Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
The bench to the right of the tree in the first photograph is where I found the leaf in the second picture.
There’s also a second bench in the scene, but it’s hiding behind the tree-trunk and had an old lady sat upon it.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
I’ve seen a few branches of this burger chain when on my travels but have never had the opportunity to visit one. The Sheffield branch has now closed down, so I don’t think my chances of doing so are on the increase…
I was planning on developing a roll of Tri-X today but hit a roadblock when I couldn’t get the film leader out of the cassette. I have an extractor tool, but it’s a bit hit-and-miss, and the alternative method of using a damp piece of film to pull it out failed me as well. I’ve resorted to buying a (hopefully) better extractor.
I wish my Nikon F80 had an option to keep the leader out on rewind.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
I went to the cinema to see Avatar:Fire and Ash today. The film was entertaining in the same wat the other two have been, although I could do without the bladder-straining three-hour-plus running time, and the 4k high-framerate visuals in the screening I attended at times made it look like a videogame cutscene.
The cinema I visited was The Arc in Rotherham. After the film ended I went for a short walk around the area to try and finish a partly used roll of film I had in my Olympus Trip. The light was lovely and I hopefully got some nice pictures (although it’s an expired roll of slide film, so we’ll have to wait and see…).
However, one thing I wasn’t expecting to see was an altercation between a rat and a crow!
I fully understand that there are rats lurking in busy town centres – us messy humans give them a ready supply of food and shelter – but it’s quite unusual to witness them on the pavement, especially on a bright afternoon. What is even more unusual is to see them in some sort of life-and-death struggle with a crow! As I approached the scene, I saw the rat being harrassed by the bird, which kept grabbing its tail in its beak and pulling it backwards towards the road. When a passerby approached the crow would hop or fly out of the vicinity until it felt safe to return and resume it’s actions.
The rat was alive, but was moving slowly with a limp, perhaps due to the crow’s attacks, or maybe some previous injury, and there was no place for it to flee apart from beneath a car parked on the pavement, but I’m pretty certain the crow would have gotten under there without trouble. I felt bad for the rat and wondered if I should attempt a rescue, but I had nothing to grab it with and didn’t fancy getting bitten and contracting some nasty disease, so I decided against it.
Crows are intelligent creatures and I had a distinct sense that it was attempting to pull the injured rat to the road where it would be run over and thus provide a tasty meal. Or maybe it thought the rat’s tail was a juicy worm?
It was a fascinating, yet horrible thing to witness.
The picture below is of Rotherham railway station which is across the road from where it all occurred.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
A happy 2026 to you all!
I wasn’t sure what to post about for my first post of the year (and the beginning of my eighth year of consecutive daily posting!). I don’t have anything that really screams “new year”, so instead I’ll continue to post pictures from the roll of Ilford Type-517 that I shot while testing the Minolta X-300 that I got in the batch of faulty SLRs I bought from eBay last year.
The Minolta performed well, giving nicely exposed pictures, and there’s usually little to fault with a 50mm lens from this period when it was the defacto kit-lens from most manufacturers.
Today’s trio of pictures show Bailey House in Rotherham. It’s currently occupied by the local council, but once-upon-a-time it was home to Grattan, purveyor of mail-order catalogue shopping since 1912. The Rotherham location wasn’t the head office, I don’t believe – I think those were (are?) in Bradford. The building is unassuming in many ways, but the protruding modernist windows add a touch of sci-fi.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
Hopefully not down to slow service!
I took our Christmas decorations down today – always a depressing activity, I find. Normally I would insist we keep them up until New Year’s Day has passed (although not usually until the traditional 12th Night), but compromised this year as my wife hates having them up once Christmas has passed. It doesn’t make me sad as much as it used to, but I would prefer to try and eke out that cosy Christmas feeling a bit longer.
Minolta X-300 & Minolta 50mm f/1.7 MD on Ilford Type-517. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 14.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 25 October 2025
I posted some pictures the museum and bandstand a few weeks back, but those shots were in black and white and shot on my Fujica STX-1. But I also took some medium format colour pictures of the same scenes (though different compositions) with my 1950s Zeiss folder. So here they are.
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Fujifilm Pro 400H. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 6 September 2025
Fujica STX-1 & X-Fujinon 50mm f/1.9 FM on Agfa APX 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 12 September 2025
The picture in today’s post is of Black Swan Walk, a dead-end street in the middle of Sheffield city centre. It has the air of a really old street and if you squint a little it looks almost like rows of the overhanging Tudor storefronts that you can see in places like The Shambles in York. It actually dates back to the late 19th century and, on close inspection, it really looks nothing like The Shambles.
Because it’s a dead-end, at the bottom it widens and there still exists the remains of a turntable and it’s mechanism where carriages would once be turned around so they could exit the narrow street after depositing their goods. There are also stories of ghostly carriages being witnessed entering the street before vanishing!
Fujica STX-1 & X-Fujinon 50mm f/1.9 FM on Agfa APX 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 12 September 2025
These steps lead up to what used to be the central post office in Sheffield. The post office closed a long time ago but the building has since been acquired by the university and now houses the art department. I think some of the students were let loose to decorate the steps..
Fujica STX-1 & X-Fujinon 50mm f/1.9 FM on Agfa APX 100. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10.5mins @ 20°.
Taken on 12 September 2025
Steel City Snapper photography 