Aust, January 2020

By shendyNo Comments
We had a particularly frosty Saturday night during January, so I thought I'd head down to Aust to see how it looked. The biggest surprise was that it actually looked very different - they'd knocked down the old ticket office, leaving just a wall and the turnstile.A bit of research shows that South Gloucestershire Council had consulted on, and approved, some changes to make the site safer and more secure, and to discourage some anti-social behaviour.There are more changes to come, but hopefully I'll still be able to access the site and take more photos. Back to the visit - the frost was pretty spectacular, and while I was there the sun started to burn it off....
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Aust 2019

By shendyNo Comments
As ever, I kept going back to Aust just outside Bristol - my favourite bleak location. The first visit was in February - the forecast looked promising and when I got up early (for a Sunday), it looked even better as it was a bit misty. When I got there, I saw a lovely bit of mist with the pylon and the old Severn Bridge in bright sunlight above it. However as I walked the last bit, it got foggier and foggier - to the point that I couldn't actually see much at all. These shots were taken on a variety of film cameras - I was testing some of my dad;s old Pentaxes before selling them. So we have an MX, and ME Super and a Z1 - some shot on Ilford FP4, some on Kodak Tri-X 400, all developed by me. The second visit was on a June morning, when conditions were very different - lovely bright sunshine. Most of these were...
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Bristol 2018

By shendyNo Comments
My most obvious subject! Working right in the centre of the city and very close to the Harbourside, I do take a lot of photos of Bristol. HarboursideGetting out of the office for a bit of fresh air naturally takes me to the Harbourside, so I've taken a lot of photos of this area this year. I've also found that it's possible to walk right round the harbour, up to Cumberland Basin and back to Prince Street Bridge, in my lunch hour. I've only done it with the phone so far but must try it with something a bit more serious at some point.So we have some shadows, a bit of the remaining industrial side of the harbourside - the steam crane is an absolute favourite of mine and I must get out and shoot it with the large format camera - and a shoot late in the year around the refurbished Metro Bus bridge and nearby. SS Great BritainI'm occasionally involved...
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Going Back to Film, part 2

By shendy Comment Closed
A bit of a follow-up on the previous post, with some more on my adventures back into film photography. In February I upgraded the TLR, buying an MPP Microcord. Unfortunately it turned out that mine was faulty so it went back to the supplier. The first images on it were taken during the heavy snow we had - I wish I could claim that I was trying to emulate the soft look of some of the early photographers, but no - the shutter was slow and it also had issues with winding on. It did take some slightly sharper shots on a visit to Aust for the spring tides, and at the SS great Britain, but it wasn't good enough so back it went.   This left me with the dilemma about what to try next. In the end I went for a substantial upgrade and succumbed to a Hasselblad, having lusted after them for many years. I found one on Ebay at a...
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Going Back to Film

By shendyNo Comments
Long and a bit image heavy... I was about to post something about getting back into taking and developing my own black and white film when I realised that I haven't actually posted anything at all about starting off with large format photography, which was where the whole film thing started - so this is going to be a long post with quite a few photos. This dates back to late 2014 when I heard about a Kickstarter project that was launching an affordable 5x4 large format camera, the Intrepid Camera Company. That's something I've thought about a few times over the last 20 years, but it's always been way out of my league - far too expensive. But suddenly this made it affordable, so I signed up. It took them quite a while to get production sorted and I didn't get my camera until mid-2016, and it's been a slow process getting used to it. I started with some cheap film,...
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