Nunhead Cemetery

I have no idea where the idea to visit Nunhead Cemetery came from, one day I just thought, I think I'll take a wander over there, as its only 15 minutes from where I live.

A bit of background on the cemetery; it's one of the so called Magnificent Seven cemeteries around London, it's the second largest at 52 acres and was consecrated in 1840. 

During WWII the iron railing were remove to help the war effort and the Dissenters chapel was hit by a bomb and was later demolished. By the middle of the 20th Century the cemetery was nearly full and was abandoned by the United Cemetery Company. With the gates locked and the railing gone, the cemetery succumbed to the inexorable power of nature and the destructive effects of vandalism and theft.

In 1975 Southwark council bought it for £1, With the assistance of lottery funding in the late 1990s, the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery (FONC) renovated the ruined chapel, restored the gates, walls and railings, repaired 50 memorials, laid new paths and cleared much of the overgrown landscape – though extensive swathes of wilderness remain. The whole 52-acre site is now a conservation area and grade II* historic park, and part is a nature reserve with a diverse variety of flora and fauna.

View up The Avenue from the North Gate towards the Anglican Chapel

So far I have made two trip to the cemetery, the first just to get an idea of what the place is like and the second to explore it a bit more.  The main pathways are quite clear but once you venture off these paths it gets more overgrowth.

Barely seen tombstones

Over the years the once manicured lawns have been reclaimed by nature and trees are growing out of the graves or even actually growing around them.

It is also sad to see that a lot of the tombstones that have either succumbed to time or vandalism.

One of the most impressive monuments in the cemetery, is for John Allan (1790-1865). According to a cemetery plaque, “His son and partner, Col. Jon Harrison Allan was an amateur archeologist. It was probably he who designed the massive family tomb based on the Payava tomb at Xanthos.”

John Allan Monument

Although this cemetery doesn't have the prestige as most of the other magnificent seven, or the more famous celebrities laid to rest there, it is definitely worth a visit.

All images shot with Olympus OM10, APX400 and FP4+ developed in Rodinal, scanned with Pixel 4, Pixl-latr and edited in snapseed.

Colour film

Continuing from the pervious post; B&W and Slide film processing is pretty easy, for B&W its normally just an invert and some minor adjustments to get the image looking good and the same with slide, although no Inverting is needed as its already a positive.

Colour film is whole different ballgame and can be very difficult to get a good colour positive, this is mainly because colour negatives have a orange mask to them, I can't say that I fully understand the reasoning behind it but this article helps to explain some of the reasons, with this is mind colour conversions are tricky.

Although over the last few years, software has been developed to help process good looking developed positive, software like Negative Lab Pro, Grain2Pixel and ColorPerfect, and although they all work well, the biggest problem for me, this they are only plug-ins for the likes of Lightroom or Photoshop, two software program I don't use.

There are some other programs out there, that can help to invert the colour negs like Darktable and RAWTherapee but I never find the workflow with them that intuitive. 

There was an app called FilmLab, for both iOS and Android but I find scanning with a tiny camera phone sensor not to give good results and ditched it.

This meant either scanning colour negs myself, which was a pain, to slow and the colours still didn't always scan correctly or have the film scanned at the lab and then send on to me, this proved to quite expensive especially for hi-res images, so it meant I stuck to B&W as I can develop, process and "scan" them at home and would only shoot the occasional roll of colour.

In the last few months FilmLab has come up with a new program and what is good about this is that; One it works on any desktop computer and two it's a standalone program, meaning I don't need any additionally software to use it.

Orange Mask, Colour Negative, DSLR Scanned

When it was first released it was subscription only, either monthly or yearly and having tried the trial version, I signed up for a year, although now you can pay a one off fee for a lifetime use.

So onto the actual software, the interface is quite basic but this is a good thing as personally I don't want to be changing lots of  slides and fiddling about with different settings.  When you first load the image into the program, it automatically converts to what it think the image should look like, and I have to say that most times its pretty correct and I usually go with that, sometimes it can be a little off and you have to go in and make minor adjustments.

FilmLab desktop

The program can handle colour negatives, B&W and Slide and can save the file as either 8-bit .TIFF, 16-bit .TIFF or a standard .JPG.

After conversion and saving the file, I then take it into PS Elements and do my final adjustments to get the image how I think it should look.

Final adjustments in PS Elements

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the program and love the fact it's a standalone program, the one and only issue I have had with it is, that when the first version was released 2.0.1 and installed it worked fine but a few weeks later, they updated to 2.0.2 and this was suppose to be an automatic update but mine never update, I did reach out to the developers and let they know and was told they would look into it but as yet I've not heard anything back, so this means the at present evertime I was to use the program I have to re-install from 2.0.1.  Now I don't know if this is because of my operating system or not but they have never asked about it or whether the problem is on their side. 

 

Pixl-latr

Back in September 2018; I wrote a post talking about digitising my film and showed the set up I was using.

Two years on things have changed a bit and I thought I would show the set up now.

In that time the Pixl-latr finally arrived in August 2020, and for the last few months this has been the main piece of equipment I have used for holding the negatives flat and being able to scan them with a DSLR.

Pixl-latr. Frame, diffuser and gates

The Pixl-latr consists of a frame, diffuser and a series of gates that fit into the frame to give sizes from 35mm to 5x4 and many sizes in-between.

My set up still consists of a daylight balanced lightbox and a tripod but instead of the film carriers from an Epson scanner the Pixl-latr does the job of holding the film.  The gates are set to which size you are digitising and the film is slid in-between the frame and diffuser, finally a vertical gate is placed in to separate the individual frames.

Pixl-latr with 120 6x9

As far I have used it to digitise 35mm colour and black & white negatives, 120 roll film from 6x6 to 6x9, it really is quick and easy to snap a RAW file of the image and then slid along to the next image, I can easily do a 120 roll in about 3 minutes and a 35mm roll in about 5.

One camera I have been shooting a lot with recently is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket, this camera shoots panoramic images and shoots in and over the sprocket holes on 35mm film, the Pixl-latr works great with this as to allows the sprocket hole to been seen, unlike the film carriers from Espon scanners.

Sprocket Rocket

The Pixl-latr has certainly made the "scanning" of film a lot quicker than waiting for a scanner to scan 6 images at a time.

New year, new projects

So we are already into the new year and I have been thinking about the possibly of starting a new project and resurrecting an old one.

The old one is one I started last year but never really got to grips with how to go about it.  The idea was to photograph London streets after dark, this idea isn't new I have seen it done before but just wanted to have a go for myself.

So I have made start on it again and see how far I get this time.

London, After Dark

The Second project has to do with Ghost Signs, these are hand painted signs that have been preserved on the side of buildings for an extended period of time and have begun to fade.  Its strange how these signs seem to be all over the place but I've hardly noticed.

Ghost Sign, Old Vs New

With both these projects I would ideally like to turn them into a limited zine run.

Always on the lookout

I'm always on the lookout for new things to try or to get involved with photographically.

Last year; I saw an event called Photo24 but when I saw it, the date for registration had already passed. Yes; I could probably do it own my own but it's always better to do it with like minded people.

Photo24 has just announced the dates for this year, 29/30 June, with registration opening on the 12 March. The event is usually over subscribed and there is a ballot for entry.

While it is a 24 hour event, you don't have to do the whole 24 hours but being London there should be plenty of things to do in the wee hours especially riding the night tube.

Hopefully I can secure a place in the ballot.

On the lookout

Leegate. Welcome to Britain's worst shopping district

In 2010 Leegate was dubbed the worst shopping precinct in the U.K.

 In the intervening eight years, not much has changed.

 In 2016 the site was given a green light for re-development, with ASDA on board to build a supermarket and 229 new homes, a community centre, pub and a gym.

 Last Summer it was announced that the development agreement with ASDA had expired and ASDA, and they had taken the opportunity to withdraw from the scheme.

The owners of Leegate, St. Modwen did come up with alternative plans but it now seems that all plans have been put on hold until March 2019 as, the representative of St. Modwen has said that 'anything could happen'  and we all know what is happening in March 2019.

It looks like Leegate can hold on to it unwanted title for a bit longer.


This is my project shot over a few weekends in Leegate.

Olympus mju zoom

Olympus mju zoom 105

My collection of film cameras has grow again, this time with an Olympus mju zoom 105.  This one was 'found' in the back of a cupboard indoors.

The camera came out in 1995, which is probably when we bought it, and it did get a lot of use until we bought our first digital camera.

Its DX coded from 50-3200 which means I can easily shoot with a nice fast film and shutter speeds range from up to 1/500.

When I found it, it already had a roll of film in it and the counter showed 2 plus I could see that it was 24  exp 200 iso but apart from that I knew nothing else about the film.

I took the camera out yesterday to look toi finish up the roll and see about getting it developed, although the counter showed 2 is was totally wrong as I only managed 5 or 6 shots before it started to rewind.

To my surprise when opening the camera I found the the film inside was a roll of Colorama. As far as I remember, this was given as a free roll every time you had a film developed at the chemist.

So I have no idea how long that film has been in the camera and apart from the 5-6 shots I took yesterday, what else is on the roll.  Only time will tell if the film is any good or not.

As for the camera itself, all looks to be working fine and give my another oprion for shooting film.

Talking of film; I also picked up 3 rolls of Lomography 400 colour negative film for the next One Film outing in March.

400

Instagram and my best nine of 2017

All my images are posted to Instagram and around this time of year there is an 2017bestnine hashtag that starts to appear.

 So I thought I'd take a look and see what the likes on Instagram picked as my best nine.

 Below is the result.

Instagram best nine 

This is quite different to what I consider to be my best nine of 2017

Click through to larger images

A small project I did over the Summer.

36 views of the Shard
 

What I did on a day off

Yesterday I popped into Central London to pick up some film, for my OM10 and look for a roll of 120 for an old camera I found.

The film was bought at The Photographers Gallery; which has Wim Wenders, Instant Stories on at the moment a collect of 200 Polaroids.  I didn't fancy looking at that many small images but its on until February so plenty of chances to see it.

As usually I had my RX100m2 with me but I couldn't really see anything worthwhile shooting, this tends to happen to me when I haven't been out shooting for a while.

Crossing over to the Southbank didn't improve things, as the undercoft was devoid of any skateboarders (not surprising on a weekday).

Next stop was the Tate Modern, the Turbine Hall is filled with lots of three seated swings and lent itself to some images of adults on swings.

1-2-3 Swing!

Not having really having explored the Tate since the Summer of last year, I had a wander around to see if there was anything of interest to me.

The first thing was a giant print by Daido Moriyama called Memory 2012

Memory 2012

Nowadays we all seem to worry about super sharp images without any noise or grain in them, this image goes to to show the great images don't have to be all about sharpness.

Next up was Stephen Shore's American Surfaces, this is a collect of 72 prints form Shore's road trip across America in 1972., the idea was to explore the country as an everyday tourist.  All the images were shoot on a Rollei 35 and Shore shot hundreds of rolls of film, which were then developed and processed in Kodak labs across New Jersey.

Shore's work shows us the a snapshot of life in America in the early 70s, the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday life of motel rooms, grotty lavatories, food on tables, odd people and shop fronts.  This series by Shore helps to elevate colour photography to a  fine art level, which had up until then the preserve of black & white photography.

Stephen Shore's American Surfaces

One thing I didn't know when I saw these images in their frames and matted in the Tate; that when Shore first exhibited them, he wanted people to know that they were snapshots and they were just stuck to the wall, so that people could see that they were Kodak snaps and he felt it made they a cultural object.