A third day of little more than just a picture, I’m afraid. I’m so busy with work right not that I just don’t have the time or energy to think about writing anything. Hopefuly things will improve come the weekend.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 20 May 2023.
Just pictures again today (I’ve been out all day travelling to and from a business meeting and am very tired. That’s my excuse :)).
The pictures are all taken in the Sharrow area of Sheffield – on Sharrow Vale Road to be specific.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 20 May 2023.
Just pictures today…
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 20 May 2023.
The week after we returned home from Italy, I decided to go out and shoot some more large format film with my Chroma 4×5 camera. I decided to visit Roche Abbey, a 12th century Cistercian monastery, or what remains of it at least. It does beg the question of what it would look like today had it not been destroyed as part of Henry VIII’s disolution of the monasteries? Indeed, what would the entire area have looked like – one might imagine a whole town at least, rather than a ruin in a lovely looking valley. Still, trying to imaging how things might have played out with a change in a historical event is quite the rabbit hole to disappear down, and whole novels have been written about such things.
The monastery is under the auspices of English Heritage and there is a fee to enter (although there’s a conveniently placed public footpath just the other side of a fence with full view of the ruins if you don’t feel the need to get right up close). Accessing the abbey is down a narrow cobbled lane that provides some serious rumbling through your car’s suspension and tyres (more on this later…).
I had four sheets of HP5+ to shoot with the Chroma, but I also packed my Olympus Trip 35 in the bag too, figuring I might be able to shoot more of the Fuji 200 that was still in the camera from the Italy trip. This was fortuitous.
I found a number of compositions for the 4×5 and carefully focused, aligned, and exposed the images. This was the first time I would be shooting the camera since McGuyvering another fix for the light-leak issues I’d been having with the camera, but I was pretty confident that I’d fixed them. Spoiler alert: I hadn’t.
In between making the large format pictures, I also shot about a dozen frames with the Trip. This saved the day, photographically speaking.
There were two notable negative outcomes from the day. The first was that my light leak fix didn’t work. Upon developing them I found that all four images had massive light leaks in exactly the same way I’d encountered them previously. After making the effort to drive to the location, pay admission, take the time to shoot the images, and then develop them the next day, this was very disappointing
The second outcome was spotted when I returned to my car and noticed that the rear tyre had a noticeable and – given I would have to drive on a motorway, worrying – split in the side wall. Given that cars these days rarely have a spare anymore – just a repair kit – I was left to decide whether to call out a breakdown truck, or to take the risk that the tyre would hold out for the journey home.
I decided, possibly foolishly, to take the second option. The split looked worrying, but also like it should last the thirty minutes or so it would take to get home, although I planned on driving especially carefully and as slowly as possible. Driving back up the cobbled track was a nerve wracking experience, and I expected to hear a loud pop as the tyre burst with every bump of the wheels, but it held out ok. Back on the main road, the car was similarly fine, although I was hunched over the wheel, prepared to react should something happen. After a while I drove past a tyre shop, but it was on the opposite side of the road and I was already past it by the time I realised. However , a short distance further on, there was a tailback of traffic and a police car was parked astride both lanes for some undetermined incident. Deciding that this was a sign, I turned around and returned to the tyre shop.
Unfortunately, there were no new tyres of the correct size, but they did have a used tyre available. I would never buy a used tyre under normal circumstances, but on this occasion it seemed a better bet than the actual damaged tyre on the car. It was also remarkably (and worryingly) cheap, so I decided to go ahead.
Thankfully, the trip home was, while a bit stressful, uneventful, and the used tyre survived without a blowout or any of the other catastrophic failures my mind imagined might happen. I replaced the tyre with a brand new one from my usual tyre dealer the first chance I got though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 13 May 2023.
Today’s is the last of my photos from the trip to Italy I took over two months ago now. It’s quite a nice one to go out on though. I’d seen this church while walking around the town with my wife, but it was the next street over so I didn’t get chance to get close. On the last full day of the trip though I went for a walk while my wife sat beside the pool reading her book, so took the opportunity to grab a picture.
Over the past few days I’ve been scanning a roll of expired Kodak Elite Chrome that I shot while visiting this year’s Sheffield Steam Rally. I used my Canon Sure Shot Ace and all the pictures are noticeably under-exposed. I never overexpose slide film as it tends to retain its limited exposure latitude, even if it’s lost some of it’s colour tonality, and have generally had well exposed results when shooting other expired E6 emulsions. So in this case I don’t know if it’s the film (it did expire over 20 years ago!), or the camera’s metering – although I’ve had the Ace a few years, this was only the second time I’ve used it, although there were no issues with underexposure previously.
Whatever the case, it will make a good subject for a new Expiry Files post, especially given I haven’t done one of those for ages, despite promising to try and do more of them.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
It’s Friday and, once again, instead of it being POETS* day, I’ve only just finished work because I’m busy, I’m behind on stuff, and have another very busy week coming up that I’ve barely prepped for, which means I’m heading into another weekend where work will be preying on my mind if I’m not careful.
Today’s picture is the penultimate photo from the Italy trip – a batch I’ve managed to stretch out for approaching two months! One more to come, then onto something else.
* P##s Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday, for those not in the know. And also, for anyone who doesn’t have the same usage of the vernacular, “p##s off“, can mean both “go away“, or “to annoy” here in the UK. 🙂
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
Does anyone remember what I posted back on the 1st of June? No? Well, neither did I, but I knew that I’d posted another photograph of the building that features in today’s post.
It seems strange that photographs taken a couple of days apart, are seperated by over a month in the blog timeline.
When posting on the blog throughout the year my pool of available photos seems to go through peaks and troughs. Sometimes I pretty much have to make sure I go out and make new photos just to keep the blog fed with fresh material. At other time, like now, I have a big backlog of stuff to get through – maybe in the region of about 8-10 rolls of 135 and 120 format images, some already on Flickr, some yet to be uploaded there, some not yet scanned, and a couple of rolls still to develop.
The pile is growing to the extent that I expect that I’ll break away from posting one or two pictured per day and maybe post bigger sets. I have a couple of rolls shot with the GW690 for instance, almost all shot at the same location on the same day, that will make a post about that particular outing.
No doubt I’ll be scratching around for stuff again in a few months though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
I guess that this Ferris wheel is one of the landmarks in Lido di Jesolo, standing close to the centre of the resort. Its official name is The Jesolo Wheel of Venice and it is almost 200 feet in height. I didn’t have a ride, although I would have done had the opportunity presented. It apparently takes around 10 minutes to go around the wheel once, so not really a thrill ride (unless you don’t like heights!).
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
More beach scenes today, but this time a tryptych of sorts showing the same set of yellow beach parasols in different compositions.
This was the first roll of the new Fujifilm 200 that I’ve shot. From everything I’ve read it’s actually Kodak Gold that has been repackaged under Fuji branding. Gold’s a nice enough film, but I’d like to have the actual Fujifilm C200 to choose as well. It has a noticeably different look.
Olympus Trip 35 & Fujifilm 200. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
Nowt* to see here but beach scenes today.
* A bit of local Yorkshire dialect. It means “nothing” in case you didn’t realise. 🙂
Olympus Trip 35 & Colorplus. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Taken 7 May 2023.
Steel City Snapper photography 