f/1.1 Colour snapsh!ts

In which I remember that Portra 400 shot at box speed is just too slow. One day I will invest in some C41 equipment & experiment with pushing colour, but not yet.

Little exhibition PhotoSoc had at a local coffee shop last year.

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f/1.1 Snapsh!ts

The usual Tri-X @ 1600 souped in Xtol, but by now the Xtol is 15 months old so I gave it an extra few minutes after testing it on a scrap of the leader. First time I’ve ever used a wetting agent & ended up with probably the worst drying marks I’ve ever had, so I don’t think I’ll bother with it again.

In Inverurie for a friend’s wedding.

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Return to Covent Garden

Back in December 2011 I was in London with a Yashica-Mat 124G that I had just bought on eBay. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Mat was actually broken & of the full 12 shots I took on that first roll only half actually came out. As far as I can tell, the rest were actually shot onto the backing paper. That roll was also the first time I ever developed a film myself, so looking back at it I was incredibly lucky to get such a nice photo of the Christmas decorations at Covent Garden, which looked even better when I rescanned it when I got my Epson V600.

I told myself that if Covent Garden had the same decorations up again, I would go down better prepared with a tripod & camera I knew worked properly. Well Christmas 2014 came around & the same decorations went up, so I hopped on the train with my RB67 Pro SD, a 5-pack of Tri-X & a nice Manfrotto tripod borrowed from work. Well, not so much hopped, as it was rather a heavy setup!

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Of course ‘the best laid plans’ etc. & the shoot didn’t go quite as perfectly as I had hoped. It was quite late on a Sunday night by the time I made it out & got set up, so there were far fewer people than I had expected & the same bustling Christmassy atmosphere wasn’t really there. But conversely, because there were fewer people & the parasols were down, you could actually see from the vantage point all the way to the back of the building & the pillars across the entry. The flare from the lamps is unfortunate as well, but I’m honestly not sure how I could’ve avoided that – something to learn for the future!

I took a bunch of shots, both from the same off-centre position as 2011 & from the exact centre. None of the shots jumped out like that original 2011 shot, but there were a couple that I was relatively pleased with (click for bigger).

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Covent Garden at Christmas [Re-scan]

I rescanned the Covent Garden photo I took back in 2011 & originally scanned with the CanoScan 9000F, this time using the Epson V600 & producing a much better result. Whether that’s because the Epson is actually better or I simply chose more appropriate options is open to debate though!

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Canon

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