Please forgive the title of this post – if it’s any consolation it hurts when I read it as well.

As well as a mountain of 120 slide film, I also just got back a roll of 35mm Ilford XP2 black and white film which I had put in my Lomo Fisheye 2 about 6 months ago. Results were less than impressive – in my (albeit brief) experience the fisheye image format really only works at all in a limited number of circumstances and even less when using black and white film.

First, 36 exposures is too many for a single roll of film as you can’t know whether the speed rating of the film is appropriate for all the conditions you’ll be shooting in. In this case, XP2 at 400iso simply wasn’t sensitive enough for most of the pictures I took, as I appear to have shot half the roll indoors. For indoor work I was using my Nikon SB600 flash in the hotshoe, but they are all still underexposed. ISO800 with flash might work.

Out of 36 exposures, at least 10 are simply blank. User error I fear. Of the rest, only a handful are even remotely interesting, and even that is probably stretching the definition of interesting a bit.

Nonetheless I’ll press on and share them here anyway, because quite frankly, I can. Click on each of these to make them all big and that.

So what’s next for the fisheye? Dunno to be honest. I’m not really getting the level of enjoyment out of it that I am the Holga and I’ve been spoiled by the lovely big 120 film images so find the tiddly 35mm negatives a bit underwhelming all round. I’ll whack a 24 exposure roll of colour film in it next and see what transpires.

Today I finally completed scanning, rotating, cropping and resizing my Holga 120 scans from my recent trip to Venice. Scan, crop, rotate, repeat – how exciting! Through some apparently odd quirk of my current aesthetic sensibilities, I appear to be happier with these than with most of the ones I got from my Nikon D200.

One of the philosophies of shooting with a Holga is that you should “shoot from the hip”. I embraced this when I was in Venice by doing exactly that, with mixed results. It’s fairly obvious which of these I fired off without even composing at all with the viewfinder, and which of them I took a bit more time over.

I love the colour and saturation that these have, much more than the digital images of the same subjects. Some of that is due I think to the fact it’s shot with film, although some of it may be down to my scanner as well. I also like the dreamlike quality you can get with a Holga. This is a clever way of pretending that your out of focus image is supposed to look like that. For these Venetian scenes it works pretty well.

All of these were shot on 5 year out of date Fuji Provia 400. Because the Holga doesn’t offer much control over exposure with just two aperture settings available, all have had only slight tweaks to levels to correct any under/over exposure. Enjoy!

So where does this leave me with the Holga? I still have 20 odd rolls of film to shoot, although I suspect the rolls of Velvia 50ISO aren’t much use to me. I think I now need to start being more adventurous, because as I become more adept at getting shots that are in focus, I think I lose some of the qualities that a Holga brings to an image. Next time I use it I plan to go crazy!

On Saturday I received my processed films back from Peak Imaging. These were the first rolls of 120 E6 slide film I’ve actually had processed properly, and it was really great to see the image in your hands without needing to scan it and convert if from a negative.

Problem was though, with 5 rolls of 12 exposures, I had a lot of scanning to do. It took me all day Sunday to scan in the slides, and I was happy enough with a few of them. Most of the shots were taken in Venice which I’ll post up seperately once I’ve sorted out the ones I like.

I am apparently unable to go more than 5 minutes without taking a photograph of Wilf, so it’s no surprise to see this one, taken a few weeks back when I forced him into a T-shirt to pose for pictures. This was shot on Fuji Provia 400 in my studio

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Wilf do bad things
Fuji Velvia 50

This next picture was taken in my back garden when my cherry tree was in full bloom, and we had a rare day of blue sky. I wanted to see how the exposure would come out when set to “sunny mode” and shot on 400iso film. I struggle to see how you could ever go below 100iso film even on a very sunny day, which renders my 5 rolls of 50iso Fuji Velvia a bit worthless.

Holga

Holga 120cfn
Cherry Blossom
Fuji Velvia 50
More lessons learnt, I feel like I’ve got the hang of the Holga a bit now!

For my birthday way back in 2006, my buddy Tuan bought us tickets to see a stage adaptation of Philip Pullman’s "His Dark Materials" trilogy. Although purchased in October 2006 the play wasn’t actually on until April 2008 – last Saturday in fact.

The play is in two parts, first was at 14:00 and the second at 19:00 with a couple of hours break in between (or pub and pints time as I named it). Total running time is somewhere near to five hours, which is fairly extreme but understandable given the length of the three books.

We set off down the motorway towards the West End of London bright and early on Saturday. When we hit Reading after about 100 miles of driving, I get Tuan to check what Theatre in the West End we are heading for. He replies;

“Theatre Royal, Bath.”

Oops.

At the next junction we turn around and head the 80 odd miles back to Bath, tails between our legs but thankful we didn’t make it all the way to London.

The performance itself was I believe an amateur group, and was made up entirely of children and young adults, with the oldest cast member something like 21 years old.

Overall the performance was engaging, and highly professional. One issue for me was that some of the younger actors appeared to think that the quality of their acting acting was directly linked to how loud they said their lines. As such some of the players delivered every line at what seemed to be full volume, and maximum attack. This coupled with some slight over amplification of the voices resulted in me occasionally flinching in expectation of hearing damage.

If you haven’t read the books the following will mean nothing to you.

It’s difficult to really buy into a young man of approximately twenty years playing the part of Lord Azrael, but once you look past that (and the other ludicrously young cast members) it’s not so bad.

I wondered how they would represent the characters of the daemons – the answer is with someone wearing silk pyjamas and a mask. I struggled with this throughout if I’m quite honest, as I did with the sets which were effectively non-existant. But I’m being unfair – it’s a huge undertaking, and the overall result is commendable. With the sheer quantity of storytelling that takes place, set design was always going to be difficult, as was getting across the daemons in all their complexity.