Our Dog's Basket

So on April 1st I decided that my old Voigtlander Bessa-L camera which I'd not used for years needed a run out so I went down to the Amberley Museum, camera fitted with Voigtlander 15mm Aspherical Super-Wide Heliar, which is the widest angle lens I have, and loaded with a roll of Ilford Pan F+. Here are a few shots from the day. Bus Stop And here's a bus.  But I didn't get the bus, I got the narrow-gauge train that runs round part of the disused lime quarry the museum is located in. Getting off the train by a bunch of old electrical stuff, and the electrical equipment gallery in the background. This claims to be a bomb shelter, though I suspect it wasn't very good! Some unused bits of narrow gauge rail which might be used sometimes? Looking down to the old lime kilns. One of the stations for the narrow gauge railway behind the telecomms gallery. A variety of old buses. Some frames were affected by a scratch and this was one of them. Not sure how the film got scratched f...

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to post my photographic efforts, such as this time when I took my old Pentax Spotmatic F, loaded with a five year out of date roll of Ilford SFX which had been languishing in my fridge since The Before Times, and see what I come up with.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...

 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...

 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...