Olympus OM1n – tim dobbs photography

Last post of 2021 …… Shooting my favorite B&W film stock ilford HP5@800

This year I have only shot 54 rolls of film, probably my lowest quantity since getting back into film photography years ago.

I don’t have a definitive reason for this maybe just how things are in the world at the moment has obviously curtailed my photo opportunities.

At least half of the rolls remained in the cameras for at least a week whereas I nearly always managed to shoot and develop usually the same day unless I intended to send certain rolls to a lab.

So my early New Years resolution is to shoot much more.

Anyway the weather here in Wales for the last 2 weeks has been bloody awful with the only opportunity to shoot would be indoors or out in the God awful rain.

I don’t really mind shooting in the rain when it is accompanied with some mist as I can get out up here and get some atmospheric images.

I have quite a few cameras as you may have noticed if you follow this blog so when I decided to brave the elements last week I dug out my trusty Olympus OM1 with the 50mm f1.4 and loaded it with some ilford HP5 that I rated at 800 with the hope that I could get some frames above f4.

To be honest there was only a few times I got to f5.6/8 most of the images were f4 and below but all the same I was very happy with what I got.

Shooting the OM1 is great it’s such a brilliant camera with the benefit of not needing batteries other than for the light meter I think any film photography should have one in their collection.

I processed the roll in ilfotech LC29 1+19 dilution for 9.30 mins and scanned with my Epson v600

As I have mentioned before I prefer the look of HP5 when pushed to 800/1600 or even 3200 than actual box speed, the increased contrast and grain gives me the sort of look I imagine when taking the shot and works great in the conditions I had here.

Also I managed to stitch together a 7 frame pano which is the featured image at the top.

So here is what I got .. I have shot very similar compositions and scenes before on this blog on various other film stocks so take a look back through my archive if you want to compare.

Click on an image to view larger in a lightbox…..

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek

Lomography F2/400 ….. What’s it like then?

I had seen this film advertised for a while but never seemed to be able to get my hands on any as it was always sold out.

Lucky for me a few months back I got a roll sent to me by a fellow twitter photographer along with various other eclectic film stocks.

I was pretty excited to try it out and loaded my Olympus OM1n as I had not shot it for ages and managed to get quite an array of images over a 2 week period … Grey day/Sunny day, Night time and some close ups too.

I had the roll developed and scanned by Filmdev

The images were really punchy with quite a bit more grain than I was used to with Lomo CN400 which is my current goto colour negative stock.

Even though the grain was present I was really happy with how they looked, the colours were lovely and had an almost X-Pro/vivid look where the reds and greens popped and pretty sharp too.

I think the images in really good light or night time scenes with lights worked the best for me, in fact if I can get hold of some more I would definitely go night shooting.

Here is a selection from the roll ….

Please click a photo to view larger

All images on my blog are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

October’s “DeltaDefJam” photos all together …..

As per last month here are all my photos taken for October’s “DeltaDefJam” challenge.

They were taken on my Olympus OM1n with the 50mm f1.4 except the turntable one’s which were the Tamron 35-70 f3.5 CF Macro using ilford Delta 400 processed in Rodinal.

I didn’t post all of these so there are some here that you may not have seen over on Twitter.

Anyway thanks for looking ….

Click on an image to view larger

All images are available as prints just drop me an email

I also have a film only blog over at usingfilm.wordpress.com if you want a peek 🙂

Testing Spur Acurol-N with ilford HP5+

A few weeks back and the subject of my last post here I was sent some developer to test out by Spur Photo http://spur-photo.com/.

This time I tried out their Acurol-N developer on some Ilford HP5+. The information I was given by the company was to rate the film at iso 200 and Dev for 12 minutes at a dilution of 1-50 which I proceeded to do.

From what I have read on the web this developer should yield sharper negatives with little effect on the grain so I shot some random stuff which hopefully would show the added sharpness.

I used my Olympus OM1n and 50mm f1.8mc which has given me pretty good clean images especially at f5.6-f11, nearly all the images here were at f8.

I have never shot HP5 at iso 200 before I have nearly always pushed it as I love the contrast and grain I get from it.

I must admit I really like the images that I got, they were very sharp indeed and the grain did not seem as pronounced as I usually get with HP5 especially in large areas of uniform colour like skies in fact it was really quite smooth in comparison.

As I now have a complete darkroom setup I am going to try a few prints from the negs to see what the softer grain looks like.

Both the developers that I have tried have definitely produced different negatives than what I get from my usual dev combinations in a good way and depending on what I am after in the final image I will keep using both.

Thank you again to Spur for giving me the opportunity to try out your products I highly recommend them to all B&W photographers out there 🙂