Fifteen Frames in an Ordinary Wood

A Mamiya 645, Kodak Portra 400 and absolutely no expectation of making anything special.

Some places make you want to photograph them.

Lambridge Woods isn’t really one of them.

That sounds unnecessarily cruel because it’s a perfectly pretty woodland. There are tall pine trees, ferns, narrow paths and plenty of green. It’s a lovely place to walk.

But pretty and photogenic aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Nothing immediately announces itself as the photograph.

Which was precisely why I went there.

I was staying near Henley for the weekend and had my Mamiya 645 Pro with me. Inside it was a roll of Kodak Portra 400 that had been sitting around waiting to be used.

More importantly, I had a question I wanted to answer about light meters.

I wasn’t going into the woods to make photographs for my portfolio.

I was going there to burn a roll of film.

That distinction turned out to matter.

Three different answers to a simple question

I’d been getting different exposure readings depending on how I measured the light.

The Mamiya has its own meter. I also had my Sekonic Zoom Master L-508 and a free light-meter app on my Android phone.

The difference wasn’t small.

In the consistent overcast light of the woods, at f/8 the Mamiya was telling me 1/60 second.

The Sekonic was also telling me 1/60.

The phone app was suggesting approximately 1/13 second, which meant 1/15 on the camera.

That’s about two stops difference.

I wanted to know which one I could trust.

The conditions were almost perfect for finding out. It was overcast, humid and, most importantly, the light wasn’t changing every few seconds.

I used the Sekonic’s spot meter to take readings from representative midtones, often aiming at the woodland floor.

The Mamiya and Sekonic repeatedly agreed closely enough that I was comfortable trusting the camera for the rest of the roll.

The phone went back in my pocket.

Test largely completed.

But I still had film in the camera.

Now I had to find something to photograph

This was where the afternoon became more enjoyable.

I’d already achieved what I’d gone there to do.

There was no pressure to find a spectacular landscape because there wasn’t one.

No mist was going to suddenly roll between the trees.

There wasn’t a lone tree waiting for the sun to illuminate it.

There wasn’t even much sunlight.

There were just woods.

So I started photographing them.

I had the Mamiya 645 Pro and its 80mm f/2.8 lens. I hadn’t brought another lens.

Normally it’s very easy to look at a scene and think:

That needs something wider.

Or:

If only I had a telephoto.

I don’t remember thinking either.

I had an 80mm lens, so I looked for photographs that worked with an 80mm lens.

That was that.

Fifteen frames

One of the things I’m increasingly enjoying about medium-format film is the finite nature of it.

The Mamiya gives me fifteen frames.

Not 150.

Not 500.

Fifteen.

Actually, on this occasion one of those was wasted on a deeply questionable selfie, so perhaps fourteen is more accurate.

Either way, there’s no incentive to make twenty nearly identical photographs just in case one is marginally better than the others.

You look.

You compose.

You focus.

You take the photograph.

Then you move on.

I’m not suggesting that makes every frame meaningful. It doesn’t. I can make rubbish photographs just as efficiently on film as I can digitally.

But it changes the rhythm.

The tripod problem

I was using my lighter travel tripod and initially had everything working as intended.

Camera mounted.

Composition found.

Mirror up.

Cable release.

Then I lost the little adapter that allows me to connect the cable release to the Mamiya.

Bugger.

Now I had to physically press the shutter button.

That shouldn’t have been particularly dramatic, except the woodland floor was soft and I could see the tripod flex slightly when I touched the camera.

I’d gone to the trouble of raising the mirror to avoid vibration and was now potentially introducing vibration with my finger.

There wasn’t much I could do about it.

I took the photographs.

Fortunately, looking at the results, I can’t see any obvious loss of sharpness.

Another lesson learned.

Tripod stability isn’t just about buying a sturdy tripod.

You also have to consider what you’ve stuck its legs into.

I nearly photographed everything horizontally

There was another bit of laziness creeping in.

I was tempted to shoot the entire roll in landscape orientation.

Turning the Mamiya vertically on a normal tripod head is a bit of a faff. The camera hangs over to one side and everything suddenly feels less balanced.

An L-bracket would solve it.

Alternatively, Father Christmas could bring me an RB67 with a rotating back.

I’m keeping both options open.

Fortunately, I stopped being lazy.

A couple of scenes clearly worked better vertically, so I turned the camera.

And inevitably, my favourite photograph from the entire roll is vertical.

It’s the photograph looking along the narrow path.

Tall pine trunks fill the frame and the path winds quietly away through the middle of them.

There’s no spectacular subject.

Nothing dramatic happens.

It’s just a path through some trees.

I really like it.

Kodak Portra 400

I’d used Portra once before in a 35mm camera a couple of years ago, but this was the first time I’d really gone out intending to discover what I thought of it.

I’ve spent much more time with black-and-white film recently.

That wasn’t some grand artistic decision. The summer and the subjects I’ve been photographing simply seemed to suit it, particularly with the infrared experiments I’ve been doing.

But I’d kept seeing colour photographs made with Kodak Portra that I loved.

Not necessarily portraits.

It was the landscapes, streets and architecture that interested me.

Beautiful greens.

Soft colours.

Creamy highlights.

Nothing too aggressive.

That’s essentially what I got from Lambridge Woods.

The photographs don’t scream colour at you.

The greens look like greens.

The browns look like browns.

The pine trunks have lovely subtle pink and muted red tones running through them.

Everything is rather easy on the eye.

I think that’s the best description I can give it.

It doesn’t look like digital

That doesn’t mean it looks better.

I’ve become increasingly bored with the argument about film versus digital.

They’re different.

That’s enough.

If I’d taken my GFX into these woods, I’d have produced files containing an extraordinary amount of information. I’d have had complete control over the colour and could have taken as many photographs as I wanted.

The Mamiya gave me fifteen.

And each one cost money.

From a purely rational point of view, digital wins before I’ve even got the Mamiya out of the bag.

But I don’t need film to win.

I just need it to give me a reason to use it.

And it does.

There’s a softness to the feeling of these Portra photographs that I like. Not a lack of sharpness — they’re plenty sharp enough — but something in the colour and contrast feels gentler.

Could I reproduce it digitally?

Probably.

But then I’d be sitting at a computer trying to make a digital photograph resemble something I could simply go out and use.

Frame fourteen

And then frame fourteen exploded.

A huge red streak cuts horizontally through the woodland.

It’s a light leak.

I have absolutely no idea where it came from.

The photograph immediately before it is fine.

The photograph immediately after it is fine.

I’ve never had a light leak from the Mamiya before.

Had it been the first frame or the final frame, I’d probably blame myself for doing something stupid while loading or unloading the film.

But the second-to-last frame?

No idea.

Perhaps there was something wrong with the film.

Perhaps I did something.

Perhaps the Mamiya decided fourteen perfectly sensible frames were enough.

Film occasionally gives you an answer to a question you never asked.

I’m not going to try to rescue the photograph.

It’s part of the roll.

Things I didn’t bring

I didn’t use any filters.

Looking at the results, I wish I’d experimented with a polariser.

The woods were humid and there’s quite a lot of reflected light coming from some of the leaves. A polariser might have taken some of that glare away and given the colours even more depth.

But I’m not particularly bothered that I didn’t.

There will be another roll.

That’s another thing I’m starting to enjoy about this.

I don’t have to solve everything at once.

One roll can lead to another question.

Then another roll can answer it.

Or fail spectacularly to answer it and give me three completely new questions instead.

Learning the Mamiya

I’m also slowly removing little annoyances from the way I use the camera.

I’d previously managed to waste frames while using the power winder.

With only fifteen photographs available, that’s irritating.

This time I was much more careful with the dark slide and the way I handled everything, and apart from my intentionally wasted selfie, I didn’t lose frames through operating the camera incorrectly.

I’ve since bought a manual winding crank.

Hopefully that removes another unnecessary complication.

The more familiar the camera becomes, the less I have to think about the camera.

That’s where I want to get to.

I don’t want using film to become some ceremonial process where every action is performed because this is how proper film photographers work.

I just want to photograph things.

Maybe autumn will be colour

I don’t think this roll has converted me from black and white to colour because I don’t think I needed converting.

I’ve simply happened to shoot more black-and-white film this summer.

If we get a proper autumn this year, that may change.

Portra 400 in autumn woodland could be lovely.

I’d also like to take it somewhere completely different.

Valencia immediately comes to mind.

Strong sunlight, blue skies, the beach and the extraordinary architecture around the City of Arts and Sciences feel almost made for the colours I’ve seen from Portra.

Perhaps I’ll take the Mamiya.

Perhaps I’ll take nothing but the 80mm again.

There’s something rather appealing about that.

But that’s another roll.

An ordinary photograph

I went into Lambridge Woods to test a light meter.

I came back knowing which meter I trusted, knowing that I liked Kodak Portra 400 considerably more than I’d expected, and with fourteen woodland photographs plus one extremely questionable selfie.

None of them needed to exist.

My favourite remains the vertical photograph of the path.

There isn’t anything remarkable in it.

A narrow trail disappears between straight pine trunks. Ferns and brambles cover the ground. There is no spectacular light, no mist and no solitary tree perfectly positioned against the horizon.

It’s simply what was there.

Perhaps that’s why I like it.

Increasingly, film seems to be teaching me that going out to make a photograph and going out to photograph aren’t quite the same thing.

I think I prefer the second.

I Nearly Discounted My Favourite Photograph of the Year

Sometimes you know you like a photograph before you really know why.

That was certainly the case with this tree.

I had been experimenting with Rollei Infrared 400 in my Mamiya 645 Pro, and to say the results had been mixed would probably be generous. Infrared film introduces another layer of uncertainty into something that already has plenty of opportunities to go wrong. Some of my exposures were simply wrong, and a few of the negatives looked so dense that I wondered whether there was anything useful on them at all.

But this photograph was different.

As soon as I saw the composition, I liked it.

There was something about the shape of the tree and the way it sat within the landscape that immediately appealed to me. The infrared film had separated it from its surroundings in a slightly unreal way, and the whole thing reminded me of a Japanese ink painting.

The branches seemed less like branches and more like brushstrokes.

It was simple, quiet and slightly strange.

Exactly the sort of photograph I tend to like.

And then I looked at the scan.

When the Technical Stuff Gets in the Way

The scan I’d received back from the lab was disappointing.

It was very grainy and appeared heavily sharpened. Rather than the gentle tonality I thought might be in the photograph, everything felt hard and slightly brittle.

And I nearly discounted the image because of it.

That’s the strange part looking back at it now.

I hadn’t stopped liking the composition. I hadn’t suddenly decided the tree was in the wrong place or that I should have taken the photograph differently.

I still liked the photograph.

What I had started questioning was whether it was technically good enough.

There is probably something slightly ridiculous about that.

We spend so much time as photographers thinking about sharpness, resolution, grain, dynamic range and all the other things that can be measured or examined at 100% that sometimes those things begin to have more influence over us than the photograph itself.

I was in danger of doing exactly that.

Going Back to the Negative

Fortunately, I didn’t quite give up on it.

I put the negative on a light table and looked at it through a loupe.

That changed things.

The negative didn’t seem to have the same harsh character as the scan. There appeared to be much more information there: more subtlety, more tonality and detail that simply wasn’t being represented particularly well in the digital file I had been looking at.

That was when I started wondering whether I was judging the photograph or judging the scan.

They aren’t necessarily the same thing.

I should probably add that this doesn’t mean all my problems with that roll were caused by scanning. They weren’t.

I definitely got some of the exposures wrong.

In fact, one of the things that has surprised me most while experimenting with scanning the negatives myself is just how much information film can sometimes retain even when I’ve made a mess of the exposure. I had negatives that looked almost black, yet with a sufficiently long scanning exposure I was able to pull a perfectly usable photograph from them.

Film had considerably more latitude than I had given it credit for.

But the tree wasn’t really about rescuing a bad exposure.

It was about discovering that the photograph I already liked was better than the first scan had led me to believe.

Seeing the Photograph Again

I eventually started scanning some of the medium-format negatives myself.

I won’t go into all the equipment and process here because that’s really another subject. The important thing was that I could take my time with an individual negative and see what was actually there.

When I rescanned the tree, I finally got something much closer to the photograph I felt I’d taken.

The aggressive-looking grain wasn’t dominating everything. The tonal transitions were much more subtle. There was detail without the photograph feeling as though every tiny piece of it had been sharpened to demand my attention.

Most importantly, the tree was allowed to be the tree again.

And that Japanese painting quality I’d liked from the beginning was still there.

In fact, I could see it more clearly.

Perhaps I Was Looking at the Wrong Thing

The whole experience has made me think about how easily we can talk ourselves out of liking our own photographs.

Sometimes that’s useful.

Time is a very good editor, and I’ve certainly taken photographs that I’ve initially been excited about only to wonder a few weeks later what on earth I saw in them.

But this was different.

I liked this photograph and then nearly rejected it because I thought there was something technically wrong with it.

That’s quite an important distinction.

Photography has become extraordinarily technical. Even with film, which is supposedly where we escape all this stuff, we eventually turn the negative into a digital file and suddenly we’re back looking at pixels, sharpness and noise on a computer screen.

It becomes very easy to ask:

Is it sharp enough?

Is there too much grain?

Did I get the exposure exactly right?

All perfectly reasonable questions.

But perhaps they shouldn’t be the first questions.

Maybe the first one should simply be:

Do I like this photograph?

With the tree, the answer had always been yes.

My Favourite Photograph of the Year?

I’ve taken quite a lot of photographs this year with cameras that are technically capable of producing files vastly superior to anything that could come from this particular piece of infrared film.

And yet I keep coming back to this tree.

It may well be my favourite photograph I’ve made this year.

Not because it’s technically perfect. I’m not even particularly interested in deciding whether it is.

I like the simplicity of it.

I like the slightly unreal quality the infrared film has given the landscape.

Most of all, I like that tree.

It still reminds me of a Japanese painting: a few carefully placed brushstrokes describing something rather than trying to reproduce every detail of it.

And perhaps there’s a useful lesson for me in the fact that I nearly discounted it.

The lab scan wasn’t what I hoped it would be. Some of my exposures on the roll were wrong. I’ve spent far more time than expected experimenting with negatives, scanning and trying to understand what I’m doing.

But somewhere amongst all of that was this photograph.

I saw something when I pressed the shutter.

I liked it when I first saw the composition.

And after all the technical distractions, I still like it now.

Perhaps sometimes that’s enough.

I have always found infrared photography interesting although I have never shot it myself the closet I have ever got to it was emulating aerochrome on some digital photographs but that isn’t real infrared. Shooting real infrared film is long overdue especially as I now  have a medium format film camera in the form of a Mamiya 645 pro. So with a roll of Rollei Infrared film and a Hoya IR72 filter I travelled the short distance to Blagdon Rings to try the film out.

When shooting with an IR72 filter which block most visible light and only allows Infrared light to pass which means that exposure times need to increase by about 6 stops and then there is reciprocity failure something you don’t have to worry about with digital cameras but film this needs to be factored in and all brands of film react differently here lies my first mistake of the day I calculated the reciprocity incorrectly so for instance a shot I metered with phone as I didn’t have a lightmeter on me (my second mistake) that I metered at 30 secs I calculated the adjusted exposure to be just over 60 secs should of in fact been 183sec so it was massively underexposed. I have included some of my photos here failures and successes, this one experiment taught me a lot about infrared photography enough to take out another roll of Rollei IR film shortly.

If you want to see the behind the scenes of how I took these photos take a look at my youtube video

A Day in London with Ilford HP5+ and the Voigtländer Bessa R

Normally, when I travel to meet family or friends, I tend not to bring a camera other than my camera phone, mainly because it’s usually a social trip rather than a photography trip. On this occasion, however, I had most of the day to myself in central London before I was due to meet the family for dinner, so that was excuse enough to bring the Voigtländer and a roll of Ilford HP5+.

Now, I’m more than aware that most of the film I’ve shot since embarking on this film rediscovery journey has been HP5+, so I’ve recently picked up some infrared film and a few rolls of Kodak Portra, which I hope to experiment with shortly.

I arrived in London at Bond Street via the Lizzie Line, which happens to be only about a five-minute walk from The Photographers’ Gallery. (All photographs on this post were taken at the Moco gallery London) We spent a good hour and a half exploring the various photographers and exhibitions. If you’re into photography, it’s well worth a visit.

Next came dinner. I don’t want to waste your time talking about that, but it did involve a bottle of wine and several glasses of grappa.

Feeling slightly worse for wear, we decided that the weather was just a little too unpleasant to wander outside for long, so we looked for another museum and eventually settled on the Moco Museum (Modern Contemporary Art) near Marble Arch. I have to say, I was really impressed with it. At the time we visited, Banksy was one of the featured exhibitors. Not only were the exhibits stunning, but the architecture and interior of the building were equally impressive.

Normally, I don’t particularly like photographing other people’s artwork, but here I tried instead to focus on visitors interacting with the installations and spaces.

Unfortunately, time soon ran out, but suitably filled with both culture and alcohol, it was time to make our way to the family gathering, where even more drinking would inevitably ensue.

I recently posted a video about my experience using the Mamiya 645 Pro. I meant to write about the camera sooner, but time and other jobs ran away with me. Anyway, here goes—bear in mind this is not a technical review, just my experience using the camera for the first time.

After my joyful experience using the Voigtländer Bessa R, I thought it would be good to try medium format film photography again. My last film camera was, in fact, a Mamiya 645E, so it’s fitting that I’ve almost come full circle in getting the Mamiya 645 Pro. Although, if I’m completely honest, I wanted a Hasselblad 501CM—but my budget would never stretch to that and a lens.

My Mamiya Pro came from eBay with an 80mm lens. It also included a motor drive and a metered prism viewfinder. Now, I am not a fan of a motor drive, and I will get a manual advance when funds allow—but more on that later. The other thing I’m not a fan of was the proprietary cable release, which meant I had to either use an expensive cable or source an adapter to use a regular release. I chose the latter, although the adapter was quite hard to source and relatively expensive for what it is.

I chose to load the camera with Ilford HP5, as I was very familiar with this stock following my previous shoots, and I also purchased a yellow filter to add a little contrast to the sky.

Location-wise, I chose my favourite beach, Ayrmer Cove. It’s a short drive from my house, has a car park with only a short walk to the beach, and is usually fairly quiet.

I spent a good 15 minutes looking for a location to shoot. As the conditions were very blowy, I didn’t want to get as close to the sea as I would normally choose because of the sea spray. I actually took the first frame handheld, and I concede that the motor drive made the camera fairly easy to handhold.

Once I found a location and set up the camera, I attached the cable release, composed a bit more, removed the dark slide, and then pressed the shutter. This is where my first problem occurred—and one of the reasons I’m not a fan of motor drives. The cable release was set to lock, so when I depressed the shutter, the camera kept firing and the motor drive kept winding. I wasted seven frames before I could react. When you only have 15 frames, that’s a lot of wastage. Despite that, the resulting photos were good, although compositionally mediocre.

Now, I was feeling brave—I wanted to do a long exposure photograph. I never really did that in my film days—well, actually, I never did. Film doesn’t respond like digital; it doesn’t respond linearly, and you have to take into account reciprocity failure. For Ilford HP5:
Secs = Metered Secs^1.31 (this can be found on the Ilford data sheet).
So my 17-second meter reading actually required a 42-second exposure. To get the 17-second reading, I had nine stops of ND filter on my camera.

For my first long exposure on film, I am very happy with the result—especially as I consider myself a newbie when it comes to film.

Overall, I had a good day with the Mamiya 645 Pro, despite my gripes with the motor drive. Thankfully, the camera is modular, and this can easily be changed, along with the viewfinder and film backs if required.

I must say, though, I was disappointed with the scans I got back from the lab, as they were lower resolution than my 35mm scans from the same lab. This is a case of me needing to set my expectations, as it seems this is the case for all labs. I will just have to factor in drum scans for any images I consider portfolio-worthy—none of these photos are.

Next: a roll of Portra 400—coming soon.

I was out playing with Ilford HP5 Plus again, this time down at Bigbury-on-Sea in Devon.

It wasn’t meant to be a shoot, not really. Just a walk with the dogs, maybe a coffee, camera along out of habit more than intention. One of those days where photography just tags along rather than leads.

But even on days like that, something usually catches.

This time it was the rocks.

Not in any dramatic sense — no crashing waves, no storm light, nothing particularly rare. Just the shapes. Clusters of them, rising out of the sand as the tide had pulled back, leaving shallow pools and soft reflections. There was a stillness to it. Even though the beach was fairly busy, it didn’t feel that way. Bigbury at low tide has that ability… you can step away from it all without really going anywhere.

And that’s what I found myself photographing.

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The light wasn’t doing anything special.

Late morning, clear sky, a bit too honest if anything. No shadows stretching, no contrast fighting for attention. The kind of light that shows everything exactly as it is — which is fine, but it doesn’t give you much to work with if you’re chasing something more dramatic.

And I think, without realising it, I was.

In my head, the images had more weight to them. More presence. Something slightly more cinematic than what was actually in front of me. But the conditions were never going to give that. They were calm, flat, and simple.

And the photographs reflect that.

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Looking back through the roll, most of the frames feel like grab shots.

Not bad… just… there.

The kind of images that, if I’m being honest, could have been taken on a phone and wouldn’t feel much different. That’s probably the part that sticks the most. Not that they’re failures, but that they don’t feel intentional. Like I saw something, reacted, but didn’t quite commit to it.

There are a few I still like though.

The shot of Burgh Island, with the hotel sat quietly in the distance — that one works for me. It gives context. A sense of place. It anchors everything else.

And the rock studies… they do what I hoped in a way. They show that even on a crowded beach, there’s space to find your own compositions. Your own little pockets of quiet.

But even those… they don’t quite reach what I thought they would.

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I think the truth is, I expected too much from what the day actually was.

It wasn’t a dramatic day. It wasn’t a planned shoot. It was a walk. And somewhere along the way, I started asking more of it than it was ever going to give.

That’s not on the film.

Ilford HP5 Plus is still exactly what I expect it to be — reliable, forgiving, and honest. If anything, it probably rendered the scene exactly as it was. Which might be the problem.

Because sometimes you don’t want honesty.

Sometimes you want interpretation.

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That’s where I keep coming back to the idea of trying other stocks.

Not because I’m bored of HP5 — far from it. But because different films see differently. Some lean into contrast, others into colour, others into something a bit less literal. And maybe on a day like this, something else might have nudged the images a little further away from what was simply there.

Or maybe not.

Maybe the real issue wasn’t the film, or the light, or even the compositions.

Maybe it was just expectation.

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There’s something in that, I think.

The idea that not every outing needs to produce something meaningful. That sometimes you go out, take a few frames, and they don’t quite land — and that’s fine. It doesn’t undo the walk, or the quiet, or the space you found between other people on a busy beach.

It just means… it was a day, not a moment.

While I have been online, I have been researching film stocks as part of my journey back into film photography. I hate saying film photography or digital photography — to me it is just photography — but I digress. I am talking about film stocks.

One film stock that interested me was Cinestill 800T. It looked really interesting to use, particularly at night with lights. The lack of a halation layer on the film means that bright lights are surrounded by a red ring and bloom slightly.

An open mic night at my local village hall provided a great opportunity to test this film and get some imagery to use on the Village Hall’s website.

The camera I used was the Voigtländer Bessa R with the Jupiter-8 lens. I know that the Nikon F501 has the 50mm f/1.8 lens, which is faster, but I just don’t enjoy the shooting experience of using it compared with the rangefinder. Plus, it is just too noisy.

No one really noticed me taking photographs. The camera is a lot smaller and less assuming than modern-day cameras. Although, when I did my shift at the bar, the camera did pique curiosity — I guess these days a film camera can be a bit of an oddity.

I used the camera’s internal meter. Initially I used an external meter, but I soon saw they matched within ½ to one stop, so I stopped bothering. In the end, I think I mostly shot at f/2 and 1/30 sec, as the performers were fairly static.

One thing I had a little issue with was focusing. It was hard to see the focus aid, as the LED stage lighting was pretty dim.

The hall was pretty dark, as I said earlier, and combined with the slow shutter speed meant that I didn’t get as many keepers as I would like. The first thing that I liked — though not to everyone’s taste — was the characteristics of the Jupiter-8 lens combined with the Cinestill 800T film. It created a lovely blooming around the brightly lit faces on the stage. Also, the mixed lighting resulted in colour shifts across the frame and slight colour separation in motion blur, which I particularly like in how this was rendered by Cinestill.

I am looking forward to shooting Cinestill 800T again for some street photography at night. It will definitely be getting packed in the bag for my next trip to Valencia. Although I think next time I use it in darker conditions, I would probably push it one stop. I definitely want to try a 120 version of that for my new Mamiya 645 — but more on that later.

I had a roll of Cinestill 800T that I wanted to load into the camera, but before I could do that I needed to finish one of the rolls of Ilford HP5 left over from the Valencia trip. As has become my usual setup, I had the Voigtlander Bessa R with the Jupiter-8 lens.

The plan was to do a mini project around my village of Harbertonford and photograph seats. I soon got bored with this, though, and ended up photographing locations around the village instead — similar places, in fact, to when I previously took the Nikon F501 and Portra out.

I think I rushed some of the photographs at the start, and it probably shows. I was conscious of using the film up — I hate wasting a roll and leaving it unfinished — although I did manage to photograph a dog who rarely holds still for long.

Despite the slightly rushed approach, I am happy with the results. Many of the shots were taken wide open, and the Jupiter-8’s characteristics — or flaws, depending on your point of view — were quite pleasing, at least to me. The light was fairly poor, which meant I was able to shoot at f/2, where those characteristics are more evident.

When I find something I like I usually stick with it rather than searching for alternatives, but I think I will try Kodak T-Max 400 next to compare with the shots from Valencia and from here in the village.

Camera: Voigtlander Bessa R
Lens: Jupiter-8 50mm f/2
Film: Ilford HP5 Plus
Scan: Analogue Wonderland lab scans (no edits)

I’ve been to Valencia and photographed the city countless times — so many times that I’ve honestly lost count. Over time my pictures had started to feel a little samey, so on this trip I decided to approach it differently.

Instead of my usual digital setup, I brought a Voigtländer Bessa R paired with a Jupiter-8 lens and several rolls of black and white film. I chose Ilford HP5 as it seemed like a good film to start with, particularly as I knew I’d be shooting in the midday sun. Black and white felt like the right choice for recording the strong contrast and deep shadows that the Valencian light produces.

I also used a yellow filter to add a little extra contrast to the sky.

Shooting film slowed the whole process down. With only a limited number of frames, I found myself looking more carefully at the light, the shapes, and the shadows before pressing the shutter.

When the scans finally arrived, I was very happy with the results. There’s always something special about that anticipation — the images living in your head for days or weeks before you actually see them.

What stood out to me most was how the shadows rendered, particularly around the City of Arts and Sciences. The highlights seemed to glow gently rather than blow out — something I rarely see in quite the same way with digital.

I gave a brief review of the Nikon F501 about two years ago. Since then, I have done nothing with the camera; it has just sat in a drawer. I also bought a roll of Kodak Portra 400 film which has sat in my camera for the best part of the year. It was about time I used it. The weather has been a bit shit down here recently — 40 days of rain — but there was a small break in the weather, so I went out with the camera. I didn’t go far, just along a lane near my house where I walk our dog. Occasionally, the sun broke through the clouds. There were some amazing snowdrops, but for the most part the conditions were drab. I sent the film off to be developed at Analog Wonderland, who also scanned the images for me. I was actually very happy with the results, considering it has been 20 or so years since my last roll of film. What I didn’t enjoy was the shooting experience; I found the F501 very noisy, particularly the motor drive, and also the annoying beep which was easily knocked on. I am very much looking forward to trying out the Voigtländer Bessa R, which is a totally manual rangefinder camera. It will be my first rangefinder experience.