Odds & Sods

I haven't been up to much over the last couple of months but in the last couple of week's I've started getting out and photographing again.

The first thing to happen was that the Kodak 2238 project, I was part of had a zine printed for all the photographers taking part, I think in total there was 30 people involved and we each got to have 2 images in the final zine.  I call it a zine but to be honest its more like a book, it is perfect bound and has around 56 pages.

Kodak 2238 Project

Through October we have had the Extinction Rebellion going on in London and I managed to get along to Trafalgar Square and capture some images of the protesters.

The Red Brigade in black & white 

One of the film podcasts I listen to is the Sunny 16 podcast and over the last few months, the hosts have been doing assignments, and encourage listenersto join in, the last one was to photograph Day into Night and I thought I would have a go at this one.

I decide that for me, the easiest way for me to achieve this was to take a series of images over a set time (a bit like a time lapse) and then blend them in photoshop.  I decided that the best palce to get this shot was from the Southbank looking back across to the City of London, with its high rise building and hopefully the lights from the building. 

I worked out what time sunset would be and thought I would start shooting about an hour before that and take an image around every 20 minutes or so and shot for about 3 hours to cover a good period from before sunset until dark.

Things started out well until the rains arrived 2 hours into the shoot, although I didn't get as many images as iI would of liked, I did get enough to produce something that worked out O.K.

I sent the final image into the sunny 16 podcast and it got a good response from the hosts, if you'd like to listen it is on Episode 176

Day into Night

More Kodak 2238

Last weekend was a nice bright and sunny day, so I took a trip into London to shoot the second roll of Kodak 2238 black & white film.

This time I wanted to shot more street stuff and the first person I captured was Melvin, a street dancer in Leicester Square.

Street dancer Olmpus OM10 50mm 1.8

The film is really great for portraits, as the above image shows, along with the Olympus 50mm 1.8 the subject really pops and there is great bokeh.  I managed to capture a couple of other portraits but one problem shooting wide open I did miss focus a few times.

I thought that shooting on the streets with this film might be a problem with it being so slow but on a bright day I was able to have reasonable shutter speeds and set the aperture to around F4-5.6 the one of the Hen party was shot at this setting.

Hen Party

One place that can really mess up shutter speed and cause problems is the book market under Waterloo Bridge, its pretty dark under there but again the film worked well and managed to capture the images I was after.

Book browsing. Under Waterloo bridge

I really like the tones I seem to get from the film and I like the high-ish contrast the images produce.

I'm on the look out for somewhere to buy more of it, in either the U.K. or Europe as so far it only seems to be available in the U.S.

There is also talk of a zine being produce from images from all the photographers involved in the project. 

In the last post I mentioned the fine grain in the film, below is a 100% crop and as you can see the grain is pretty hard to see.

What; No Grain!

Kodak 2238 Project

Back in April, I was lucky enough to join in with a group of film photographers on Facebook, who were trying out a colour separation film. This film is ment for backing up movie film and not as a film for shooting photographs.

The film is black & white 35mm and rated at between 6 and 25 ISO. With such a low ISO, I needed a camera and lens with a good wide aperture, so I went with my Olympus OM10 and the 50mm 1.8 an a 28mm 2.8

As very few people have shot images with this, it was going to be interesting to see what the the images would be like and how to go about developing the rolls of film.

Once I received my two rolls, I was keen to get out and shoot the first images with it. I'm not one to usually shoot cars but I have seen this VW beetle around in the last few week and wanted to shoot it and this seemed like a good opportunity to shot both it and this film.

I rated the roll at ISO 25 and went of looking for the VW. I not only found the VW but also a Chevy van that had been stripped back to the bare metal and ended up shooting the whole roll on these two cars.

VW Beetle

Stripped Chevy

As this isn't a normal film, there isn't any real information about development films, so people within the group are working on using different developers and times.  I went with Rodinal for 16 minutes and mixed at 1:50.

As it is a low ISO there is very little grain in the images.

I hope to shot the second roll on either some street scenes or maybe some street portraits.