Top to bottom, left to right
1. Bench and felled tree. Belgrave
2. Football pitch on the other side of the river. Birstall
3. Wolsey chimney. Wolsey Island/Abbey Meadows.
4. Traveller’s caravans. Abbey Meadows.
5. Railings next to the river. Belgrave.
6. Driftwood. Watermead Country Park. Birstall
The usual Derwent Edge walk, starting from Fairholmes, involves heading north on the east shore of Derwent Reservoir and then east across Little Howden Moor to Lost Lad but I really like taking the more direct route – east on the small footpath just before the dam and then picking up the track that leads past the Grouse Butts and on to Green Sitches. It’s a bit of a climb but I quite like getting the hard work out of the way early, and on a cold day it warms you up pretty quickly.
Personally I also find the landscape a bit more interesting this way :)
The popular Derwent/Fairholmes walk can be found on Trekking Britain – http://www.trekkingbritain.com/derwentedgefromfairholmes.htm – it’s well worth a day of your time.
What started with the relatively cheap purchase of a Canon EOS 5 (which I considered to be an old camera at the time) now seems to have become an expensive habit, with me mulling over the purchase of small colour processing kit capable of taking 5×4 film.
This seems crazy to many people – myself included until recently – with the usual phrases including things like “you can do whatever you like with digital”, “each shot is free with digital”, “you can see what you’ve taken straight away” being trotted out frequently. All of these are of course valid points, and I have no intention of putting my digital kit away but there is something inescapably fun about film. Maybe it’s actually using the cameras themselves that is fun, I don’t know – what I do know is that unless I need digital quality results I find myself choosing a film camera to take with me when I go out now instead.
I was slowly working my way through all the different types of film I could find (although I tend to prefer B&W as I find it hard to get excited about colour film) and also enjoying the different characteristics, and faults of the various cameras when I suddenly remembered the old Box Brownie. The Kodak Six-20 Brownie Model C, made between 1946 and 1953 – surely it wasn’t possible to still get film for it?
A bit of searching led me to http://www.photosupplies.co.uk/ who offer 120 film respooled for use in 620 cameras. Not only that, but they also provide affordable, more than adequate quality processing (which is more than I can say for my local camera shop)
The image above was taken on my first trip out with the Box Brownie, taken on Fuji Neopan Acros 100 and processed by http://www.photosupplies.co.uk.
For a long time I’ve been trying to get “the shot” of this building that will stop me wanting to come back here and try again. To be fair I have a few that I quite like but it was only when this film came back from Ilford that I realised what I’d been missing – I was concentrating on the building all the time and I hadn’t noticed the obvious – the space.
What is missing is as important as what remains – the gaps where the rest of the shoe factory once stood and the word “WOLSEY” painted on the chimney – these are details I had missed until a change of camera and lens forced a different perspective on me.
Canon EOS 5, Canon 24mm f/2.8, ILFORD SFX200, Cokin P003
Images: left – SFX200 film with no filter, right – SFX200 film with Cokin P003 Red filter
Not too long ago, inspired by the work of others (and in order to plot another point on the Stages Of A Photographer graph) I picked up a second-hand Canon EOS film camera. I managed to get an EOS 5 from ebay for around £25 including postage – I had been wanting to pick up an EOS 3 but £100 seemed a little too extravagant. I could also have bought something more fashionable, but as a first tentative step into the world of film it seemed a sensible choice – I can use all my lenses and it works pretty much the same as my main camera, the 5D (although there are some inconvenient differences, such as the lack of dedicated Depth of Field preview button)
I put a couple of films through it to see how I got on, and got them developed locally (and cheaply). Unfortunately the results were pretty poor – lots of scratched prints – but it also seemed that how I metered for digital wasn’t appropriate for film. There were some nice images though, so undeterred I decided to try again so I ordered 4 B&W films at random and it just so happened that one of these was a roll of Ilford SFX200.
I hadn’t really read anything about the film when buying it but whilst casually researching the films before they arrived I noticed that it had “extended red sensitivity” and “using a deep red filter skies can be rendered almost black and most green vegetation almost white”. Reading a bit more about the film I couldn’t really find out any solid facts about using it – although had I found the flickr group earlier I could probably have got my questions answered – so I decided to document my limited experimentation with it so far here.
Kit used:
Canon EOS 5
Canon 24mm f/2.8 lens
58mm filter adapter – as the lens has a 58mm filter thread
Cokin P Series Wide Angle Filter Holder (BPW400A) – I could have used the standard 3 slot one but as I was going to be using film and not digital I didn’t want to be relying on the need to crop the edges if the adapter was visible. (Because the viewfinder isn’t 100% there is always the chance that you don’t see the filter holder through the viewfinder but that it is visible in the shots)
Cokin P003 Red Filter
Notes:
I was using the square Cokin P-Series filters because I already had them. Kood also produce the filter accessories (adaptor, holder), which are generally cheaper than the Cokin ones.
A screw-in Red 29 filter will perform the same function. (A Red 25 filter may also be used but the effect will be slightly less strong)
Without filter/With filter comparison:
The images at the top of this page were shot at the same time (well, within less than a minute of each other) in identical lighting conditions – bright sunlight. Ok – the composition is slightly different, which doesn’t make it a 100% accurate comparison, but my slight change of position will have made only minimal difference to the exposure.
TTL metering was used for both images, metering set to Evaluative. The Red filter has a filter factor of 8, meaning that it absorbs 3 stops of light, so bright sunlight really is necessary for taking shots hand-held. Normally when using the red filter with digital I would shoot at ISO400 but as I was using this film for the first time I decided to use it as its rated speed. ISO400 obviously gives a bit of extra leeway with the aperture setting and I found that I was shooting at f/8 and f/5.6 at less than 1/100s here. Even though statistically 1/50s should be fine with the 24mm lens I still like to shoot a bit faster, so I was expecting a few blurred shots from the roll (but was happily surprised when they were all ok)
As you can see from the images above (left, SFX200 film with no filter – right, SFX200 film with Cokin P003 Red filter) there is a marked difference in the tones when using the red filter. It’s not quite true Infrared as a) the red filter still lets a lot of visible light through and b) the film doesn’t record far into the infrared spectrum, but it’s quite a strikingly different look and one which I far prefer to the 650nm digital conversion that I have.
For a more authentic Infrared effect you could use an IR72/R72/Cokin P007 filter – however this is a very dark filter and it’s virtually (if not) impossible to compose and focus with the filter on. For the time being I’ll be sticking with the red filter as the film camera is a relatively inexpensive thing of fun for me – I’m not quite ready to stick it on a tripod and take it seriously.
There are barns like this dotted around the landscape in the Peak District – buildings that have fallen into disrepair as they are no longer required. It’s pretty easy to chalk these things down as yet another photographic cliché and I won’t be presenting any argument to the contrary, but there were enough elements here – the mid-morning spring sun illuminating the building but leaving the foreground in darkness, the partially lit gate and the tree to the right – that made it worth a couple of shots.
Taken somewhere on the footpath from Hope to Win Hill with Dan and Al.
It’s not really blossom, but it’s what it reminds me of – and I didn’t like “Bridge” as much as a title.
Spring seems to be a good time for infrared photography – the trees are still bare enough to be visible but they also provide delicate dots of bright white leaves.
This is from a location I’ve visited regularly in the past, not far from home, but I normally visit for the (relative) beauty of it rather than to take pictures of discarded metalwork. I’ve always been fascinated though by this bridge just being dumped here, and it made a good choice as an item for a themed exhibition later in the year so I popped along with the IR camera to see how well the metal would stand out from its surroundings.
Whilst getting to choose your own wages is probably the best thing about working for yourself, being able to escape to do something fun when the workload isn’t too hectic comes a very close second. On one such less than hectic day Dan and I decided a trip to the Peak District would be the best use of our time and arranged to meet up with Al Brydon for a moderately paced photographers stumble up and around Win Hill.
This was taken towards the end of the walk, as the sun was disappearing behind cloud and the general mist that had been present all day.
This work is available at redbubble along with selected others
If moody pictures of trees (and moody pictures not of trees) are your thing then you’d do well to check out Al’s Holgascapes book or his work on Etsy. He’s too good – I hate him.
Not many blog posts recently – not because of lack of enthusiasm but due to lack of time. Unfortunately earning money has to come before gallivanting around the countryside in all weathers (most of the time)
This shot was taken on a Sunday afternoon walk around Cressbrook Dale in early January with the talented and extremely pleasant Mr Al Brydon (http://www.albrydonphotography.co.uk/ or on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Al-Brydon-Photography/329360448276)
I’m often tempted to try and fit all the subject into a shot, but since I took a break from using the wide angle lens I’ve been concentrating more on using longer focal lengths (40-50mm) and trying to crop scenes to make the most of interesting light and detail. Here I liked the curve made by the tree and its shadow, how the winding path filled up the left of the frame and how the branches on the left of the tree extended to fill the sky.
This work is available at redbubble.
