Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally

There was a whole community of small traction engines

After a shaky start when the Whitby event was cancelled owing to bad weather our steam engine summer has gone from strength to strength. Today finds us at the Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally which was completely awesome in every way. We had great weather, lots of things going on and and lots and lots of steam.

A very nice piece of kit

I was playing with a zoom lens which was fun to use but very hard to hold still. The lens was made before we had things like image stabilisation.

Love the line about flying airships

Getting better all the time...

I’m very pleased with how this turned out

After the mild disappointment of the pictures I took on Monday I was pleased to find that the second roll of pictures I developed today have come out a lot better. I’ve no idea why this is; although I suspect I might be getting better at working out the exposure. Or some days I’m lucky and some days I’m not. Either theory works with the evidence to hand.

Coming to a project near you soon…

I really like the idea that these images were created by chemicals and physics. And they pop out of the page in a most satisfactory way. At least for me.

Taking pictures of cameras is a thing

For your information (and so I don’t forget) I used 1+50 dilution and developed for 7.5 minutes at 21 degrees which is supposed to be for 50 ASA exposure. This seems to have produced some very tidy looking negatives though. Alternatively, it might just be that FP4+ is nicer film than the first roll I was using.

Blurs in the woods

This is one of the better pictures

I took one of my lovely lenses for a walk today. We were celebrating being married for an unfeasibly long time and we went to Dalby Forest, one of my favourite places in all the world. I was hoping to take lots of pin sharp pictures of the scenery but when we got back and I developed the negatives I was a bit disappointed. I need to work on my exposure, and remember that wildly different colours might all end up looking grey when rendered into black and white.

Yet another camera for Rob

This is the first picture I took… I think we are going to get along fine

Whisper it, I’ve bought another camera. It seems that I’m slowly converting all my music production devices into cameras. This was our first trip to York since before the pandemic. Last time we went I wandered into York Camera Mart and bought a lens. This time I’ve got a camera, for around the same price. It is a very old camera, but I really like the way it looks and how nice it is to operate.

When we got back home I processed the film and took at the negatives. Every time you take a picture on a film camera you are setting yourself up for a little bit of heartbreak when the developed version fails to match up to the lovely image in the viewfinder. This is especially true when you take black and white pictures. Things with different colours might map to exactly the same shade of grey and disappear into each other. I’m very happy with the shots that I got though. I need to work on my exposure technique - quite a few shots were over-exposed - but I’m very happy to do this because the camera itself is just so much fun to use. And now I’m going to sell another synthesizer….