Wednesday, 17 May 2017
Saturday, 13 May 2017
London St Pancras…
A brief trip south by train last week saw me travelling lighter than usual, restricting myself to one camera and just the two lenses…
Packing a single, small bag at the last minute didn't leave much room for photographic equipment but I managed to squeeze in my Fujifilm X-T10 body + XF 35mm f2 R WR lens combination and (for a bit of variety) the 14mm f2.8 R lens.
I didn't get much chance to take photographs until I was passing through London St Pancras station on the return journey but did come up with a couple of images whilst changing trains…
Paul Day's 2007 sculpture 'The Meeting Place' (also known as 'The Lovers') stands at the south end of the station and I never get tired of looking at it but invariably end up photographing it from the 'wrong' side which at least lets me also capture some of the fantastic 245ft wide train shed, designed by William Henry Barlow and constructed by the Butterley Company in 1868. The ultra-wide 14mm (135 equivalent: 21mm) lens allowed me to capture the full 9m height of the statue.
I switched to my current fave lens, the tiny, weatherproof 35mm f2 (135 equivalent: 53mm) for a quick shot of Martin Jennings' wonderful bronze statue of the former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman which commemorates the poet's successful campaign to save the station from demolition in the 1960s.
Tuesday, 14 March 2017
Expired Film Day 2017
Can it really be almost a year since my last post? 'Bad Andy!'
Anyway…
"Expired Film Day celebrates the joys of using film whose Use-By date has (preferably long-since) passed. One of the particular pleasures of being a film-using photographer in these modern times is the abundance of expired-but-still-probably-pretty-good film on the market, found in grandparents’ attics or at thrift stores, or sourced from the freezers of pros who’ve gone digital.
Expired film can be unpredictable: if you know how it was stored, it might be easy to compensate for its age, if that’s even necessary. If you don’t, your results could range from dark, to flat, to color-shifted and beyond. Many people today say the potential unpredictability of using film is part of what draws them to it over digital; using expired film takes the existing unpredictability of using film and compounds it."
The above is lifted from the 'Expired Film Day' website, explaining the idea far better than I can…
Expired Film Day is tomorrow, March 15th, and I'll being joining in by using up some of this…
In these…
So that's some Ilford Pan F+ dated 2007, a couple of rolls of Fujicolor SuperG Plus 200 dated 1997 and some Kodak Gold 100 dated 1996!
Add one classic camera (Olympus Trip 35 - a charity shop find) and one unloved runt of the litter (Nikon FG-20 + 50mm Series E lens) and I'm all set.
Wish me luck!
Friday, 6 May 2016
Last weekend's haul…
A trip to Devon at the weekend to collect a rather large eBay purchase for a friend gave me chance to trawl the charity shops of Totnes on Saturday afternoon. This was my haul!
A Minolta 7000 SLR complete with 50mm f1.7 lens, a Pentax AF240Z flashgun and the unattractive and fiendishly complicated, Porsche-designed Samsung ECX1, a not very compact 35mm 'compact' camera introduced in 1994.
I'm looking forward to putting some film through the Minolta and the Samsung and the flashgun joins my growing collection of 1980/90s Pentax equipment.
Sum total spent? £16.99.
Wednesday, 9 March 2016
Saturday, 5 March 2016
Kodak 66 Model II - The results (finally)
Way back in August last year I spent a day in London and took this little beauty along with me…
I shot a roll of Ilford XP2 with it and sent the film off to UK Film Lab for processing and scanning…
The scans were done in double quick time but I first misplaced and then forgot about them until a couple of days ago when they turned up on a memory stick at the back of my desk drawer.
While I did make notes regarding exposure settings I've managed to misplace those too but I do remember sticking to a shutter speed of 1/200 second for every shot.
I'll admit to being pleasantly surprised by the results, with such a simple viewfinder composition is a bit hit and miss but the scans haven't needed too much straightening up. Overall image quality isn't all that bad, certainly good enough for snap shots which is what the camera was designed for after all…
Wednesday, 2 March 2016
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