Pub Chairs
I, and my Olympus XA2, found this stack of chairs in an alley behind a building that houses three pubs and a couple of night clubs. I think I like the colour version better, but the black and white certainly works just fine.
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Olympus XA2, f3.5/35mm lens, Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 film, scanned with Epson V700
burnt embers 
Hi Ehpem – after we met at shatterbox I looked up your site, I’ve only checked out about 6 shots so far but they’re all really impressive. View Towers has never looked so beautiful! (I seriously doubt that anyone has ever had that so say about it.) I chose this particular photo to comment on because it’s from the same alleyway as the photo of mine that I showed to you (my shot was a few doors further north). Also I’ve been taking shots of View Towers, and out back of J&J, I work a few doors down from there.
I’m looking forward to going through the rest of your work, there’s a lot for me to learn here.
And I also I look forward to bumping into you again on the street sometime soon–get that shutter working! I want a portrait of myself reflected in one of those puddles on View Street!
Martin
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Hi Martin,
it was nice to meet someone else lugging around a medium format camera. Thanks for your kind comments about the blog. I wondered why the location of your shot looked so familiar! As to View Towers, the beauty, what there is of it, is in the details I think, or otherwise filtered through reflections and so on.
A portrait reflection in those puddles is do-able, we just need to get together on a reasonably nice day after rain – should be pretty easy to arrange in this town.
The shutter is working with my other film back, and I think it is probably working now with the one that did not work. Not sure what the issue was, but it would not fire without the back, but when I swapped in the other one with new film then it became active and I could load a new roll of film and so on. So, I think it is all back in order, for now. Research needed.
After I met you I met a young woman, a fellow customer, in Prism who was dropping off 120, 35mm and one of those automatic little wedge-shaped canisters of film. Including a roll of ancient Agfa colour that came in a camera she had just bought. So, we got talking, she had just bought a Bronica medium format camera. Funny to meet two people with similar interests to mine in the space of an hour, after going for months without!
I expect we will run into each other again.
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The colour works for me too. I think that the B&W image would come from a close-in shot of the chairs set against the black void and nothing else in the frame.
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That is a good idea – the close-in shot. No idea why I did not think of it, other than perhaps the heckling bar staff on a smoke break who asked if I was making art with their chairs. Distracting comments like that can throw me off my game.
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Like them both…I’ve been wondering where you get your colour film developed. I have an old point and shoot Canon around somewhere (along with a ton of old SLRs, and rangefinder cameras) and finding a place that will develop any of it has been a challenge.
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Hi Peter – welcome to my blog – nice to have you commenting!
There are a few options in Victoria. I have used London Drugs because they are quick and cheap but recently they returned negatives that were stained somehow (not properly dried) and not enclosed in any protection other than the paper envelope. So, they are out for me (rumour has it they may be withdrawing from film and film processing – they certainly don’t have a good range of film anymore). Currently for colour negatives I am using Lens and Shutter – they do a good job and if not backed up with a number of rolls of film can be done in an hour or so (the longest I have had to wait is about 1.5 days). For silver based black and white I go to Prism – they do it in-house in a couple of days and do a very nice job. They can also handle larger negative sizes of various kinds.
I do my own scanning, and don’t normally print so I can’t compare service or prices from either of those places for scanning and printing. However, the film processing at Lens and Shutter is 5$/roll vs 8$/roll at Prism. L&S sends their black and white to Vancouver for processing and it can take 2 weeks. Film purchase is also quite a bit cheaper at Lens and Shutter, but I am not adverse to buying film in other places if it seems to be well stored – most of the in-house big-box brands are made in Japan and thus are Fuji and seem to work just fine.
For more exotic films Camera Traders (Market Square) is a good place to check, but they don’t process. They do carry chemicals if you want to process your own film. They also are a good place for batteries for older cameras, and will check your shutter to make sure it is accurate. There are other places, and there may be somewhere in Sidney too, but I have not looked into it.
So, I would suggest that if you have colour film (negatives) and are coming into town that you call L&S and see if they can give your film priority so that you can pick up the same day. They are very accommodating so I bet that would work. If you want them scanned, I would go for higher resolution than lower unless you can scan negatives yourself, or if you get prints and are ok scanning them.
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The color of the chairs against the dark background works best for me, too. You’re right, though, the black and white is also nice.
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Thanks Ken. Those black doors make a pretty good back drop for things. In the conversion I had to fool around with the reds quite a bit to get the chairs to stand out – they red tends to blend in to that background.
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