One more photo from Woodhouse Washlands. This willow tree has suffered some sort of catastrophe at some point, it’s tunk ruptured and folded down to ground level, but such is the tenacity of the tree that it lives on, thriving boughs rising at angles from the fallen section.
I was pleased with the results here. I opened up the aperture to soften the otherwise distracting background, but didn’t have a tripod, so had to carefully hand-hold the shot to maintain focus on the texture in the broken wood.
At the northern end of Woodhouse Washlands, close to the old route of the A57 road, this piece of public art sits beside the footpath. Next time I pass I’ll look to see if there’s a plaque or something with information about it, but I’m presuming its part of the winding equipment from one of the old, now gone, collieries that were nearby at Beighton and Orgreave. It now has the outlines of multiple trout cut into the wheel. I’m not sure if the concrete base denotes part of old mine workings – the sites of extinct shafts are sometimes capped off with large slabs like this.
This hawthorn tree stands beside the River Rother and its twisted trunk made for an appealing photograph. I had to duck beneath the tree’s canopy to get this picture and, as I had no tripod, open up the aperture to get a good shutter speed (and also to throw the river and far bank out of focus).
Back to the black and white stuff (at least for a roll). While taking a walk on the wetlands beside the River Rother not far from home (luckily, Sheffield is a very hilly city, so we’re in no danger of flooding where our house is) I spotted this lone can of Nourishment left atop a fencepost close to the road where I’d parked. I’ve never drank the stuff myself, but I believe it’s some sort of sugary milkshake thing – not sure just how nourishing it is exactly…
I liked how the lone can looked though and made my first shot of the roll.
Ok, maybe not the most autumnal shades here – more a yellow green than fiery shades of red and orange – but it’s probably the last shot from this year’s clutch of seasonal images where the trees still bear foliage. Today, as I type this, most of the leaves have fallen, littering the pavements and roadsides where they’ll release that rich scent of autumn so evokative of this time of year. There are still some late straggling leaves on the limbs of silver birches – some still green in fact – but most trees have revealed the skeletal form of their branches now.
I still have autumnal images yet to come, but they are of the misty, damp, almost monochromatic feel of late autumn as it rolls over into winter.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
The two photographs today show the former Glossop Road Baptist Church, the first with its steeple rising from between autumnal trees in the back gardens of the stone houses (now mostly owned by the University and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals) on Claremont Place.
The church is now owned by Performance Venues, a small group who run this and two other venues (the Octagon and Firth Hall) in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. It is now known as the Drama Studio.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
Early last month, on a bright sunny day, I took a walk around Weston Park, Crookes Vally Park, and the surrounding areas. I took my Yashica Mat 124G loaded with some Lomography Color Negative 100 film, and my Sure Shot Telemax containing some Kodak Gold (the results from which I’ve been posting here over the past week or so).
This was the first time I’ve used the 100asa Lomography Color Negative variant, although I’ve shot several rolls of the 400asa version and liked the results. As is my current process for medium format colour films, these have been home-scanned as linear tiff files with my V550 using Vuescan, and then converted to positives using the free Grain2Pixel Photoshop plug-in. I found that, while the initial conversions looked pretty good, I’ve still had to tweak them to get them looking “right” – or at least as “right” as my own eyes reckon they should be. Grain2Pixel is a very good piece of software, especially given it is free-of-charge, but I do find that I have to remove colour casts sometimes depending on the film I used. The scanner (Epson V550 for medium format / Plustek 8100 for 35mm) can also make a difference too.
Occasionally, certain frames from a roll produce very odd results – oftem at odds with the rest of the shots from the same roll. I tried using the trial version of Negative Lab Pro to compare with the Grain2Pixel results on some of these and it also went slightly crazy – with colour tones looking very odd. All the shots here today were pretty straightforward to deal with though.
Anyway, the three photos today are all from the Lomgraphy 100 roll, shot with the Yashica, and all three made in Weston Park (with the museum visible in the first, the bandstand in the second, and the nearby Univesity Arts Tower in the third). Autum was underway, but the trees still held onto most of their leaves and a good amount of green at this point.
Yashica Mat 124G & Lomography Color Negative 100. Grain2Pixel conversion.
This morning I decided to get up early and go make some photographs. A lot of trees are starting to turn and there are some gorgeous colours to be seen in their foliage – colours that would look extra nice in the light of an early morning sun. The weather forecasts over the past few days – right up to when I went to bed last night in fact – had stated that it would be cloudless first thing today, with duller weather coming later, and the dew point indicated a chance of mist. When I woke up, I took a look out the window to see how it looked and, sure enough, the skies were free of cloud to a degree, although there was still quite a lot about. So I got dressed, grabbed my camera and tripod, and had a quick breakfast. When I stepped out of the front door twenty minutes later the sky was covered with cloud from horizon to horizon.
I briefly considered just going back inside, getting undressed again, and getting back into the warm bed. But I didn’t. In for a penny, in for a pound as the saying goes and, even without the clear skies, I still thought there might be a chance of mist in the river valley where I planned to go.
There was no mist.
I have several weather apps on my phone. None of them seems to be any better at correctly forecasting the weather than a pine-cone or bit of dry seaweed hung outside the door. One of them once told me that the location where I was experiencing pouring rain at that very moment was actually in full sunshine. If they can’t tell you what the weather is doing in the present, what hope do they have at predicting the future? Anyway, rant over.
Deciding against making any photos in the dull, unflattering light – no point wasting film – I decided instead to drive to a nearby car-boot sale. It would be the first time I’ve visited a boot sale this year. Partly due to lockdown, but also because I’ve just had other things to do at weekends. I always have a slight frisson of expectation when I visit these places. The dream of picking up a Leica or a Hassleblad for next to nothing, that sort of thing. The dream didn’t come true today, sadly, but I did find another film camera, the only one I saw on all the stalls. It looked in nice condition – boxed with the manual – and the seller only wanted £1 for it, so I decided to rescue it.
It’s not a camera I wanted or needed at all – it’s a fairly nondescript 35mm compact – a Fujifilm DL-270 Zoom Super (catchy name, eh?), with a 35-70mm zoom that starts at a slow-ish f/5.6 and goes downhill from there as you zoom in, granting f/11.2 at the long end. It look s like the sort of camera that someone who wanted to take pictures but lacked any interest in photography would have bought in the 90s. But, for the low price, I’ll give it a go and see how it performs (maybe on a bright day though!). The last camera of this ilk that I used, a Samsung Fino, made surprisingly sharp pictures. Hopefully Fujifilm stuck a decent (if slow) lens inside.
As a bonus, there was a boxed roll of Fuji C200 in a box on the same stall, and the seller kindly threw it in with the camera. I expected it to be expired by fifteen years or something, but it only expired in July this year. Even if the camera is a bust, I still got a bargain roll of pretty fresh film! On top of that, there’s also a roll already in the camera. When I stuck a battery in when I got home (the included battery being dead), it powered up and showed frame 1 on the LCD. This probably means one of three things:
The roll of film is completely unused. Bonus!
The roll is partly used, but the counter has reset due to an elapsed battery. I’m not sure if this would happen though.
At some point someone has opened the back of the camera while it had the film inside, resetting the counter and probably ruining the film. This is the option I think is most likely (although the other, fresh, roll of film I got with it might indicate otherwise). I believe the camera is one of thosa that unloads the entire film when inserted and then rewinds each exposed shot back into the cannister though, so any shots already on the roll might be safe (whatever they might be), but the unexposed remainder might be toast.
Whatever the case, I’ll shoot the roll that’s inside and then, depending how I feel, maybe another. After that, unless it stuns me with the results, I’ll likely pass it on to someone else. But at least it will live on.
And finally, nothing to do with the rest of the post, here’s a nice colourful photo I made with the Yashica Mat the other week…
A couple of photographs taken within 50-feet or so of one another, looking in different directions (roughly north-east and north-west), but quite similar in look and feel thanks to the tall buildings in this part of town and the way they have reflected the clear blue of the sky. They both share the theme of reflections too.
A photograph of The Hubs, which I’ve posted images of before, such as in this post here.
The building has occasionally been referred to as the saucepans by locals, each part of the four hub structure looking like a silver pan with a stubby handle, not that it’s apparent from this angle.
Yashica Mat 124G & Kodak Ektachrome 100 EPN (expired 2008).
Steel City Snapper photography 