Jonathan Gazeley

Hana’s dad picked me up a folding Voigtländer Bessa camera at a car boot sale in Exeter. To my surprise, it had some film in it – although unfortunately I didn’t find out until I’d opened the back.

I developed the film in my darkroom, and found that, as expected, half the film was totally black but the rest had some faint images. One frame had some rust on it, as it had been in the camera for so long.

In the end, only three frames out of the eight produced any usable results once scanned and edited, so here they are.

The camera is rather older than the film, as the Bessa was first manufactured in 1929. The film used here was Ilford FP4 (note: not the newer FP4 Plus) which was produced from 1968 to 1990.

If you recognise the location in the first photo, or recognise the man in the second and third photos, please get in touch. I’d love to trace the person who forgot to take out their film, all those years ago Chances are the man in the photos is still alive, if he was in his 30s back in the 1970s.

Recently on my blog I posted about using flash bulbs with an old box camera. The photos in this post are taken with said box camera, and the indoor ones are using flash bulbs. This is my first attempt at using flash bulbs, and indeed at any flash photography on film.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to fire reliably at first^[1], so the first photo is exposed twice, once with flash and once without. Most things in the non-flash exposure are invisible, except for the lamp.

Once at my parents’ house in Nuneaton, Dad demonstrated that while he may be retired now, his knees are still good enough to kneel by the fireplace.

Clearly photos by the fireplace did not offer a sufficient thrill to entice my brothers home, so I went to pick up Edmund from Nuneaton railway station a little later on. Of course,any excuse for some photos…

Here I knelt as close to the edge of the platform as I dared while a train passed. You can see the concrete kerb-stone at the bottom of the picture. The driver gestured that I should get back a bit, but I wasn’t likely to mess up a photo with the price of film these days!

On Sunday, we ate at the Courtyard. Edmund’s girlfriend Lara came along too and I finally managed to get everyone to pose together for this photo. Nobody was quite ready for the snap, but having spent about quarter of an hour setting the camera and flash up, I wasn’t likely to try again! I think the not-quite-posed nature of the picture adds a lot to it

After the meal, Oliver took custody of the camera and after some tuition, managed to make it work.

After the meal on Sunday, Hana and I returned home to Bristol. I processed the film, dried it, scanned it, and uploaded it here – long before my parents had even looked at the photos on their digital camera. They’re probably still looking for the USB thing-a-ma-jig that plugs into the digital-ma-bob right now!

Who says film is impractical?

[1] I disassembled the flashgun and cleaned the internal copper contact strips with cotton buds and spirit vinegar. I also found out that you have to scrape the oxide off the terminals of each flash bulb before use.

Sprocket holes in 35mm film are usually outside the boundary of the picture. But the other day, Paul showed me some of his pictures taken on an Ilford Sporti 4 which include the holes in the picture and it got me thinking*. I decided to run some 35mm film through my LOMO Lubitel and see what happened.

*About plagiarism of his work.

The Lubitel usually takes 120 roll film and produces images 6 ×6cm in size. With 35mm film, you get an image that’s 6cm tall, 3.5cm wide and has sprocket holes running vertically.

So here goes, with a customary view out of my balcony to get us started.

Some double yellow lines in the road. I hadn’t realised how shallow the depth of field was (or how inaccurate the focussing).

A nearby electricity substation. Ever tried shooting landscape with a TLR, looking sideways into the upside-down viewfinder?

And finally, at the end of the film, a snap of Hana. Shame it got cut off, because she looks great in this picture.

I’m pretty sure I need to calibrate the focussing in this camera. I took care to ensure that the image in the viewfinder was always in sharp focus, so I think the gearing between the viewing and taking lenses has fallen out of sync.

In several of these photos you can also see a white circle. This is the red window for watching the film numbers advance on paper-backed roll film. Of course, 35mm doesn’t haven’t a paper backing so any light leaks fog the film. The Lubitel has a little metal shutter to cover the window but clearly it’s not 100% effective.

Hana’s Dad recently lent me a 1934 Kodak Six-20 Brownie. I’ve just run my first roll of film through it, and here are the best from the roll.

Unfortunately the scans haven’t come out well – I’m still getting to grips with my new medium-format transparency scanner – an Epson Perfection V500 and it seems to struggle with dynamic range. It doesn’t help that the negatives were slightly over-exposed – probably my fault for using ISO400 film in a camera from the 1930s.

On the other hand, it gives them a rather faded, vintage look and feel.

This week I loaded some Ilford Pan F Plus 50 film into my AE-1. It’s the slowest film I’ve used to date.

I took a few photos around the campus of Bristol University but before I had a chance to shoot many, I lent the camera to my mate who visited for the weekend. He took pictures of steam trains, and we developed the film together. No doubt his pictures will be on his blog; I’ll provide a precise link to the actual post when he does. In the meantime, these are the handful of photos that I took.

The wall of the Chemistry department.

Colston’s Almshouses on St Michael’s Hill.

N^o 71, St Michael’s Hill

Royal Fort Gatehouse

This week, Hana bought me a Braun Paxette Electromatic II, dating from 1960 or thereabouts. I’ve shot one roll of film in it so far.

Looking at these photos, you’ll see that the quality is bad – both from poor focus, camera shake due to the slow (fixed) shutter speed, and that most of them are exposed and corrected for in post-processing. Many of them also have scratches across them, presumably where something in the camera rubbed on the film as it scrolled past. I like it – it reminds me of a cinefilm movie with scratches and lines.

Anyway, the detail is all on my blog if you’re interested

Overall, I think this camera gives a very authentic vintage feel. Lots of these photos look like they were genuinely taken in the 50s or 60s.

For now, these are my favourite photos from the roll.

To start with, a couple of portraits: first of Hana by her car, and then me by my desk. The picture of Hana has been spoilt down the left hand because the film got jammed inside the camera and I had to open the back to unjam it.

The next two shots were taken in Castle Park on my way to work.

And these two were taken on Queen’s Road, by the Clifton Triangle.

Finally, these two were taken in Brandon Hill park.

Hana and I went away for a few days to stay in Wells. (You may already have seen her looking gorgeous in the restaurant).

This is the view from our bedroom window in the Ancient Gate House Hotel, lit by the golden evening sunshine. I took about a million similar photos with various kinds of daylight (and night-time illumination) but this is my favourite.

There’s little else to do in Wells, so we spent most of a day in and around the cathedral. I felt super-special important because I bought a Photographic Permit, which entitled me to take all of the following photos

Firstly, the arches which were added ten year after the construction of the cathedral, on 3 sides of the main tower, because it was going to fall down.

A series of arched “windows”

The beautiful vaulted roof of the chapter house

Hana sitting in the chapter house

The famous staircase leading up to the chapter house



A view down the side aisle

The organ

An old building through an old window – the view of the cathedral from the cloisters

This week’s Photo Challenge is architecture. I want my photo to be a little bit different from everyone else’s so I decided to use my fisheye lens. Building almost always have straight edges, so a curved and distorted lens can really make things interesting.

One of the criteria of this Challenge is to take only one photo of each building – so this is what I’ve done. (Although I’ve taken photos of lots of buildings).

My dad is the webmaster of St Paul’s Church and has been working on a prototype for the new website. He wanted a banner-shaped image for the site header, and so we went for a walk around the churchyard to find something that might suit that format. There was nothing particularly suitable due to the church being quite tall, and the churchyard being quite overgrown.

Eventually, we decided to take a panorama of the inside of the church. I took ten photos and stitched them together with Hugin. I think it works quite nicely.

I also took a close-up of the war memorial (which you can see in the panorama) for personal consumption.

This is the back of Osborne Villas, as seen from the tops of the buildings on Woodland Road.

This chap was sitting on a bench in Brandon Hill park one lunchtime, reading. Hana thought it was me! Slightly offended – that guy was probably in his 60s and bald with glasses. Perhaps Hana needs glasses

This view is from the top of Constitution Hill.

I think photos of flowers in black and white are unusual – probably because flowers are noted for their colour. I took a few floral photos on this roll of film, and they were mostly quite average. But this one appealed to me for some reason. I think it’s the bokeh in the background.