Bakewell bridge and willow

The bridge that carries the A619 Baslow Road across the River Wye at Bakewell can be quite frustrating to photograph. It’s an attractive structure but, due to it carrying traffic on one of the main routes into and through the town, along with the popularity of the place as a tourist trap, it can be difficult to catch a moment where some vehicle isn’t raising it’s distracting head above the top of the walls. I’ve nearly managed to avoid it in the picture published here today. But not quite. If you look carefully there’s a van peeping into view. Not a bad picture though and I have almost the exact same composition to come in a future post, but this time on 6×45 and in colour.

Olympus XA3 & Ilford Delta 400 . Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 1 November 2022

Keep absolutely still. It’s vision is based on movement.

A few weeks ago my wife an I visited some local garden centres to see if they had their Christmas sections in place (they did, of course, it was late October – practically the big day already!). While wandering around the displays in one I spotted this festive T-Rex and the terrified snowman quaking in the background. The snowman was literally shivering – some mechanism causing it’s movement – and it amusingly reminded of the words spoken by Alan Grant in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex escapes its paddock.

I’m quite surprised the picture turned out ok – it wasn’t well lit in there and I have no control over the XA3’s shutter speed or aperture.

Olympus XA3 & Ilford Delta 400 . Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 31 October 2022

Save the Children

I’ve been away for a few days and scheduled a bunch of posts to auto-publish. Unfortunately I didn’t draft one for today, when I’ve just arrived home exhausted! So a very quick post today with a bit of street photography (the people that can be seen to the left of the frame are part of the march that I’ve posted images from over the past few days).

Olympus XA3 & Ilford Delta 400 . Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8mins @ 20°

Taken on 1 October 2022

Pretty big thing

Although it doesn’t really look it from this photograph, the distribution centre for online fashion retaile, Pretty Little Thing is huge. They’ve gone for that “try to make it blend in with the sky” colour scheme that I’ve seen on a number of similar facilites, though I’m not convinced it works.

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.

Like a glockenspiel

This building reminds me of a glockenspiel. I think those are the mallets in the middle left…

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 22 September 2022.

The Bath Hotel from Convent Walk

I have vague memories of visiting this pub occasionally at lunchtimes when I was much younger than I am now, many years ago. It was a short walk from the building where I worked with a bunch of thirsty engineers. There would be, generally on Friday’s, sessions where I doubt many of the people were in any fit state to do any work when they got back to the office!

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.

Winner winner salad spinner

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I’d bought a salad spinner as a means to remove excess liquid from my negatives before hanging them to dry. At that time I’d only tried it with a single roll of 120 film (and not scanned them at the time of writing). I’ve now developed and spun three rolls using this method and it’s been a resounding success so far. Today was the first roll of 135 film I’ve used the spinner to dry and it looks to have worked really well too – 135 film was where most of my issues occurred and I rarely got noticeable water marks on 120 film (that I could see, at least).

Today’s picture was shot in the Winter Gardens in Sheffield city centre. The table football game hasn’t been there when I’ve walked through on previous occasions, but it has been a while. It made for a nice photo though and I really like the airily lit upper part of the image. Colorplus is a surprisingly nice film, despite it’s ‘consumer’ status.

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.

A schoolbus near City Hall

This was taken as the new students were arriving in the city for fresher’s week and there were a series of events taking place to introduce them to the city, including some in Barkers Pool in front of City Hall. Yellow schoolbuses are not a thing here in the UK, so they’re certainly worth a picture when they’re spotted.

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.

The house on Gell Street

This satisfyingly angular building isn’t actually a house. Rather it houses the archaelology department of the University of Sheffield, or at least some of it – there may be other facilities elsewhere amongst the vast array of properties owned by the university also dedicated to the same subject.

I expect it probably was a residential property at some point but I’ve not found anything covering its history in my (brief) online search.

I went out today and shot a full roll of Velvia 50 – a roll that I bought before the pandemic with the intention of capturing some autumn colour but which has sat in the fridge ever since. Today was its day. Let’s hope I get something good, eh? 🙂

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.

Seeing the old in the new

The modern building in today’s picture is The Diamond, a facility owned by the University of Sheffield which houses engineering facilities and lecture halls. It stands on the site of the original Jessop maternity hospital (where my eldest son was born) and parts of the original listed structure still remain, incorporated into the modern architecture.

Reflected in the glass is the tower of St. George’s church, now redundant as a place of worship and acting as a lecture theatre and student accommodation.

Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.

Taken on 23 September 2022.