shooting a roll of E200S, and not E100, so I was in actual fact over-exposing the roll by more than a full stop. Thankfully, this worked out ok and probably produced better results than my original idea.

When I received the developed transparencies there was still a noticeable purple cast when I scanned them, but colour correction in the scanning software, plus some further work in Lightroom managed to remove the bulk of this. There’s still a hint of purple to the results, and the deep shadow areas have a little purple speckling, but it’s barely noticeable when compared to the first roll I shot through the Holga. On the whole I’m really pleased with the results I got and it’s encouraged me to shoot some more of the E6 film I have in the fridge.

The three shots here were hand-held.

Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Ektachrome E200S (expired 2003).

Taken on 22 June 2020

35mm · Film photography · Photography

More Ektachrome re-scans and a street portraiture outing

July 11, 2020 fishyfisharcade1 Comment

I decided today to start a long-considered project to make portraits of strangers. It’s not an original idea – many others have done it before – but the aim is to make one-hundred portraits of people I don’t know. This is not something that comes naturally to me, both from a technical photographic angle – portraiture is not something I’ve done very much of – and also from a social aspect. By nature, I’m something of a shy, somewht introverted person, and approaching someone I don’t know to ask them if I can make their portrait is a definite challenge. So it was with no little trepidation that I decided to make a start today.

I decided that I will shoot all the portraits with my Yashica Mat 124G and use Kodak Portra 400. The choice of camera is for a number of reasons:

It makes nice photographs
I like the square format for portraits
I’ll hopefully get better quality images from a medium format camera
Because it’s a TLR, I hope that it will be disarming / start conversations in a way that an SLR maybe wouldn’t

The Portra was chosed because:

It looks great
It has a excellent exposure latitude which gives me flexibility when shooting in changeable light.

The first person I asked today said no, which wasn’t the best for my already shaky confidence, but I perservered, and the next two people both agreed to let me make their portraits. In all, out of fourteen people I asked, just three declined to take part, and there was no animosity whatsoever from anyone.

I photographed a range of people, both men and women, young and old. A couple of my subjects had cameras, so I approached them thinking that they might be more embracing of the idea of my taking their photo. A couple were street musicians, so they’re probably used to being photographed. Everyone else was a person who looked approachable, including a girl manning an ice-cream van, a couple of men who looked like they might be waiting for their wives to come out of shops, and a girl carrying a large potted plant. The latter girl asked what I would do with the photos, so I gave her the name of my blog. If you’re reading this, thank you agian for letting me make a portrait. 🙂

On the whole I was very pleased with how the day turned out and it gives me confidence to do the same again. I’ll get the film sent off for processing next week and will hopefully have some results in a few days time. Fingers crossed that they turn out ok!

For today however, I’ll post a few more of the re-scanned Ektachrome slides that I shot at a steam rally last year. The film really seems to lift in good light.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Re-scanning some Ektachrome

July 10, 2020 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

Last year I treated myself to a roll of Kodak’s re-issued Ektachrome film. I shot the whole roll at a steam rally (none of those this year, sadly 😦 ) and was looking forward to the results. Unfortunately, they weren’t what I expected – or, at least, my scans weren’t.

The slides themselves looked pretty nice. One or two of them were a little off on the exposure and looked a a bit dark, but nothing extreme, and the colours looked great. When I scanned them though, the colours were off and the levels were out considerably. Lots of deep contrast and strange, oily tones to the more vivid colours. Shadow areas lacked detail and I had to adjust the Tint and Temperature controls to make them look halfway decent. Some of them were beyond even this rectification though (or at least my skills to correct it).

The scans were made on my Plustek 8100 and Silverfast, a scanner and software that serves me perfectly well for most of the other things I scan – although this is primarily black and white. I did the best I could with them and posted some to Flickr, and a few on this blog (here, here, here & here), but otherwise wrote them off as a bit of a disappointment.

Recently however, I’ve had a hankering to shoot some more slide film, and shot a roll of 17-years expired Ektachrome the other week which gave surprisingly nice results. Not perfect, but more than I could have hoped for given the age of the film and my scanning it using Epsonscan – a package that I’ve always struggled to get satisfactory colours with (again, probably due to my skills with it as much as anything else).

So, I decided to revisit my 35mm Ektachrome slides for a fresh attempt. This time I tried something different.

Back before I bought my Plustek, I’d tried some alternative scanning applications to see if I could improve my colour scans on my Epson V550. One of those was Silverfast, the other was Vuescan. Silverfast software is linked to your scanner, so the copy I have for my Plustek won’t work on my Epson (something I dislike – If I buy a piece of software, I’d like it to work with different pieces of hardware thank you. It came with the Plustek though, so I’ll not complain too much). Vuescan however, will work with anything you own and has free lifetime updates if you buy the Pro version. As I still had the demo version, I decided to try it with my Plustek and the Ektachrome transparencies.

Lo and behold, the results looked much more promising than the scans I’d managed with Silverfast. I was pretty happy about this and, as Vuescan is discounted at present, decided to fork out for the full, non-watermarked version and give my Ektachromes a fresh attempt.

It took a bit of trial and error, but I think I’ve found a setup that does a good job on them. Certainly an improvement over the original scans to my eyes, so I thought I’d publish a few examples here today. I think the new scans are a noticeable improvement – a lot of the horrible green tinge has gone (how I didn’t spot that originally I don’t know) and there’s a lot more shadow detail. They’re in before and after pairs, the before shots first.

Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 D & Kodak Ektachrome.

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Pandemic scenes #2

April 18, 2020 fishyfisharcade2 Comments

The local park is quite small and is essentially an open space in the middle of the housing estate where we live. Nonetheless it still contains a 5-a-side football / basketball court and sets of swings, climbing frames and a slide for children to play on. In normal times, the park would be populated by children of various ages, from older kids hanging out and playing football, right down to toddlers having fun on the infant swings or climbing on the frames while their parents watch them from one of the benches – something I used to do regularly when my boys were younger.

It’s a different story at present, and the park is largely deserted apart from the occasional person walking their dog, taking some exercise, or just passing through on their way to somewhere else.

The swings have been tied up and, on the day I took these photos, the equipment had been cordoned off with hazard tape (although someone has since removed it). No-one plays there at present.

Canon Sure Shot Telemax & Ilford Delta 400 – Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins

Taken on 29 March 2020

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Joe’s

February 16, 2020 fishyfisharcade4 Comments

I’m jumping back in time a little today with a photo from 2017. The main reason being that I decided yesterday to re-scan this roll of negs. My original scans were performed on my Epson V550 flatbed using the Epson Scan software, which is what I used to use for all my scans, but is now only really used for black and white medium format stuff.

All my B&W 35mm negatives are now scanned with my Plustek scanner, which gives far superior results, while I send all my colour films off to a pro lab for dev and scan (mostly because I know the colours will look how I would expect them to). I still scan medium format slides on the V550 though – mostly because it will cost me an arm and a leg to get lab scans (the place that processes and scans my C41 film for a very reasonable price don’t process E6 unfortunately). The Epson doesn’t fare too badly with medium format scans, although that’s only really down to the fact that the larger image size means that any loss in scanning quality is less easy to spot on screen – comparing like-with-like with a 35mm scan shows the quality is exactly the same.

So, while all my C41 film has been lab scanned over the past year, I still have a lot of stuff that has only ever been scanned on the Epson (both colour AND B&W), so every now and then I’ll re-scan those rolls on the Plustek to get better results. Today’s photo is from one such roll – shot during a trip to Camden in London that my wife and I took a couple of years ago. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the Portra 160 colours that the Plustek and Silverfast have given me, they’re a whole heap better than the slightly muddy, greenish cast scans that I had from my Epson Scan attempts. The resloution is light-years ahead too, with details now much more finely resolved than before.

Today’s photo is one that has really benefited from the re-scan I think.

Pentax P30T, Rikenon 50mm f/2 & Kodak Portra 160.

Taken on 9 September 2017

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Padley Gorge

November 22, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

Padley Gorge is a steep sided wooded valley situated in the north east of the Peak District national park, not far from nearby Sheffield. The sides of the gorge are packed with interesting twisty trees and the ground is littered by gritstone boulders of all sizes, many of which are covered by moss and lichens. Burbage Brook runs down the middle of the valley, carrying runoff from the moorland above. It really is a beautiful place.

When I visited last weekend we’d had a considerable amount of rainfall over the preceding weeks and the brook was in spate. It’s always nice to see, even when the flow is gentle, but when the water is a torrent it’s very impresive indeed.

Despite the somewhat grim weather meaning I had to keep putting my (non-weather-sealed) cameras back in the bag at frequent intervals, I had a really nice time walking to the bottom of the gorge – where there’s an excellent cafe the does a great job of filling the bellies of passing hikers – and then back up to the top where I’d parked my car.

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fujifilm Velvia 50.

Taken on 23 October 2019

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Mossy topped rock

November 21, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

I shot my first (ever) roll of Velvia last weekend, and today’s picture is the first of them that I’m posting. It’s a fairly simple shot of some autumnal leaves atop a mossy rock.

I underexposed most of the shots as I wanted to try and get nicely saturated colours, and they’re definitely there on the transparencies. Scanning them satisfactorily on my Epson V550 flatbed has taken some work though and they’ve needed quite a bit of Lightroom faffery to get them close to looking like the originals.

I think part of this is down to shooting it in somewhat gloomy conditions – I think I’ll try shooting something in better (or at least sunny) weather next time. I also noticed that a number of photos are a little soft. I have a feeling that this is down to the longer shutter speeds that I needed. Although I was using a tripod, I have a feeling that I ought to have made use of the mirror lock-up switch for these to prevent vibrations.

Oh well, I’ll try that next time.

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Fujifilm Velvia 50.

Taken on 23 October 2019

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Another Whitwell Woods photograph

November 6, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

I managed to miss a picture out of my post yesterday, so here it is, last but not least. It’s captures the sidelight on the mossy tree-trunk quite nicely, I think, although the background is perhaps a little messy with all the undergrowth.