As part of my work and experience gaining exercises, I planned to go and shoot with some medium format FOMA Retropan 320 soft in the disused train depot within the grounds of the Cheltenham Racecourse. However upon arrival it was clear that the station and line were not as disused as we once thought, the station was currently occupied by a great steam train readying its boiler soon to depart. It turned out to be a Christmas holiday train so at this time of year it would be infeasible to enter the train depot further down the line.
It was a very crisp and clear day and the golden hour was soon approaching, deciding we couldn’t wait any longer for the train to depart, we left and headed out to some floodplains that would be sure to be flooded with the recent rain. I was using my Minolta Autocord 6×6 TLR and had loaded it with some FOMA Retropan. My thoughts now shifted from gathering harsh metallic textures in the depot to experimenting with tones and capturing atmospheres instead.
Using the Autocord was as fun and easy as ever, with its bright, open, waist level viewfinder and simple controls, having it mounted on a tripod made this even easier and allowed me time to compose and really focus in on my shots when taking them.
Unfortunately I think that there might be something inside the Autocord that is scratching and marking the film on its way through the camera as everything I’ve shot with it has comeback with strong, white lines down the right hand side of the images. However as mentioned in my post about the Retropan 320 film, I planned to use this to my advantage and let the film strips get scratched up, damaged and weathered to create images with a strong vintage vibe to complement the equipment and the nature of the film emulsion.
Once sufficiently roughed up and ‘vintaged’, I scanned the negatives in and processed them to bring out the dramatic tones and skies in the shots, the added weathering really enhanced the images and created very broody, melancholic and atmospheric images as I had hoped they would.
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