The Turl

 The famous Turl Street in Oxford:

Turl Street, with Jesus College on the right.  Check out the chimneys - unusually tall and rather splendid. As you can see on the left, Turl St caters well for the thirsty academic.  HP5 in HC-110, on Foma 133 paper.

I'm not getting the results that I want from my new HC-110 developer with HP5 - I seem to be losing about a stop - these negatives were a bit lacking in contrast after 8 minutes of dilution E (1:47).  Salvageable, but I don't like having to print at Grade 5 since if you need a bit more local contrast anywhere there's nowhere to go.  The Yashica T4 reads the speed from the DX coding on the cannister and usually I've bulk-loaded some HP5 into 200iso cannisters to fool the Yashica into giving me that extra stop but on this occasion there was a proper HP5+ cannister inside so it was exposing at 400.  

This print is hot off the press this morning which is the first time in a while I've actually been in the darkroom.  We're still a bit bushed after the weekend and the house is upside down as we've a kitchen guy in doing some refurbishment of our cupboard space.  He was booked months ago and it just so happened to coincide with a week that we could have usefully spend doing not very much.  With luck he'll finish today and we can start to get the place back into shape, by which time there will be a hundred other things to do.  Does it ever stop?

Whiterocks and tears

This is the view from the East viewing platform at Magheracross.  Standing on it gives you a grand look at the limestone cliffs, with all their arches and stacks - the sort of stuff you would normally only see from a boat unless someone was dangling you by the ankles over the cliff face:

Looking down from the viewing platform at Magheracross on a dull morning in August, 2021. HP5+ via the M6, on Foma 133 paper.

The bigger picture:

Cropped to square from 35mm, on MGV Deluxe paper.   This area is known as the Whiterocks, for some reason ;)  The beach just visible in the distance leads to Portrush, about a mile or so away to the East and is a very pleasant walk on most days of the year.

Uni Update:  Yesterday (Sunday) evening my wife&I said Goodbye to Missy and left her to start her new life at Oxford Brookes Uni. We fly home today. Needless to say there were tears. 

Saturday was a very busy day, with a (very) early flight over from Belfast and a day of trains and taxis interspersed with getting Missy's room into some sort of inhabitable condition.  Restrictions due to Covid-19 meant us parents had only a one-hour slot on campus before we had to leave so it was a mad rush to get boxes unpacked, bed made and try to see what we had forgotten to bring. Then we took a taxi to a large supermarket and got a few essentials to start her off.  By that time we were all ready to collapse - my wife and I back in our hotel in town and Missy in her room.  Yesterday we met up for lunch and had a bit of a dander about Oxford - which is a fabulous city, famous for the University Colleges dating back to the 12th Century.  It's a busy place - though I tend to find all cities busy (and noisy) these days. Perhaps living in semi-rural Northern Ireland has something to do with that. I took the Yashica T4 with me to Oxford but didn’t do a lot of snapping…too much else to think about. We’ll see if anything worth sharing appears when I get the energy to do some darkroom work.  Meanwhile my wife & I will be busy trying to make sense of being ‘empty nesters’. Scary stuff.

Neptune Reclining (and a busy weekend beckons)

 The Turia Fountain in Valencia:

Neptune, taking a well-earned rest after a busy day at sea.  Looks like he has life sussed, if you ask me.  Captured on HP5, printed on Foma 133 paper.  I like this paper - it's resin coated so it's a lot less expensive than fibre paper and has much shorter wash times.  I prefer it to Ilford's new deluxe RC paper, which I'm finding a bit too contrasty/harsh for my tastes, although from what I read on the forums I seem to be in the minority here.
If you google "Turia Fountain, Valencia" most of the shots you see are taken from the other side of the fountain, and the backdrop then consists of rather lovely old Spanish buildings (including the Valencia Cathedral) and not the rather ordinary looking blocks of apartments you see here.  Which means, of course, that the residents of these apartments have the most lovely outlook.

To say things are a tad busy at the minute is a bit of an understatement, for in two days' time we fly to Birmingham and from there take a train to Oxford, which will be home for Missy for the next few years as she embarks on her University course of choice: Biological Sciences (Zoology) at Oxford Brookes Uni.  On Monday my wife and I shall fly home to a very different house for the next 14 weeks while Missy begins the Great Adventure, which kicks off with a week of fun and get-to-know-you events known to all as Fresher's Week.  It's exactly 40 years since I did the same and not surprisingly things have changed somewhat in that short time ;)  I set off on my own with all my gear packed into two suitcases (no wheels, of course, in those days).  Missy, on the other hand, will have two doting parents alongside to help get her installed in her Uni halls, sort out her 'first food shop' and do a million other things.  There are already four (!) large packages sent on by post (or direct via online shopping).  In spite of the accommodation costing an arm and a leg virtually nothing is provided other than the basic infrastructure, so we have had to sort out duvet, pillows and bed linen as well as cutlery, plates and cooking utensils. I know in some countries it's common to have a 'dining plan' whereby students never have to think about cooking for themselves but we don't do that in the UK.  No, here the norm is that students fend for themselves from the off.  Most likely Missy will buy some of her meals at the various cafes and restaurants on campus and supplement that by doing some food prep in her kitchen, shared in this case with 5 other first year students.  It's going to be a big change for our daughter who, let's face it, hasn't really had to fend for herself up to now.  Of course Mother and Father will be available at the press of a few buttons, day or night.  Forty years ago it was a weekly phone call home from a communal telephone box, usually on a Sunday evening.  Everything else you figured out by yourself.  I loved every minute of it - although those phone calls home were sometimes a nuisance :)

Humble Pie

Oh Yes, a good serving of Humble Pie for my breakfast this morning.  After my recent post about 'not leaving films in cameras for too long' what do I go and find lurking in a camera?  Only a film from a couple of years ago.  That'll teach me.  In my defence, I must have taken the film out and then for some unknown reason re-loaded it, since the last half of the film was doubly-exposed.  Not nicely doubly-exposed, either - the frame spacing was inconsistent so it's all a mess.  What was I thinking, I wonder...

Anyway, there were some shots of the old town of Valencia on the first half of the film.  Here's one with a pigeon in it: 

Downtown Valencia, 2019.  HP5 in HC-110, on Foma 133 paper.  That's the 15th Century bell-tower of Valencia Cathedral in the background, by the way.  You can walk up to the top - all 207 steps, apparently.  We didn't - it was very hot and a trudge around the town at street level was all we could manage.

The Stones

Not the Stones that have been in the news recently on account of the demise of drummer and natty dresser Mr Charlie Watts.  No - these stones, wot I snapped up while they were resting on my mother's windowsill:

Stones, August 2021.  Via Hasselblad/150mm with extension tube.  FP4+, RO9 on MGV paper.  I would have liked a little more texture on the white stones but I like the way the others came out.  So if I print this again, I'll do a small burn-in. 

I'm guessing every now and then a stone catches her eye and she places it on the windowsill by her back door.  And why not, eh?  The different textures are rather nice, I think.

Titanic Workers

A mural from the the famous Sandy Row in Belfast depicts the Titanic Workers, many of which came from this working class area.  The Titanic is Belfast shipyard's most famous export by a country mile - for all the wrong reasons, of course.  There are a lot of murals around this part of Belfast and I snapped up a few while I was there but I've come to the conclusion they aren't the easiest things to get a decent shot of.  I cut most of the letters out of the frame since the workers were the most interesting part of the mural to my eyes, not the word Titanic.

The history of the Harland and Wolff shipyards is interesting in itself and while it is well known that the workers were overwhelming Protestant this article scratches beneath the surface of that headline.  Anyway, to the masterpiece!

Belfast Mural, 2021.  Yashica T4, HP5 printed on MGV paper. 

Check out the paint tins - and the dog! On the right, just above the workers you might just be able to make out a sketch of the Titanic Museum, which is designed as four pointed hulls, 38m high, the same height as the ill-fated ship.  Also, I didn't notice at the time but it looks like there's a hidden door to the building on the right.

A Grand Entrance

This one was lurking at the start of a film which finally got finished last week.  It's always nice to come across some shots you've forgotten about although generally I try not to leave a film in a camera too long.  The OM-1 that I acquired some years ago has some marks on the chrome runners inside the back of the camera, due, I was informed by the guy who serviced it, to a film having been left in it for a very long time.  Must have been years, I reckon.  The marks are still visible even after the cleaning but don't cause a problem.

Anyway, here we are at the entrance to the Downhill Demesne sometime earlier this year, with the sun casting nice shadows of the impressive ironwork gates:

Entrance gates at Downhill.  M6 on HP5+ in HC-110.  Foma 313 paper.

Shooting contra-jour is always an exposure balancing act - do you meter for the highlights, or the shadows.  The former and you'll risk the shadows going to black, the latter and you'll risk blowing the highlights.  I'll either take a couple of shots and bracket or I'll go somewhere in the middle and hope for the best, as I did here.  Assuming your negative holds detail in both shadows and highlights the trick then is to get it on the paper in some sort of acceptable form.  In this case, there's a still a hint of detail in the stone arch and the highlights aren't paper-white, so while it isn't going to win any awards I'm OK with the print.