Another set of Holga 120N pictures to follow on from yesterday’s blog post. They include two views of the pavillion in Endcliffe Park, the Trinity United Reform Church (a brutalist design just across the road from the park), and a climbing frame in the middle of the park.
Holga 120N & Fomapan 100. Adox Adonal 1+25 4mins @ 20°.
Taken on 10 April 2022
On the day I tried out my first roll of the new Kodak Gold 120 variant, shot with my Yashicamat, I also took the Holga with me. I still had a couple of rolls of the “bad batch” Fomapan 100 (the one that liberally sprinkles little white specks on the resulting pictures), and it seems a good fit to shoot it with the Holga as, while I don’t want to use faulty film with the camera, it is great at covering up such defects due to its uniquely rendered images. I also have quite a stash of film at present and aim to try and get through some of it this year.
This was the first time I’d used the Holga in over a year – the last time was for some snowy shots back in January 2021 – and it’s easy to forget how much I like the pictures it produces. While this roll didn’t produce twelve bangers, I still got several I was happy with, and so I’ll post them here today and tomorrow.
I developed the roll in some of my remaining trial bottle of Adox Adonal (Rodinal in all but name) and used a 1+24 dilution which gave a pleasingly short 4 minute developing time. I’m pretty happy with the way they’ve turned out.
Holga 120N & Fomapan 100. Adox Adonal 1+25 4mins @ 20°.
Taken on 10 April 2022
This photo was taken the same day as the canal pictues that I posted here yesterday. Conisbrough is a mile or two down river from Mexborough and there is a nice railway viaduct there which spans the River Don. It was my intention to try and get a photo of the viaduct while I was in the area but, as it was the first time I’d visited and I’d not really planed a route, I ended up in the wrong place with quite a long detour if I intended to reach a spot where I could access the viaduct.
So, instead, I drove back the way I’d come and decided to take a few pictures of the castle. I shot a few frames on the expired TruPrint FG+ with my F80, and a few more with the Olympus XA3 which was, as usual, in my coat pocket. I had a polariser fitted to the 50mm lens on the F80 and, combined with the expired film, it resulted in some wildly vivid colours. I’ve actually toned down the blue in the sky for the shot posted here. The colours were reminiscent of an old postcard of the sort that used to be sold when I was little, with vivid, almost painterly tones.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & TruPrint FG+ (expired 2005). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 2 April 2022
I’m not actually sure if this stretch of canal has a name. It’s a navigable route that runs beside the River Don at Mexborough, presumably because the river itself is not suitable passage in this area. The canal diverts from the Don just upstream of Mexborough and then re-joins it further along, just before the River Dearne also merges with the flow.
I’d visited Mexborough because I believed therewas a camera store in town, but when I got there the address appeared to be closed. Not wanting to waste the trip I had a wander around and took a few photos. The three here today are all taken close to one another from the canal towpath.
Although all three shots have been converted with the same settings, the first has a different tonality to the others. I’m not sure if this is a factor of the Negative Lab Pro processing in some way, or if it’s down to the camera’s metering of the scene perhaps.
I like all three of the photographs, but they probably would have been much better on non-expired film.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & TruPrint FG+ (expired 2005). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 2 April 2022
The tall chimney of the Veolia Energy Recovery plant stands sentinel over these walls on industrial streets to the east of the city centre. I was shooting a roll of expired film on the day and, when I left the house, the sky was clear and full of light. Unfortunatley, by the time I’d parked and started walking, the sky was mostly covered by cloud. This wasn’t ideal – I don’t like shooting colour film in overcast conditions at the best of times, but even less so with expired film.
As it is, the results aren’t too bad and the grit of the film perhaps suits the conditions. I have more shots from this same roll to come – mostly shot in good light – and the grain is equally prevalent on those too. I have a second roll of this same stock left to shoot and think I’ll overexpose it next time, which is what I normally do with expired C41 film (using the one stop of over-exposure per decade of expiry guidance). I didn’t do that on this occasion as I’d been told the film was fridge stored and wanted to see how it looked shot a box speed.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D & TruPrint FG+ (expired 2005). Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 2 April 2022
According to the sign, this is Newark’s famous floating pub. I’m not sure of it’s sphere of fame – I’d never heard of it until I visited Newark the other week – but I expect it’s well known to locals and those able to visit it with greater ease.
Whatever it’s fame, it was an attractive subject for some photographs and I’m really happy with how these turned out, even considering the shortcomings of the camera I used.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 March 2022
The photo in today’s post is a few years old – it was taken on a cold, but bright, February day back in 2018 on the edge of the moorland near Surprise View in the Peak District national park. I don’t think I’ve published this picture online anywhere before now.
I re-scanned it, and the rest of the photos on the roll, yesterday, using Vuescan to make a linear RAW DNG file and then Negative Lab Pro for the conversion in Lightroom.
Now I understand how to use NLP properly (or at least much better – there are still a bunch of controls and sliders that I stay away from!), I’m very pleased with the ease of getting colours that I’m happy with almost straight out of the box. I still tweak things a little, first using NLPs controls, and then maybe some minor tweaks in Lightroom itself (usually adding a little clarity and sharpness), but there has been none of the annoying mental gymnastics where I can’t decide if the colours are “off” in some hard to define way.
Obviously, colours are subjective, whether it be someone sat at home trying to get what they think Portra or whatever film stock they’ve used to look “right”, or a technician in a photo-lab making adjustments in the Noritsu software (or whatever it is they use) on the behalf of the photographer. So far, Negative Lab Pro has given me colours that feel correct with very little faff on my part, and for this I am thankful. I love black and white photography, but this new found ability to get results I’m happy with from C41 film is making me want to shoot more of the stuff (and re-scan some of the photos where I had less than satisfactory results in the past). It’s just a shame I need to sell a kidney to afford colour film these days!
Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & Kodak Portra 400. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 7 February 2018
From a shop window full of slippers in yesterday’s post, to one full of newspapers in today’s. It would appear that Ragazza has seen better times. It’s sad to see businesses like this – much better that they be thriving. Nontheless, I thought it made for an interesting photograph.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 March 2022
Two different apsect of Newark market here today. A couple of pictures from outside in the market square where the red and white striped awnings on the stalls glowed vibrantly in the bright sunshine. The third shot taken inside the market hall in a shady, but nicely lit arcade. I’m quite pleased with the interior shot given the somewhat basic (and un-changeable) settings of the camera used – fixed f/11 aperture and 1/100sec shutter speed. The shadows are a little muddy but, on the whole, it’s an appealing photograph, I think.
As is seemingly the RETO UWS’s remit, one of the shots has been photobombed by my fingertip.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 March 2022
Away from pictures of Flamborough now and, for a few days to come, on to some photos from a trip to Newark I took with my wife last month. Newark is a market town in Nottinghamshire, about thirty or forty miles from home. It sits on the River Trent and has the ruined remains of a castle. They have an English Civil War museum there which I would quite like to take a look around, but that will have to wait for a future trip.
The town centre hasn’t yet been fully homogenised by all the same chain stores that you find everywhere else, although they are certainly making inroads. As a result it’s quite a nice place to wander around for a few hours. I’m not a big fan of shopping unless I either have something specific I want to buy, or it’s a shop full of stuff I find particularly interesting, so a lot of the day was spent with my wife browsing inside the shops while I stayed outside and took photographs of whatever I found interesting. This suited me just fine. 🙂
The only film camera I had with me on the day was the RETO Ultrawide and Slim, in which I’d loaded a roll of Kodak Gold. I was chancing things a bit by using a 36exp roll – I’ve heard the slightly flimsy film advance on the camera can struggle with rolls longer than 24exp, but I’d decided to risk it. The film advance definately seemed to be getting harder to turn as I approached the end of the roll, but there were no catastrophic failures thankfully. I do wish I’d taken a different camera though. While the RETO UWS is fun to use, having seen the results, I can’t help but wish I’d used something with a bit more fidelity for a trip like this. I also managed to get my fingers (and even the camera strap) into the frame on several shots, a much worse ratio than my first roll through the camera where I think it only happened once.
Today’s picture is kinda random, but I liked the arrangement of these colourful slippers in this shop window. While my finger didn’t get into the frame on this occasion, my shadow has crept in at bottom right.
Reto Ultrawide & Slim & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken on 18 March 2022
Steel City Snapper photography 