Tag: Traction Engines

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Traction engines and a mountain of scanning

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A few pictures today of traction engines (and a wooden caravan) photographed at the Sheffield Steam Rally back in June.

I did a quick tally of how many negative I currently have waiting to be scanned today and it came as a bit of a shock. I currently have four rolls of colour 135 each with approx 38 frames on each, two rolls of colour 120 with 15 frames on each. On top of that I have four frames of large format sheet film to develop and scan, and also a roll of 120 HP5+ with 6 frames left to shoot before I develop and scan it. By my reckoning that will be 201 pictures to be scanned – a daunting prospect! Plus I still have three rolls of film that I’ve already scanned that have not been seen here in any shape yet! At least I won’t run out of stuff to publish on the blog any time soon…

Obviously not everything will be worth publishing, but I expect that I will be featuring more picture-heavy posts on here to avoid falling ever further behind, chronologically.

40th birthday
Carriage lamp
Brass rubbing
Caravan

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE, & Kodak Ektar. Lab developed, home scanned, and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken 24 June 2023.

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

6×4.5 to 16:9

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While I sometimes crop digital photos to a panoramic ratio, it not something I tend to do with film photographs which, outside of a little straightening, or minor bits of resizing to remove edge-of-frame distractions, I tend to not crop at all.

Steam truck and traction engine

However, when looking at the scans of some of the photos I took with my Bronica ETRSi at this year’s Sheffield Steam Rally, I realised that large swathes of the top and bottom of the images were filled with uninteresting sky and grass, so I decided to see how they would look with that stuff cropped out. Turns out they looked pretty nice, I thought, so here they are today.

Steam Rally pano

I think it helps that the 75mm Zenzanon lens is very sharp, and that Acros is a fine-grained film, but it’s something I’ll remember next time my in-camera framing doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Another steam rally pano

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 PE, & Fujifilm Acros. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 14mins 45secs @ 20°

Taken 24 June 2023.

35mm · Film photography · Photography

More Ektachrome re-scans and a street portraiture outing

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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:

  1. It makes nice photographs
  2. I like the square format for portraits
  3. I’ll hopefully get better quality images from a medium format camera
  4. 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:

  1. It looks great
  2. 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.

FILM - Steam Rally 2019 Ektachrome scans-4

FILM - Steam Rally 2019 Ektachrome scans-6

Steam rally scenes

A variety of vehicles

Land Rover

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

Taken on 30 June 2019

35mm · Film photography · Photography

Steam rally 2019

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After a hiatus (on my part) last year, I visited the Sheffield Steam Rally again this weekend. The weather was warm and sunny – in fact very warm on the Saturday, hence my choice of visiting on Sunday instead. I like nice weather, but not too much ot it all at once. 🙂

I decided to shoot the roll of Ektachrome that I bought myself just after Christmas and which I’ve been saving for a suitable occasion. The steam rally, I decided, would be suitable enough, otherwise I’d risk the film never being matched with a good enough subject and sitting in the fridge forever.

I was quite excited to shoot with it, and it was only the third roll of positive film that I’ve bought, so I loaded it into my Nikon F80 (figuring that that would have the most reliable metering of my film cameras) and set off – with a roll of HP5+ as trusty back-up.

As soon as I entered the showgrounds, I started taking pictures, but it was only when I got to about frame ten that a sudden horrible thought dawned on me… I wasn’t focusing the camera!

You see, most of my photography over the past couple of months or so has been with compact cameras (where a half-press of the shutter triggers the auto-focus), or manual focus SLRs, where it’s very obvious when something is out of focus. However, I’d made a rookie mistake of forgetting that I’d set my F80 for back-button focusing, and was instead just half-pressing the shutter to focus and then taking the shot. The reason I didn’t notice my error more quickly is that I was shooting at f/8 and the viewfinder looked to be pretty much in focus anyway – I just wasn’t checking for it snapping to sharpness when pressing the button.

As soon as I realised my mistake, I resorted to doing things properly, but I had sour thoughts about the almost-third-of-a-roll of expensive Ektachrome that I’d probably wasted. I did think about re-taking some of my initial shots, but then decided I’d take the risk that they might be ok and photograph other things instead.

I got my slides back today and, thankfully, all bar a couple of those first shots have come out focused sharply enough to be used, so I was relieved about that. I haven’t scanned the full roll (or even started on my HP5+ shots) yet, but here is one of the pictures that I have. The Ektachrome has produced beautifully saturated colours in the sunshine ( the colours on some of the more shady frames need tweaking though – especially the reds) and, in fact, I’ve actually reduced the saturation a little on this photo.

FILM - Traction

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

Taken on 30 June 2019