Pre-Lockdown walk on Brighton Beach with the Hasselblad 500c/m and the Lomography Lomochrome Metropolis 120 film

Back in February, I went for a walk on a sunny Sunday afternoon with my Husband and my dog, Daisy along Brighton beach. I decided to take my Hasselblad 500 c/m camera with me on this walk and the Metropolis film as I wanted to see if the film would still have that dark, steely edge when used in bright sunshine.

I shot the film at 400 ISO. Looking back, I think it would have been interesting to try a 100 or 200 ISO on such a sunny day so I may try that next time. There were clouds in the sky and I wonder if that is why I decided to shoot this film again on a 400 ISO.

It’s taken me a long time to post this blog as I put the film in for development with my local lab literally a few days before we went into lockdown in the UK and my local lab didn’t re-open until July.

Although I picked the film up several weeks ago, due to busy work commitments, I hadn’t got around to scanning the film on my Epson V600 scanner until now.

Here are the results:

Here are a couple I managed to take of my husband and Daisy:

I love these two photos of my husband and Daisy playing on the beach:

Here is one of Daisy:

During the winter months, my husband and I sometimes like to stop at this fish place along the beach for lunch and have a nice warm fish chowder soup with some bread.

One mistake I sometimes make with the Hasselblad is I wind the film on when I’m not ready to take my next photo. The camera then will face the floor when hung on the strap around my shoulder and what can happen is that the shutter will accidentally press against my leg when walking and go off. Here is a prime example of this happening and wasting a photo of my precious 12 roll film. I’m hoping I will stop doing this going forward! Here is the result of me doing that on this walk:

I still felt the photos had the gritty, street feel, even on a sunny day. It would definitely be interesting to use this film on some architecture. Perhaps I need to arrange another visit to the Barbican Centre and try out a roll of this film there. I’ve not yet been to London since COVID-19 happened and I don’t currently have any plans to visit anytime soon.

Using the Ilford HP5 Plus Black and White 120mm film with my Lubitel 166B

Since I really loved the previous black and white photos I had taken using my Lubitel 166B, I thought I would try out the Ilford HP5 Plus film as it’s a very easy film to get hold of in a few of my local shops in Brighton.

The more I use the camera, the more I continue to love it. Since my last blog, I’ve now discovered how to focus the photo properly by using the attached magnifying glass in the viewfinder and looking at the central circle in the viewfinder.

I also thought I’d test out the eye level viewfinder on the camera which is a small square in the plastic at the top so you don’t actually look into the picture part of the camera. Here are two photos I took using this method of shooting:

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I didn’t feel that using the little square viewfinder gave an accurate image of  what I inevitably shot so I know I definitely prefer using the actual picture viewfinder and mainly shooting from the hip.

It was a cloudy, windy day in Brighton and the waves were immense. I wanted to capture this as best I could using the Lubitel and here are the results:

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I wasn’t sure when taking the photos if I was going to find them boring once developed but I do really like them. Again for me, I just really like the style of photo this camera produces.

Trip Zine Issue 2

A Couple of months ago, I blogged about a new magazine that had recently been published called Trip Zine.

The magazine is completely dedicated to photos taken on the Olympus Trip 35 camera.

Trip Zine recently had asked for submissions for their upcoming second issue and I was pleased to find out that three of my photos taken on the Olympus Trip had made it into the magazine:

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Trip Zine Issue 2 can be purchased at https://www.etsy.com/shop/TripZine