We managed a few days away down West Wales in the cottage 2 weeks ago and as usual I couldn’t make up my mind what camera or film combination to take but as the weather forecast was for lovely bright days albeit pretty chilly I decided on some Fuji Reala in 120 and some Lomo Color Negative 400 in 35mm ….
I would have taken some of the new Kodak Ektachrome but my order didn’t arrive in time for me to take.
Eventually I decided on my Yashicamat 124G and Nikon F100 with both the 50mm f1.4 & 24-85VR and had the processing and scanning done by Filmdev who as usual did a brilliant job.
Anyway here are the images …. first Lomo Color Negative 400
and now the 120 …. Fuji Reala
Apart from the egg shots & cottage image … the locations were Saundersfoot and Tenby.
Please click a photo to view larger
All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email
Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of spending time with world renowned artist Kevin Sinnott who lucky for me lives here in Pontycymmer where he also has his studio and his most excellent gallery “Studio 18”.
My first thoughts about this series of images was to shoot it completely on film which after my initial test shoots was not going to show how I pictured the project in my mind where I had some sort of control over the colours of the paintings.
So I used a mix of film & Digital hopefully to give a good overview of a working artist.
Before we start here is a very brief snippet about Kevin that I procured from the web….
Kevin Sinnott
Born in Sarn, South Wales in 1947, Kevin Sinnott is a contemporary Welsh artist with a truly international reputation. He trained at Cardiff College of Art & Design, Gloucestershire College of Art & Design and at the Royal College of Art, London. Kevin remained in London throughout the 1970s and 80s, building a very successful career, and exhibiting at leading London galleries, major galleries in the USA and mainland Europe. Kevin’s work is collected worldwide and he is represented in many important public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His large canvas, ‘Running Away with the Hairdresser’ has proved to be one of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales’s most popular acquisitions. Kevin returned to live in Wales in 1995 and has quickly established himself at the forefront of the renaissance in Welsh painting. While his work is primarily concerned with human relationships, the influence of the south Wales landscape is strongly felt in his paintings. He was elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy in 2007.
I will include some links at the end of the post to various articles featuring Kevin that may be of interest.Hopefully this will be the start of an ongoing project where I hope to spend time with artists in their studio or place of work where I can document the process of their discipline whether they are a painters, photographers, illustrators, musicians, sculptors etc
This 1st post may be an exception as Kevin gave me unlimited access to him and his studio for which I am so grateful.
I was very lucky with my timing as Kevin was in the middle of a painting on the day we arranged for me to pop over to do the studio shoot.
I was privileged to watch him work and then re work the painting “SuperMam” which will feature in most of the following images, please excuse the slight colour variations as obviously they are a mix of Film & Digital.
The paintings need to be seen in life to appreciate them 🙂
The images were shot on a mixture of Kodak Portra 400, Fuji Pro 400H for the colour and ilford HP5+ and Kodak T-Max for the B&W.
Cameras used were Nikon F100, Mamiya 645, Mamiya C330 and Leica M2.
Digital were Nikon D600, Fuji XT-1 and Fuji X-Pro1
I have been taking part in a Twitter competition #SummerFilmParty where the photographers have to use certain types of film during shoot week then over the following 2 weeks develop and then post the results.
Today was the last posting day so I decided to also post all my entries her together.
I used 2 cameras … Nikon F90 with a 50mm f1.4 & Sigma 105mm f2.8 with some Kodak Ektar.
and Yashica Mat 124G with Fuji Reala 100 both rolls developed and scanned at home.
Here they are in no particular order … Obviously the Square images are from the Yashica Mat 🙂As usual it was fun to be a part of …. here is the link to Emulsive where you can see the info about this and future competitions .. Summer Film Party also here is the Twitter link @summerfilmparty
Thanks for looking ….
Click on an image to view larger
All images are available as prints just drop me an email
A few weeks ago my very, very kind cousin gave me a huge bundle of film all of which had expired over various dates.
One of the oldest was a roll of HP5+ that expired back in 1995, as none of the film had been either fridge/freezer stored for quite a while I was expecting pretty hit or miss results but I love the unexpected.I loaded up my Mamiya 645 and popped out to see what I would get.
I exposed as if it was 200 iso and processed accordingly using ilfotec HC 1+47 dilution for 8 minutes and the negatives came out fine at 1st sight.But on close inspection the sharpness and contrast were just fine but the grain in the lighter areas was pretty soft and mushy, not that I minded it was fine and towards the end of the roll the circles of the paper backing were evident in 2 of the frames.As you can see in this crop…Nevertheless I was really impressed with the film, I love grain and contrast and this roll had not really lost either, I could have most probably developed a little longer and got it even more contrasty.I love HP5, its my goto film most of the time and even if it expired 20 years ago its still great in my book…… thank goodness that Ilford are still flying the flag for film.Thanks for looking
Click on an image to view larger…….
You can also find more film goodness over at my “Film Only” blog at:
Ages ago I was kindly given a bag full of film, all expired ranging from 2000 to 2009 and the friend who gave it to me didn’t know how it was stored as he himself was given it by 3rd party.
I have been using some of it to test any old 35mm camera I managed to pick up and to be honest it has all been ok but I have not shot it with a decent camera/lens combination and had it processed professionally so the other week I loaded up my Nikon F4 with some Agfa HDC plus 200 that expired back in 2002.I deliberately set my iso to 100 and also over-exposed quite a few shots hoping to get a bit of contrast and colour in the film as what I have found with the other rolls that I shot at box speed and camera exposure have all been a little flat.As with most Agfa colour films I have used before the images had a magenta tone to them which I don’t mind.
I was impressed with the contrast and sharpness too, it really made a difference shooting this film in the F4 with my nice 50mm f1.8.After our little walk I still had a few frames left and my better half had a go with the F4 while we relaxed outside our local pub shooting my happy face.All in all I am very happy with how the film performed, it really made a difference using it in a good camera and the processing was done by AG Photographic and not at home by me.
I have another 10 rolls of this as well as various other Agfa/Kodak mixture so now I know that the film works fine I will shoot these in my better cameras rather that just as test rolls in the many point & shoot/rangefinders I seem to pick up in charity shops “I have a GAS problem 🙂 “.Thanks for looking….comments most welcome 🙂
Today’s weather is pretty poor so just for a change from shooting film I put my Canon FD 50mm on the X-Pro and popped out to see how it performed in the real world of a walk about test.I have used it before but only as a closeup, short DOF type test so shooting it on a walk and only manual focus was going to be a bit of a challenge.As the camera does not know what aperture the lens is at (well at least the exif does not say) I am not sure exactly what aperture I used for each shot was but apart from the container shot which I know was F8 all the others were between f1.4 to f4.0.I was a bit awkward shooting manual focus but the focus peaking on the X-Pro helped greatly but any fast street style shooting was out of question unless I used zone focusing.The results were very pleasing overall, I am not sure I totally like the Bokeh this lens produces with the X-Pro unlike what it produces when I use my Canon T90 but that aside the images came out fine.I have a shed load of FD mount lenses so I am going to try each one just to see which if any I prefer and will blog the results.All the images were shot Raw and processed using Adobe Lightroom 5
Thanks for looking
click on an image to view larger ……..
I also blog all my film stuff here if anyone cares to take a look 🙂
I have had a roll of ilford panf 50 in my fridge for a few months now and every time I go to get a roll of film I see it sitting there by itself and I never seem to give it a go that is until about 2 weeks ago.
It was quite a bright morning so I decided to load up the Canon T90 – 28mm f2.8 and headed up the mountain.
As I was climbing the clouds were building and by the time I reached the top and began walking across towards the Memorial flag here in the Garw valley the darker it got….. not very good when you have a 50 iso film in your camera.
Nevertheless I managed to keep shooting albeit mainly at f4 – 5.6 and pretty slow shutter speeds.I processed the film in ilford Ilfotec HC and hung up to dry wondering if I managed to get many shots without blurring.And out of 36 frames I managed to get quite a few very sharp almost grainless images, I did slightly bump up the contrast on these scans in Lightroom and apart from cloning out a few dust spots these were pretty much straight scans.I am not sure when I would ever use this film as I prefer the contrast and grain that I get with my Favourite film HP5+ but the results were pretty nice, I may print some of the negatives in the darkroom just to see what they are like.Thanks for looking ….
My friend and neighbour Merlin has a huge challenge/project going on for the last couple of months to attempt to build a replica of a plane built in about 1904 here in the Garw valley.
I have had the pleasure of trying to document the building of the said plane as the project has been progressing. Sadly Merlin’s health has slowed him up greatly but his determination is a pleasure to witness.I love popping next door to his workshop and exploring all his quirky, interesting pieces dotted about.Hopefully this project will see the light next year and I will be there to see the finale 🙂
A few weeks ago I managed to pick up 2 cameras from my local charity shop for the princely sum of £20 each.
They were a Pentax K1000 and a Canon AV1. I have a couple of other Canons A1, AE1 Program and a T90 along with quite a few FD mount lenses so I decided to test the AV1 first.I loaded up with some ilford HP5 and used my Canon 50mm f1.4 for all the shots going from f1.4 through to f11.
I must say I really liked using this camera much more than the AE1 as I shoot mainly aperture priority or manual this camera was more in line with how I shoot, to be honest I don’t really like using the AE1 much.
I popped along to a local derelict factory to see how things performed and the results were great, all the shots here are straight scans which brings me to another point.
I updated my iMac to the new OSX 10.9 Mavericks which seemed to go well except when I went to scan my negatives my Epson Scan software that I use with my v500 scanner said “Not Compatible” so I went to the epson site to update only to find that they have not yet updated their program for any of their scanners.
Luckily I have Windows 7 installed on my mac and scanned using that while I wait for Epson to pull their finger out and update the software (1 week later and still no update…Epson support are pretty poor indeed, a lot of people with scanners as doorstops I expect).
Anyway thanks for looking, comments most welcome 🙂
The best of the rest …
Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of spending time with world renowned artist Kevin Sinnott who lucky for me lives here in Pontycymmer where he also has his studio and his most excellent gallery “Studio 18”.
Hopefully this will be the start of an ongoing project where I hope to spend time with artists in their studio or place of work where I can document the process of their discipline whether they are a painters, photographers, illustrators, musicians, sculptors etc
As usual it was fun to be a part of …. here is the link to Emulsive where you can see the info about this and future competitions .. 
Thanks for looking…. comments welcomed
tim dobbs photography 