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.

First Film (well almost)

I wrote this article back in April, during the lockdown, it was for a photography website but it seems as through they didn't decide to use it, so I thought I may as well just it on the blog.

Not all the images are posted here, as there are a few duplicates.

Over the years my negative files have been stored in many different places and in that time I have lost some of the negs. 

The first real camera was the family camera and this was a Zenit-E, which was bought sometimes in the early to mid 70s, although plenty of prints from this era survive, the negatives have long gone.

The first camera I owned outright was the Olympus OM10, which was bought for me as an 18th birthday present, it came with the standard 50mm f1.8 lens. 

This camera went with me everywhere trips to Europe, motorcycle meets, hiking, even on my honeymoon in 1984 but again all negatives from this time have disappeared. 

The first set of negatives I did find date from 1987/88, I can pinpoint these dates quite accurately as the American football match was played in September 1987 and the tour shirt was a Fairport Convention tour in the early part of 1988.

Now here comes the strange things, the images are on Ilford XP1 400, a film stock I never shot before or again, I don't even know why I would have bought this particular film. Back then I was developing my own B&W, so why would I buy a chromogenic film, as my go to B&W back then was HP5 and I didn't shoot it that often, as I did like a lot of people and had my colour films processed at the chemist and this always meant a free roll of colour film back. 

The other funny thing with these negatives is that no prints exist from them, so I'm thinking that this is possibly the first time they have been seen as positive images. 

As for the images 28/36 and just the general stuff I would shoot, holiday snaps, and friends just having fun. 

The OM10 is nowadays seen as a bit of a classic; for me it's always just been MY camera, its shot images from most of my life from late teens to late fifties, weddings, honeymoons, births and it's still my go to camera for capturing life forty years later.

Paris

Film for Paris

Last week I was in Paris and above is the film I took with me, along with 5 cameras!

Olympus OM10 with 28 & 50 mm lens
Canon 500n and 28-90 mm lens
Lomography Sprocket Rocket
Olympus XA3
Instax Square

This may look like a lot of film but I shot all but 3 rolls of black & white while we were in Paris.

There's not really much to say, as it was a family holiday, so I'll just leave some images from the week below.

Instax Square

Instax Square

Odette

Moulin Rouge

Scan or Digitise

Island Cafe

Last week I had a few days out shooting with the Canon eos500n and a Holga 120.  In the Canon I had a roll of Tmax 400 and the Holga was a combination of Rollei 400 and Ilford hp5+. I was looking to start a new project, trying to capture some the of the hidden places in London, places that people won’t necessarily know about or walk pass without a second glance.

I was think about doing this project all on 120 film but wasn’t sure how well the Holga was going to work as I had only recently picked it up, so was covering it shooting with the Canon.

I ended up shooting 3 rolls on the Holga and just one roll of Tmax with the Canon.  Not having any way to process the film at home, I needed to find somewhere to develop them.

I look at the local high street shops but I found snappy snaps to be to expensive and although Jessops could do develop only, on the 120 films for £5 it would take 2-3 weeks.

Looking online was a similar problem with prices ranging from £4 to over £10, eventually I picked out AG photographic in Birmingham who could develop the 120s and 35mm film for £3.99 each plus £3.50 return p&p, with freepost to send the films to them.

So on Tuesday I sent off one roll of 120 and the roll of 35mm, their turn round was pretty quick as I had my negs back by Friday.  

The roll of 35mm was fine but the 120 from the Holga was a bit hit and miss, out of the 12 images about half were underexposed as they were shot in low light but I guess this is half the fun of shooting with a Holga. The images are not that sharp either in fact they are very soft, so the Holga may not be the camera for this project, I will have to see that the other 2 rolls are like when they come back next week.

Scan or digitised

My digitisation set up

Up until recently I have been scanning my negatives on a cheap Epson flatbed scanner but the results have been mainly poor, fairly regularly I couldn’t get a sharp image and it would mean re-scanning with the film carrier set to a different height and to be honesty it was more trouble that it was worth.

A couple of weeks ago I bought a sigma 50mm macro lens for my digital Nikon, the lens is manual so gives me a lot of control when focusing in on the negs.  The current setup is a daylight balanced lightbox I had from Jessops, a Nikon d5100 and the Sigma lens. F8 seems to be the best aperture when working on the negs and I shoot to RAW so I can make any adjustments in darktable.

So far I have digitised the one roll of black & white 35mm and one of 120 and the results are 100% better than the scanned images, and it takes a lot less time, as you only need to move the lightbox and re-frame, I also end up with 16 megapixel digital negs.

Below is the same image, the first is done via the Macro lens and digital camera, the second via the Epson scanner. Both have had no post production done to them and although the scanned one looks correctly balanced it is blurred. The digitised one is flat but this is the same for most RAW files.

Digitised 

Scanned

Correctly balanced image

I'm still looking forward to when the pixl-latr final shipping as this will hopefully help to keep the negatives flat, as I noticed that the 120 Rollei film was very curly.

The only problem I have had, with digitisation using the camera is with colour negs, no matter what I do with the negs in darktable I always end up with a colour cast which I can never seem to remove. I will have to keep working on the colour negs but for the time being I will be shooting black and white.

Update

I have now had the other 2 rolls of hp5+ 120 film developed, and although I've had a better return with images exposed correctly, I still ended up with some underexposed.

Also I'm not sure I really like the square format, so I think I'll be sticking with 35mm for the foreseeable future.

Previous I talked about getting print made up and looking into print swaps.  This I've been luck to receive some prints this week from two Facebook groups, the first is Photography Print Swap hosted by Dustin Cogsdell, and my swap partner sent me a great street photography print and a wonderful booklet of his work.  The other group is the Negative positives Facebook group and from my swap partner I receive 3 prints shots from the Caribbean.

If anyone is interested in joining The Photography Print Swap Group, have a search on Facebook or contact me and I will add you to the group.

Print Swap Prints

Yodica Films

Yodica Films - Atlas

My latest journey out on the streets was down in Brighton for Brighton Pride and this time I was shooting with film but not any old film stock but one call Yodica.

I first heard of Yodica films on the Sunny 16 podcast and was intrigued by the concept of the film.

Yodica is part of the growing trend in pre-exposed film, this is film that has already been exposed to either a light source or some other way of exposing the film, I have see films with aliens and UFOs or light leaks exposed on to them.

Yodica have 7 different film types out already, all with a range of bright saturated colours, the ones that grabbed my attention were Atlas and Pegasus, both of these have a rainbow effect to them but with Atlas being more random, unfortunately when I went to buy a roll of each both Analogue Wonderland and The Photographers Galley were out of Pegasus so I bought 2 rolls of the Atlas.

The film cannister and plastic cannister are wrap with a representation of how the colours look and is rated at ISO400 but if you peel back the wrap, you can see the original film is Kodak 200.

I'm not an expert on double exposure or film in general but have been told that 400 for the first exposure and 400 for the second will equal 200. 

I shot both roll in my Canon eos500n and as the film wasn't DX coded set the camera manually to ISO400.

Brighton Pride was a good day out, with temperatures in the high 20s and very sunny.

I shot a roll and a half of the Atlas, and though and hoped I had some goood images.

I had to wait a week to use up the rest of the second roll and then get them processed, this was a bit of a palava as my new local Snappy Snaps wanted to charge almost £20. 

So I ended up waiting another week and getting them processed at Jessops for £11.

Once I got the negs back and looked at them I was surprised how they looked. Scanning them revealed that although the Yodica colours were there and coming through, my images looked muddy and underexposed in a lot of the shots, in fact they looked about 1 stop under. I ended up with a lot of processing in camera RAW to try and get the images half decent. 

The best result I could achieve from this frame 

The images that I managed to get to look OK, were pretty interesting but some that were shot I just couldn't get anything out of them and a lot seemed very hit and miss.

Another one that I struggled with

I'm reviewing all this about 4 days after doing the scanning and I think I may know what the problem could have been with the images looking so underexposed.

Mr Gold

That Vintage Look

Unlike digital there is no exif data,so this is only a theory, the film is rated iso200 but both the pre-exposed and my shots were shot at iso400 to balance out the double exposure.

Now when I shot on the street, I use aperture mode and normal set between f5.6 to f8 and let the camera go with a shutter speed, as I said it was hot and sunny and I think the maybe the shutter speeds were to high, I remember a couple of times seeing 1/1500 and 1/2000 of a second. It could be that at these high shutter speeds I was underexposing even more and that would explain why some frames look OK and others don't.

Like I said I'm not an expert so this is all conjecture on my part.

So what do I think of this film stock?

Well it is a bit gimmicky and I think some of the purists in analogue photography may look at it as a film for the Instagram generation, but that doesn't bother me I think it's a fun film. If I could nail down the second exposure's better, maybe shutter speeds in the 1/125 to 1/500 would work then I think I would use it more especially for events were the added colour adds to the image. Images like Mr Gold and That vintage look worked really well.

I'm not sure whether Yodica films will get to read this post but if they do and would be interested in sending a couple of rolls to let me test out my theory, that would be much appreciated.

If you fancy trying Yodica films it can be purchased from either Analogue Wonderland or if in London the Photographer's Gallery.