Category: Black & White.

Early morning.

Pre-scheduled post.
Early morning walk before the rain returns, it has been a very wet couple of months, way behind with all the jobs we had planned.
Going out with a camera in the heavy rain is not my idea of fun !!!
Started doing some clearing of fallen branches, gathering plant pots that had blown away and generally checking things around the house, until the rain sent me back indoors. Have not even started on our static caravan at Castle Howard, at least we have avoided the floods that many people have suffered. Don’t tempt fate David.

It could be worse:-

1607: Bristol floods
Some 2,000 people drowned around the Severn Estuary, with 200 square miles of farmland inundated. Long blamed on a storm surge, it is now suspected that the devastation was caused by a tsunami.

1703: Great Storm
The Great Storm of 1703 was described as the worst natural disaster ever to hit southern Britain. Between 8,000 and 15,000 lives were lost and the lead roofing was blown off Westminster Abbey.

1891: Great Blizzard
More than 200 people died and Cornwall and Devon completely cut off from the rest of the country by a great blanket of snow that covered much of the two counties.

1953: North Sea flood
A severe windstorm over the North Sea combined with an unusually high spring tide caused a storm surge in both eastern England and Holland. Over 300 people died in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and in Holland around 1,800 died.

1962/3: the harsh winter
From Boxing Day 1962 to March 1963 much of the UK was covered with snow. In January the sea froze for up to a mile out from Herne Bay and the upper Thames froze over.

1987: Great Hurricane
Michael Fish (metrologist on BBC) laughed off suggestions a hurricane was on the way. A few hours later 22 were dead, 15 million trees uprooted and wind speeds of 122 mph were recorded in Norfolk.

Info from Mark Piggott (IBTimes UK)

As the sun goes down.

As the sun goes down on a cold Autumn evening..

It’s nice to see that all my scheduled posts have been published, I have never used the facility before.
I have been away from Driffield over the New Year so internet has been rather haphazard; there is only one reliable provider in the area and it’s not the one I’m with.

Difficult negative.

Bent old tree.
Yashica Mat 124G on Ilford HP5.

This was a negative that I was never able to print in the darkroom, I messed up the processing by using a rather hot stopbath by mistake. It caused mild reticulation & a slight increase in the film grain. I had filed the roll away and thought nothing more about it until I came across it again the other day, but nothing ventured nothing gained. Could I scan it and make a digital print that came close to my original visualisation ?

I used Lightroom and Nik software then printed it on matte art paper that has a slight textured surface, so although this Jpeg doesn’t give a true representation it’s close enough and I am pleased with the print.

Storm clouds.

Nikon F4 with  Tokina 35-70 f2.8 AIs AT-X lens on Ilford HP5 400 pushed to 800.
Storm clouds over derelict farm house.

Update: I kept looking at the grain in this image scan and thinking, it doesn’t look right for a T-Max 400 film; I was right.

It was in fact Ilford HP5 developed in Rodinal: the confusion arose because this image was at the end of a series I had made of storm clouds. I changed over to T-Max ( having run out of Ilford) and continued, but kept the negatives together as they were all of the same subject. That will teach me to pay more attention to the edge markings, getting lazy !! with using my Nikon Df/800 and always having the metadata confirm what my settings were.

 

Old way marker.

Nikon F4, Nikkor 50mm f1.8 AFD lens on Ilford FP4

Not sure if this is an old Drovers’ way marker or a ‘Standing Stone’ that has been bypassed by the track.

From Wikipedia:
A drovers’ road, drove [road] or droveway is a route for moving livestock on foot from one place to another, such as to market or between summer and winter pasture Many drovers’ roads were ancient routes of unknown age; others are known to date back to medieval times

Sun burst.

A flower from my daughter’s garden, probably gone now the cold weather has returned. Winter is on its way and the clocks go back this weekend in UK.

Changing the time twice a year was first established by the Summer Time Act of 1916, after a campaign by builder William Willett, so that  evenings have more daylight and mornings have fewer daylight hours. It’s been changed a couple of times since then, notably during WW II when ‘Double’ summer time was introduced, 1941 to 1945 when Britain was GMT+2. Between 1968 and 1971 the clocks stayed at GMT+1 but statistics showed an increase in traffic accidents during the morning hours but a substantial decrease in the evening so UK reverted back to GMT/BST changes each year. Beginning at one o’clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in March and ending at one o’clock, Greenwich mean time, in the morning of the last Sunday in October.

I hate it, it’s not natural, messes with my body clock, I’ve only just begun to get it into my head that in UK I can’t go shopping late evening, as most shops close after 17:00 hrs.

Pinhole image of a bridge in Bath – Somerset: I think.

A bridge in Bath – Somerset, I think.
Image scanned then adjusted for noise & contrast in P.S/CS6.

The problem with going through old files and negatives is finding forgotten and unidentifiable images. That is exactly what this is, all the negative page said was ‘Pinhole experiments’ with 35mm camera and body cap, it had several badly exposed and/or very blurred images but this one was the best.

I remember reading about the possibility of using a body cap drilled for a pinhole lens, but cannot find the modified cap since moving.

I do remember using the Nikon F4/Nikon F2Sb after making the lens from a drilled body cap which I then fitted with a disc made from very thin aluminium with a precisely centred hole. The ‘f’ stop was around f:200, calculated by using the following.

f-stop = focal length / aperture diameter

Figures estimated by using a ruler and dividers, was about 0.25 mm and the distance of the pinhole to film plane about 50 mm.

f-stop = 50 mm / 0.25 mm = 200.

For those who wondered what the symbol of a circle bisected by a line was on their SLR, it denotes the point of focus for images at infinity; the film plane.

The disc was sanded, cleaned in Isopropyl alcohol then glued onto the lens cap and all painted with matt black paint.

Why I have never carried on with these experiments I have no idea and the memory jog only came after looking at pinhole images posted on Kevin Allan’s excellent blog  filmphotography.blog/2019/09/25/ondu-pinholes-hexham-abbey/  Well worth visiting for his images and articles about cameras, materials & techniques.