Sheep Photos

In my previous blog post I mentioned that I wanted to turn some of my sheep photos into prints so that I could frame them and put them up in my knitwear studio.

On Saturday I had some time to visit the darkroom and I am pleased to report I managed to successfully do some 8 x 10 resin coated prints.

You’ll see from the cover photo, that I initially printed a contact sheet and selected several photos I’d possibly like to develop into prints. In the end, after lots and lots of test strips, I printed a total of three photos.

Here are the first two I enlarged from the 6 x 6 negatives into prints:

In the next print I decided that the people in the background were a distraction and didn’t quite fit in with the two previous prints I had done:

I therefore cropped the original photo on the enlarger so the final print showed just the sheep:

This did mean that less of the closest sheep was shown in my cropped photo but I actually didn’t mind this since I had a similar thing happening in the first print so felt it helped towards the cohesiveness of the three photos.

Needless to say, I am absolutely thrilled with these prints and am really excited about framing them and putting them up on the wall of my knitwear studio.

Another attempt at animal photography using my Hasselblad 500 C/M camera

Back in July I visited the Rare and Traditional Breeds Show at the Weald & Downland Living Museum with my husband.

He has fond memories of visiting this show when he was a child with his Dad and hadn’t been for several years so was keen to go this year.

I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to take some black and white photos of some of the animals.

I decided to take my medium format camera (the Hasselblad) since I thought that would give me greater detail if I wanted to develop any of the photos in the darkroom.

I also had a roll of the Bergger Pancro 400 film in my film stash so thought I’d use this.

Here is a photo of one of the bulls being shown:

My main profession is a hand knitwear designer, so I was particularly drawn to the sheep breeds at the show which I found easier to photograph with the Hasselblad:

I was extremely impressed with the fleece detail on this breed of sheep in the following photographs and yet again, was pleased I had taken the photos using the Hasselblad:

I have a real fondness for the Southdown Sheep as they remind me of ‘little teddybears’ plus they’re bred in Sussex. However, as a knitwear designer, I’m frustrated that I can’t really knit with their fleece since it is very coarse when spun into yarn so isn’t very comfortable to wear for the ladies garments that I design which is a shame.

I couldn’t help but watch and take a couple of photos of the showing of them:

Although there is still a lot of room for improvement of my animal photography, there are actually a couple of photos of the sheep that I now want to develop in the Darkroom and get framed to put in my knitwear design studio which is an added bonus!

My Olympus Pen FT Camera and Lomochrome Purple 35mm film

I’m a big lover of the Lomography Lomochrome Purple film (since purple is my favourite colour!) and have really liked the results in other cameras I’ve used it in.

I therefore wanted to try it out in my Olympus Pen FT camera. I already knew from trying out the film previously that it worked well with landscapes.

I therefore visited Seven Sisters Country Park in Eastbourne to take some landscape photos and here are some of the results:

I was really happy with the results of the film with the landscape and I managed to achieve the cool purple effect I was after. I wasn’t sure how the pictures of the sheep would turn out but I was pleased with those photos too.

Since the half frame camera has twice as many photos to shoot, I didn’t manage to use up the film whilst at Seven Sisters.

I therefore headed to Brighton Marina and took some more pictures using my 25mm Zuiko lens and also my 150mm Zuiko telephoto lens and here are some of the results:

You’ll see that the film wasn’t nearly as effective as it had been on the landscape shots. I did feel the photos taken at the marina had a vintage feel to them and there is clearly a hint of purple and a lot of the blues on the boats have turned into a green colour.

I also took a couple of photos of the cliffs nearby:

Again, the purple was only really effective on the green parts of the landscape but I did like the effect the film had on the blues of the sky and sea.

I still had a couple more shots of film left to use up (72 exposures goes a long way!), so I decided to head to my local cemetery in Hove and here are some of the results:

I was really pleased with the results of these photos too. I got the purple effect I was after along with a nice contrast of turquoise sky in some of them.

I know I’ll definitely be using this film again when taking landscape shots as I absolutely love the colours it produces.