Another batch of 120 film and a small step forward. I took advantage of a cheap shuttle fare (£20 return) to pop over to France and Belgium for a day, do some shopping and take a few pictures.
Doug came along, with his trusty Yashica-Mat (his house is on route to the tunnel) and within a couple of hours we were on the autoroute on our way to Ieper (Ypres to you and me) for some food, Belgian beer and a spot of film photography.
We were incredibly lucky with the light – as soon as we got to Belgium, the sun came out and stayed with us until it it set around 5 o’clock. If you have never been to Ypres, you should go, it’s worth the short drive from the tunnel, if only to see the Menin Gate. The link will tell you all you need to know about the huge monument, but suffice it to say it’s a huge, movingly impressive memorial to 54,896 officers and men of the Commonwealth forces that died in the region between the start of the war and Aug 15 1917 – and have no known graves. And it’s to this enormous edifice we turned our lenses.
This time round there were fewer technical errors, but the results are still uninspiring. Why? The colours are flat and detail isn’t really there – is this due to cheap low-res scanning? Composition isn’t precise and mostly it’s flat and boring – and that’s definitely down to me.
And, there were a couple of mechanical failures, where images were-double-exposed, or had not been advanced sufficiently and there was some overlap on the negatives.
And finally, the image below is from the end of the final film, it’s of Fish Island – it’s starting to show some promise.
posted on 26 November 2010
category: photo links
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