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Off The Rails

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A day out on the Bluebell Railway 16th April 2025. So I decided to blow the dust off this ancient blog so I've got somewhere to post my photographic efforts, such as this time when I took my old Pentax Spotmatic F, loaded with a five year out of date roll of Ilford SFX which had been languishing in my fridge since The Before Times, and see what I come up with.  After giving the film an hour in a 1:100 mix of R09 developer, this is what I get. Signal Box at Horsted Keynes, with a rail crane behind it. To the village. Beware of giant balloons. Platform 5 at Horsted Keynes There's a lot of renovation going on at Horsted Keynes, so plenty of guys in hard hats. Old Fire Buckets. The snow plough has a kind of Mad Max thing going for it. Rusty old locos and decaying carriages parked the other side of the building works going on. Waiting for the train. From the bridge at Sheffield Park - which is a long way from Sheffield! Watering the loco. The Sir Archibald Sinclair at the end of the...
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Not Seeing Red.

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 Has it really been so long since I last updated this blog? Why yes, yes it has, yet somehow this post acts as a direct sequel to the last one. August, and it's another hospital appointment, so this time I took along my Yashicamat 124G Twin Lens Reflex. I'd not used the Yashicamat since 2019, so after checking the meter battery was still working I loaded it with a roll of Ilford Ortho Plus film, which I'd bought not long after the film was introduced in late 2019 but not got around to using due to reasons. Ortho Plus is an Orthochromatic film - which means it is not sensitive to the whole of the colour spectrum, and not sensitive to the red end of the spectrum. It's also a fine grain film and the fastest Ortho film available at 80 ISO. So on a walk around as I was in London I played tourist and took some shots. Lots of people around, so unusual for me. Nelson Mandela Statue off Parliament Square. On Westminster Bridge, looking west. Nice clouds! Big queue for the fish a...
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Seeing red... Infra-red (ish).

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 In May I had one of my two annual hospital appointments, this one with a doctor, as I'd not seen one since November 2019. So I figured as I was travelling into central London I could at least 'play tourist' for the time. I had a two year out of date roll of Ilford SFX film, and decided to take my Voigtlander Bessa-L camera for the day. The Bessa-L is a weird one, it's basically just the bare bones of a camera. Film goes here, lens screws on there, there's no viewfinder in the camera itself, you just clip a viewfinder into the accessory shoe, depending on the lens you're using, and there's no mechanism for focusing, you just use depth of field to get as much in focus as you can dependent on aperture. F8 and be there! Voiglander Bessa-L, here pictured with 15mm Aspherical Super-Wide Heliar. Rather than use the 15mm lens in the above picture, I'd discovered that the 25mm Snapshot Skopar had a filter thread which was the right size for some of the filters I...
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Two years of Plague So in March 2020 as the first lockdown for COVID-19 began, I had an idea, a rather grandiose idea for a project at which I completely failed. I decided I'd carry a camera with me any time I went out, and chose an Olympus EE-2, which is a fixed-focus half-frame camera with automatic exposure govered by a selenium cell. No batteries, relatively compact for a camera of its time. In a half-frame camera, you get twice the number of shots to the roll of film. So I put in a roll of Ilford FP4+ black and white film. It took me until March 2022 to shoot the lot, and here's a selection of shots from the last two years.  A really organised person might have carried a notebook and taken a note of each frame shot, but that's a pain, so I didn't do it. Here goes.... Social Distancing - when people still did that. Queueing for the bank. Maintain Social Distance This is not a basin That's not how you spell 'Cosy'! Tax on Hope So that's what became of...
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 Two whole years. Today is the 6th of March 2022, which makes it two whole years since the last time I went anywhere outside of walking distance except for the three times I went into London to St Thomas' Hospital. At one point it would have been technically possible to go somewhere for a day, but given that so many places were shut and any walk would have been very unlikely to wind up in a pub unless I booked a seat days before for a specific time, which all seemed like too much faff.  Then I got to the stage where I couldn't really afford to go anywhere and do things, so boo. Two years ago, however, the weather wasn't that great, and I wanted to do a camera check so on the spur of the moment went somewhere that was relatively picture-skew  but had indoorsy bits to shelter from any showers that might prevail. So off to the Amberley Museum  which seems to have survived recent events and is still going with its old buses, narrow-gauge railway and collections of olde-w...
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