Gentleman, in Oxford

One from my last walk around Oxford City Centre for a while:

HP5+ in Ilfotec HC, on old Kentmere fixed grade paper

I didn't look too closely at the gentleman before taking the shot and when I saw the print it made me wonder about his situation.  He is very well dressed, complete with long overcoat and rolled umbrella.  But he does have a lot of cases with him and what appears to be a can of beer on the ground beside him (and a coffee cup). If he wasn't so well dressed I might think he was a 'gentleman of the road', but that doesn't go with his attire.  He shall remain an enigma.

I took a little Olympus Mju-1 point 'n' shoot with me this time, to see how it would fare.  The answer was it fared pretty good.  These are tiny wee slide-across-clam-shell cameras, auto-everything with a 35mm f/3.5 lens and it worked a treat.  A contrasty lens which focusses down to 0.35m, which is rather useful at times. It's so small you can stick it in a coat pocket and not notice it, so it was perfect for this trip.

I should have read up about the camera a bit more than I did before taking it, as I've a nice date-stamp on all the negatives.  This feature can be turned off, I now know.  

Wesco

An old oil can, via the macro/fisheye extension lenses:

On Kentmere VC paper.

Better news on the kitty front.  Maisie's leg has still got the bandage on, but the wound is starting to heal over, so hopefully the bandage can come off soon.  She's doing well, eating and drinking normally and starting to put weight back on.  Still has a bit of a limp, but that's improving too.  She's getting frustrated, or bored, with life on the inside though - keeps going to look through the patio doors and then crying up at us to get out.  There's no way she is well enough to go out, though - there are too many potential problems for a kitty with a weak leg: foxes, cars, trees.  We're thinking her wandering days might be over for good.  So we need to get her more stimulated inside the house - a cardboard box might do the trick for a while, something new to explore.  And cheap, which after the vet's bills is no bad thing.  

Tractor Grease

 You never know when you might need it:

HP5+, HC-110, Kentmere VC Select paper
Another one from the OM4ti/50mm combination, with close-up and fisheye attachment.

We're not long back from graduation and a very pleasant time it was.  The weather was kind to us and it all went smoothly.  It's been a tough week though, with poor Maisie and her bad leg meaning we cut our trip short.  We ended up driving from Liverpool to Oxford on the Tuesday morning, graduation on the Wednesday and than back to Liverpool on the Thursday.  Lots of early starts and short sleeps on the ferry means we are all pretty exhausted.   Maisie wasn't in great shape when we got home - her leg did not smell good at all and the vet confirmed an infection had set in.  With antibiotics she has improved a good bit since then, but she needs a lot of attention and comforting.  She's started to eat and drink which the vet said would be the best thing to fight the infection.  It's back to the vets later today (Monday) to get an update.  She's not putting the leg down properly yet but she is beginning to move it a little.  If we can get the bandage off I think it might help with the movement side of things, but I guess it depends if the wounds have started to heal or not.  Hopefully it will be good news.

And here she is, The Graduate of 2024 (phone snaps):

Castlerock Beach (and a cat's tale)

Hold the front page I was actually out on the beach the other day - early(ish), to avoid the holidaymakers:

HP5+, 35mm lens; Kentmere VC paper, bleached in cupric sulphate then sepia toned.

Too much of the old sepia?  Maybe this one is easier on the eye:

Castlerock beach, looking over towards Inishowen/Donegal.

Note the tramlines - looks like I've gone over the negative with a razor blade.  This is what happens when you mess too much with winding half a film back into the canister and then loading it in a different camera.  Must have picked up some dust somewhere along the line.  Said canister is now in the recycling bin.

My life, I have found, bumps along OK for most of the time.  Then a dozen things happen at once.  This week, for example, we are off to Oxford for the graduation of the year.  My wife and I had tacked on a few days to ourselves before getting the ferry back from Liverpool.  Then our Tabby cat, Maisie, decides to throw a spanner in the works.  She went AWOL last Friday night - it was a warm night and she was last seen running around the garden like a mad thing as dusk descended.  Woke up Saturday morning and she was not in her usual place (bottom of our bed) and her biscuits (by her own bed) were untouched.  Probably sleeping somewhere outside, we thought - it has been known; she'll come back when she's hungry.  Didn't see her all day and as dinner time came and went we became increasingly worried.  Went out a few times to call her name, up and down the road, nothing.  A while later and we were alerted by her cries - she'd managed to drag herself home, got through the cat-flap and then collapsed.  Her front leg was dangling, clearly she was unable to lift/move it.  Hard to tell what happened but her paw looked crushed and her leg was lacerated, as if she'd tried to free it from something by pulling it out.  She was crying incessantly, clearly in pain.  So it was off to the vets with her.  The news isn't great.  We don't know for sure yet as they haven't x-rayed it but there's talk of amputation.  What can you do?  She's young (just turned 4) and otherwise in good health - she wants to live.  If - and it's a big if - there's a big improvement today then they might leave it alone to see how things go, but so far they haven't seen much change in her, in spite of strong painkillers and fluids.  The vets seem good and helpful so we're confident they will do the right thing.  She's not insured though, so this is going to hurt me as well as her.  Payment plans are available, we're told.  You can guess what that means.  In the meantime we are still going to Oxford, but abandoning plans for our mini-break afterwards and coming straight home.  I'll keep y'all posted on progress.  

Ramblings

It must be all the clearing out at my mother's place but I've taken to decluttering my film stuff lately, listing various bits of gear on that well-known auction site as well as locally.  I'd prefer to sell locally as the other place's charges are ridiculously high these days - 12.8% of the total amount of the sale (which includes postage, weirdly - how can they justify taking a cut of the cost of postage?), plus 30p (a bit random), plus a 0.42% 'regulatory operating fee', again on the total final value.   I had listed an old computer magazine (Personal Computing) from the early 1980s, just for fun really, to see if there was any interest; listed at 99p.  Amazingly it sold - someone paid £3.69 for it, included postage.  After fees, I ended up with...drum roll...41p.  Worth the hassle?  Absolutely not.  So I deleted all the things that I had listed for less than a tenner (which will now go to charity) and upped the postage costs on everything else.   

 Anyway, the point of today's ramblings is that I came across a lens attachment thing which I thought would be the perfect thing to sell, for maybe a tenner or so.  There were two parts to it - one was clearly a fish-eye optic and the other bit, which screwed on to the rear of the fish-eye, was a close-up optic. Bound to be rubbish quality, I thought.  But I noticed it had a 49mm thread.  Interesting,  I thought - both a bunch of Olympus OM and Pentax ME lenses take a 49mm thread.   Then I remembered I had half a film lurking in the Leica which I really should get finished and developed, which might mean I have something actually worth printing in the darkroom for a change.  So from the Leica I wound the film back into the spool (well, not completely, obviously), loaded it into the OM4ti, stuck it on manual, 1/2000 of a second at f/16 and in the darkroom, in a black bag for safety, fired off the half of the film that had been exposed.  Back in the light I attached the close-up/fisheye optic on the end of a 50mm Zuiko and headed to the garage to see what I could find to photograph up close.  This was one of the shots, after developing in HC-110 and printed Sunday morning on Kentmere VC Select paper that was kindly sent to me recently by an old friend whose daughter used to print some time ago.

Can you guess what it is?

I was right - rubbish quality, optically.  But the end result was most pleasing.  Bottom line, I'm keeping it.  I promise I'll try not to over-use it but it is tempting to go a bit mad with it, I reckon.

Oh, what is it?  It's a shot of an old (very old) motorists emergency Pifco lamp.  It has a red dome which would have flashed once upon a time and a headlight torch (the headlight is what you can see here, with the body of the lamp just about discernible to the right if you know what it is.  One of my father's purchases, no doubt, about 50-odd years ago.  Well done if you guessed correctly ;)

This man walked in space

Cet homme a marché dans l'espace was the headline in the Paris Match edition from 27th March 1965.  How do I know this?  Because yesterday, up in my mother's garage, I was holding this magazine in my hands, having discovered it (and a few others from that era) lurking in an old box.

The guy's name was Alexi Arkhipovich Leonov, a Russian Cosmonaut
- the first man to conduct a space walk (which lasted 12 minutes and 9 seconds). 

I'm guessing my father must have subscribed to Paris Match at a time; he was always interested in European languages and did all he could to keep up his knowledge of French, Italian, German and Spanish, having travelled all over Europe in his bachelor days - on his Triumph motorbike. 

Space exploration really took off in the 60s, of course and magazines like this would have offered readers a glimpse into these historic events - in colour.  It was still a few years before colour TVs became commonplace in Ireland.  We got our first colour set around June of 1976 and I remember being amazed by the fact that the tennis courts at Wimbledon were a vibrant green - who'd have guessed! 

From 1963 we have this edition which covered the coronation of Pope Paul VI - who looks like he's either about to go into space (or just arrived from space):

When I get time, I'll post some phone shots of the contents of these magazines.  For now, I've left them with my mother to peruse.

Film is alive in Ireland

A few years ago the local Photographic Club was gifted some old cameras and darkroom gear from a local school art department that was closing (the school was closing, not just the art dept).  As chief 'film and darkroom guy' at the club the stuff fell to me.  I helped one guy set up a darkroom in his house but he's since gone on to have a clatter of weans (that's children - wee ones - in case you aren't familiar with the vernacular) so I don't think he has the time for it right now.  Two other enlargers (Durst M670BW and Meopta Axomat) have been sitting in my garage for the last few years and there seemed little (i.e., no) interest from anyone else in the Club.  So I listed them on FB Marketplace, free of charge.  Yesterday a guy drove 3-and-a-half hours from the other end of the country to pick them up.  Over a cup of tea he explained his plans.  Originally from Belarus he started an online business a while back, digital printing service mostly, calendars, photobooks and the like.  He also offered a film processing service by mail order - the only one in Ireland, apparently.   Enter Covid and lockdown and his film processing service took off, since the shops were mostly closed.  He tells me he does about 500 films a month, so I guess film is well and truly alive in Ireland.  Though over 90% is C41 colour, for some strange reason ;)

He plans to open a community darkroom, hence his interest in the enlargers.  I wish him well - he seems to have the determination to make it happen and I was very happy to gift him the enlargers to help kick-start his efforts. 

What better way to start the week than with a photo of a cute lamb.
This one with my fellow Photo Club member Graham, who reared this little one a while back.