COAL’OLE

CLICK THESE TINY PICS.  IT’S THE ONLY WAY YOU’LL SEE THE SUPER-SEXY GRAIN.

YES GRAIN! REAL GRAIN ON REAL FILM!

CLICK’EM !   YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE

Remember how I told you yesterday was bleak and miserable here in The Black Country?

Well it really was. Greyer than a very grey thing and as cold as a witches tit……Big style bleak!

But…It’d been almost a week since I’d given my shutter finger a work out, and between you and me I was getting a little jumpy, (the digit-fidgets), so when, just before noon, the rain stopped and all I had to contend with was a bitter wind, I bit the bullet and loaded some Ilford XP2 into my 1950’s WERRA 3 Rangefinder and ventured forth into the wintery desolation of Dudley to shoot my second roll of film….(phew, long sentence).

I headed for The Racecourse Colliery, part of The Black Country Open Air Museum.

Well, if your using actual black & white film on a foul and wintery, black & white day, what’s better than a subject that gave The Black Country it’s name in the first place?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Dudley’s ‘Coal’ole’.

Scarily, I find I’m at risk of becoming a film snob.

OK so it’s pricey…Film and developing/scanning, even at a budget photolab, cost over £12.00 for a 36 roll which will soon mount up. But, I take one look at the super-sexy, gritty, grainy, crunchiness of the shot above and I’m almost ready to start spouting all of that Luddite nonsense you hear from some of the old school film boys…..

ALMOST READY I hasten to add.

The truth is of course that it’s ‘horses for courses’…..Looking at the shots I posted yesterday it’s impossible to deny how liberating the move to digital photographic technology has been, But I am glad however that I’ve re-discovered some of what real film has to offer. Film is great, I love it. For some subjects and some situations it can do things that digital shots can’t…But, I’m not about to chuck the Nikon DSLR and Photoshop in the bin quite yet.

Anyway, I already know I’ve not become a ‘Vintage Photography Fashion Slave’…. First thing I did when I got back from the lab was fire up Photoshop on the digital scans of the Ilford film to get rid of some dust and scratches. My little WERRA 3  camera is fantastic to use, but at well over fifty years old she is a little dusty in her more intimate areas.  I reckoned she wouldn’t mind if digital technology stepped in to give her shots a bit of a rub-down.

I took too many shots for single post, so there’ll be a few more to come soon.

(Find out about The Racecourse Colliery here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Racecourse_Colliery  )

All Images Copyright Stuart Allan Hyde