Moving

I've moved  this blog over to substack, which is a newish blogging platform.

https://flaneuronthestreets.substack.com/

You can follow either via their app or a newsletter which is, if you have signed up to, will be sent each time I upload a new blog.

I already have two posts up and another one coming Friday.

Maybe I will see you over there.

George

Street Portraits

I shot this image last year for Holga week. 

Holgas are cheap plastic 120 cameras that can have a lot of vignetting, blury parts to the image and light leaks. It only has one shutter speed, 1/100 and two (if lucky) apertures f8 and f11.

Luckily my Holga doesn't suffer with light leaks and I was really happy how is image turned out.

I would like to explore taking people's portraits more, so this year I'm going to try to capture as many portraits as possible, using the Holga.

I think the images need to be in colour, so I'm going to be shooting Kodak Gold 200 ISO film.

I'm setting myself a target of 25 images within the year, even though we are already nearing the end of January.

Its going to be a scary prospect as portraits are not something I normally shot and asking people will be something I'm quite nervous of doing.

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.

Why film?

Sometimes I get asked why film? Surely digital is much easier, better, faster and although that is true, there is something special about film.

Digital is always consist, and always sharp sometimes to sharp.  Film can give you small inconsistencies and different film manufacturers, give different looks, Ilford Delta 400 is very different to Kodak T-Max 400, Lomography 100 to Portra 160 and this is one reason to shoot film. 

If you shoot 35mm the actual act of taking the image is the same whether digital or film, select your shutter speed and aperture, compose the shot, take the image but with film you have that waiting process to see whether the image is what you were looking for and this is half the fun of film the not knowing until the whole roll is developed.

And talking about developing, this is the part I enjoy the most. Mixing the chemicals, working on the timing for a the developed of a film and the process of turning it into images, I'm still amazed when I open up the tank and see the images for the first time.

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+ Negative 

Ondu Pinhole, FP4+

Another reason for film, is the different choices of not only film but cameras, from homemade pinhole cameras, 35mm, 6x6, 6x7, 6x9, 5x4 the list goes on. For most of the year I have been shooting with a Coronet Superflash, which is a pretty basic camera, made c.1955.  It takes 120 roll film, the negatives are 6x9 and only get 8 images from it but the 1/100 shutter speed and 75mm lens still produces great results.

6x9 Coronet Superflash, Foampan 200

Another fun camera is the Lomography Sprocket Rocket this camera shoots 35mm film but gives a negative of 72mm x 33mm, so panoramic but its allows you shot into the sprockets and adds a little twist to the images.  You can allow double expose on the film and have the ability to wind the film backwards and forward to create unusually images. 

Sprocket Rocket 72x33mm Kodak 200

Sprocket Rocket without sprockets, accidental double exposure, Kodak 200

So that's the reason I shoot film.

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.