Holkham Hall Details

I'm still so drawn to black and white photos at the moment - it usually happens during winter when everything seems to become much less saturated and mute - black and white film just captures the mood so well of that I think.

Saying that, these photos are from September - and it was an unusually sunny September day too - but they still capture the mood well I think :)

I particularly love that last photo - I'm not sure why really, I think perhaps that the book looks so soft, like you could stroke the pages and know what it feels like maybe?

Camera: Canon EOS 750
Film: West Yorkshire Cameras C41 Black and White Film
Location: Holkham Hall, Norfolk

Creake Abbey Part III

Some little details that I spotted walking between the Cafe and the Abbey, including a friendly horse and even more coins.

I've only used my Zenit E twice so far but looking at these again is making me itch to take it out for some more photographic adventures together, I really love the photos I can take with it.

Camera: Zenit E
Film: West Yorkshire Cameras B&W Film
Location: Creake Abbey, Norfolk

Creake Abbey Part I

First, I have a new template on my blog - hurrah! I get bored fairly quickly of layouts I've found and it took me all of last week to realise that was why I didn't really feel like blogging at the moment - but now things are a bit cleaner and simpler I'm glad to be back. What do you think?

I'm excited to be sharing photos from Creake Abbey here today - we had some of our wedding photos taken here in September (you can see one here, I love it) and we went back again to visit with friends and family the week after the wedding as well and of course I took my cameras with me. 

The abbey isn't that big - especially compared to Kirkstall Abbey near us and definitely compared to Fountains Abbey which is huge but its charming and delightful and I'm glad I got a chance to capture that myself on film. I'm always going to be extra fond of it after having our photos taken there I think.

I'm really pleased with the results from my second roll of film taken with my new to me Zenit E as well - I think I'll be taking it out with some black and white film again very soon.

Camera: Zenit E
Film: West Yorkshire Cameras C41 B&W film
Location: Creake Abbey, Norfolk
 

I bought a film scanner (finally)

So as well as turning 30 and getting married, September was also the month that I finally bought my own film scanner - a busy month huh. I've mentioned before that I usually use a shop in Leeds called Max Speilmann to develop and scan my photos and usually the quality of the scans (combined with how cheap they are) is enough for what I need to share photos on here and occasionally print them.

Until one film.

I've been trying to find more black and white films since the demise of Kodaks BW400CN film (still so sad, I should have stocked up) and as part of my searching I found that a local camera shop in Leeds - West Yorkshire Cameras - sold their own C41 B&W film - how awesome and perfect is that? So obviously I bought one to try and I ran it through a camera as fast as I could. And it was all going great until I picked up the film from Max Spielman and saw the results - they were so grainy - as you can see in the photo below (ignore the light streak, we're pretty convinced that was user error ha).

At first I thought it was me, so I popped to the West Yorkshire Camera shop to ask them if they'd seen results like it before and the man working there was great - he looked at the negatives for me and figured out that basically Max Speilmann's scanners couldn't cope with the negative.... so I bought a new scanner that could scan films that evening - like you do. A Epson Perfection V370. I could have bought a more expensive one, but I wasn't sure if that was what I wanted to do and actually this one has been great and done exactly what I needed it to do. Phew! 

The photo above is the scan from my scanner - as you can see the grain is much much better and the photo seems much softer with a more balanced contrast (though could it be lighter? perhaps?). I'm still not particularly great at scanning - now that I've started it I'm thinking that perhaps I've opened a whole can of worms with scanning details haha. Especially if I decide to scan ALL my photos - I've taken 50 films in my LC-A alone, so I can't imagine how many films I do actually have to rescan now in total. At this moment I've scanned 5. Though those 5 are swaying me to scan them all as even with my limited scanning experience so far they look so much better quality and grain that the ones I originally have.

If any one has any tips about film scanning (that won't fry my brain) I'd love to hear them!