April, 2011

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Street style: Oxford

Friday, April 29th, 2011

As millions of people around the world were glued to their tv’s to watch the royal wedding of William and Kate, I headed into town to do a quick portrait shoot. Afterwards I decided to go for a stroll to see if I could find any street parties or something to photograph that would capture the occasion. I didn’t have much luck with finding street parties but I did notice that University students had returned from their spring break so the streets were busier than they had been in the previous two weeks.

My first shot was the girl with the baskets on her bike. This is now a series that I am working on expanding – owners with their bicycles.

[Tech info] All of these images were made with my digital camera. I had the colour mode set to black & white so the preview on the LCD screen I was seeing was in black & white but the RAW files are in colour. I love all of these images in black & white and struggled for a while with the decision of posting them here in colour or not. In the end I decided to give some variety to this photo blog so here they are in glorious technicolour.

Street portraits: Oxford

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

These ten images are the contents of an entire roll of film from a street portraits session two days ago. All of the images except one are full-frame and uncropped. A car poked its nose into the background of one of the shots so I decided to crop it out. So far I have only allowed myself one frame on each portrait which I find is a good discipline. Every frame is valuable on a roll of ten exposures so when I press the shutter I have to be sure I’m ready to commit that image to film.

This session started at around 3:30pm, which is unusual for me having only previously done street portraits in my lunch hour. I’ve got the week off work thanks to a Bank Holiday at either end of it so it was nice to have some longer shadows compared to midday. The first shot on the roll was the guy with his bike. Oxford is full of cyclists and as a cyclist myself I can’t help noticing the variety of different bikes all around. There might be a future series there, bicycles and their owners.

Amongst my ten shots there are three of people with their cameras. The guy with a Leica, a lady with her Rolleiflex (inside a nice leather case) and the tourists with their assortment of cameras, one of which was a plastic Lomo camera. That was the last shot on the roll and is one of my favourites. I love how they are all standing differently and photographing me photographing them. I didn’t set it up like that, a happy accident.

[Tech info] Film used was Fuji Arcos 100 (my first time using it). I had incorrectly set my lightmeter to ISO 250 for the first shot and rather than lose that frame I decided to stick with that ISO for the whole roll. Unable to find any precise data on how long to process the film for at ISO 250 I made a rough calculation and gave it 11mins in HC110 (1:47), dilution E at 20C. My camera was an RZ67 with 180mm lens.

Street style: Oxford

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

I’ve been enjoying going back to using film in some of my medium format cameras.
I often spend some of my lunch hours people watching in town, looking for anyone that looks worth photographing on a frame of my precious film. With only 10 shots on a roll, I have to make every click of the shutter count. Here are some recent images.
[Tech info: Pentax 6×7, 105mm f2.4, TMAX 100]