Making Photographs
A lovely sunny day in March I went for a wander around the Royal Botanic Gardens and Kings Domain. Seeking some respite from the sun we wandered down into the Fern Gully and were met with this scene. There was a good bit of haze in the air too which really helped this shot. I had a few attempts at getting a shot at 1/4s but got a hint of motion blur, 1/8s had to do. I like how the stones behind the waterfall have come out, a bit otherworldly, I might go back and just shoot that wall.
Christmas 2021 was a bit touch and go with COVID spiking and RATs rarer than hens teeth, we made it up to the Blue Mountains though! This photo is of the Three Sisters in Katoomba. The weather on the day we visited couldn’t have been better. The clouds were low, the light was soft as was the wind, and there were little wisps of cloud floating up from the forest below the lookout.
These two photos were taken on drastically different film stocks. Ektar 100 is a punchy colour negative film from Kodak that has some amazing reds, which really make the rock formations sing. The Provia is a nice contrasty slide film with a fairly natural rendition of colour, leaning a little on the cool side.
Looking for something a bit different and a bit fun I picked up a couple of rolls of Lomography Redscale 50-200. Redscale is a film that has been loaded into the canister or roll backwards, so that you expose the film through the orange film base. I’d done a little research on it before starting to shoot with it, seeing results I liked the look that shooting it at around 50 ISO (more yellow, less red, and interesting blues).
On a sunny day in early 2021 I took a long walk around South Wharf and Docklands, the burned through a roll pretty quickly. That’s easily done on an RB67 with just ten frames.
This is definitely my favourite from the day. I had to wedge my camera in the fence around the ship, making framing and levelling it a bit of fun (especially with the flipped image in the waist level finder). In an ideal world (one with an open gate and still no people) I’d have fit the whole ship in there and not had cut off the bit above the prow.
I decided to leave the film boarder on this shot to show what film I’d used and some of the imperfections. The RB67 back I used for this seems to have a slightly wonky film transport, hence the film label bleeding into the frame in the top left corner.
Thanks for reading!