A picture without words today (well, except for these).
Yashicamat 124G & JCH Street Pan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 July 2023.
Metropole
Tag: TLR
Roller coasters and Ferris Wheels
Back to the Blackpool photos for a few days, with a couple of types of thrill rides (although I gues the second could be a bit less thrilling unless you don’t like heights).
Typing the title for this post made me wonder – is the structure in the second photo actually a “Ferris Wheel”, or is it a “Big Wheel”? And is there a difference?
A quick search online brought this interesting page from the National Fairground and Circus Archive, which gives a overview of the history and development of such rides and states that the proper name is Ferris Wheel, even though George Washington Gale Ferris wasn’t the originator of such rides. His biggest claim to fame – at least in terms of building Ferris Wheels – probably came with the construction of the wheel that took his name at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a construction that stood 264 feet tall and could carry 160 riders. It was intended to be an equal to the Eifel Tower.
The fairground ferris wheels that are commonly seen at travelling funfairs (as well as permanent fairs) are known as Eli Wheels, named after the Eli Bridge Company which manufactured them.
Yashicamat 124G & JCH Street Pan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Taken 1 July 2023.
A hot day?
When this is published, I will be on my way home from a day-trip to London to see an Evelyn Hofer exhibition at The Photographer’s Gallery (and, if I’ve had time, a nosey around The National Portrait Gallery).
At the time I’m writing this (Friday evening) I must confess that the 32°C temperature that has been forecast for London on the day is not filling me with glee!
Anyway, apropos of nothing, here’s a random picture from back in 2016 that I took with the first Medium Format camera I owned – a Lubitel 166 Universal TLR. It wasn’t the best camera to use, but it could produce nice pictures nontheless.
Lubitel 166 Universal & Ilford HP5+. Lab developed.
Taken 2016.
Monochrome Ektar
The colours on these two Kodak Ektar pictures were very strange and I couldn’t get them to look right no matter what I did in Negative Lab Pro, Lightroom, or Photoshop. So, in the end I decided to convert them to B&W, which has worked quite well, I think.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted to black and white in Lightroom.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Blackpool Tower
There will be several more pictures of Blackpool’s famed tower to come over the next few days. You have been warned! 🙂
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Coral Island
Another Ekatar shot with slightly odd colours. There’s something off with the purples and greens in the shadows and midtones and, for some reason, the foreground road and pavement looks almost monochrome. It’s a shame as I like Ektar as a film and it normally scans just fine, but this roll has taken much more effort to get looking closer to normal.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Blackpool North Pier (in colour)
Blackpool North Pier marked the spot where my roll of black and white film ran out (pictures still to come!), and where I switched to a roll of Kodak Ektar. The three pictures here show stuff on the pier, plus one shot of the view north from the pier. I cropped the third shot as there was quite a lot of uninteresting sky in the image and I felt it looked better without.
The colours are still a little off in these frames, but not too bad, I don’t think.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Comedy
If you walk along Blackpool promenade in front of Blackpool Tower, you will come across the Comedy Carpet. This is a section of the floor covering 1880 square meters that is packed with jokes, routines, and catchphrases from 850 comedians and writers. You cand easily spend a good hour reading through it all, hopefully letting out a few good laughs while you do.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Gulls
In a break from tradition, I’m jumping right to a photo I only uploaded to Flickr today, rather than slowly working through them in a mostly chronological order – I have a whole bunch of other pictures that pre-date this shot (and this roll), but images from those sets will come later.
I jumped to this shot mostly because I didn’t want to write a long post, and this image seems to suit a shorter form blog entry (although I’m already writing more than I often do, so go figure!).
The photo was taken during a recent trip to Blackpool which I took with my wife (although it’s already two months ago!). There was an onshore breeze blowing on this day which, when it hit the sea-wall along the promenade, created an updraft that these gulls were taking advantage of. They were effectvely hovering and it made for a nice shot.
There is something a little funky about the colours in this roll of Ektar. I’m not sure if it was an older expired roll that I’ve not looked after well, or if I maybe underexposed it or something but, whatever the case, the colours looked odd when I put the negatives through Negative Lab Pro. I even went back and re-scanned an older negative to see if I’d somehow messed up my scanner settings, but that one was fine. As a result I’ve had to faff around with the colours in the pictures more than normal, so if any look a little weird, that’s my excuse.
Yashicamat 124G & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with negative lab pro.
Taken 1 July 2023.
Busy, busy, busy
The past three weeks have been pretty crazy. Even outside of the illness, I’ve been incredibly busy trying to sort a bunch of things out both at home and at work. I’ve had little to no chance to do any photography and my blog posts have frequently been, let’s say, concise.
I think that situation is likely to continue into next week at least, although I really do hope for a bit of calm and a chance to catch my breath before long.
So please exuse any lacklustre efforts I make. I don’t plan on missing any days, but there may be a few posts where there’s little to see other than a photograph.
Here’s another picture from the University of Leeds. I like this one a lot for some reason.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins 30 secs @ 20°
Taken 25 March 2023.
