Steel City: Olympus OM2n Rollei Retro 80s review
You can see how the trees look almost white in the foreground, testament to the almost infrared qualities of the film and gives a beautiful tone to the shadowed parts of the scene - I realise it gets repetetive me trotting out the line 'my new fave film/camera/whatever" but in this case - I actually mean it! I'm seriously considering just buying 100ft of this film and just shooting this for the foreseeable future!
I had a meeting at Sheffield Uni recently (not about photography - i do other stuff too you know)! so there I was a few floors up in a meeting room prattling on as is my way and all the while my eye was being drawn out the window and across the street to what I can only describe as a gigantic borg cube doing a relatively crap impression of being a building... all i wanted to do was get outside and shoot some photos of it!
These were taken a few weeks ago now but what with the lag in shooting a whole bunch of film, sending it off, getting it back and then scanning it's taking me a while to work through the images so I'm only now getting chance to share these with you.
I remember when this building opened - it was the pop music museum or something daft like that, anyway suffice to say it didn't last very long and it ended up being boarded up for a while but it's a pub now which of all the possible uses for a building is a pretty bloody good one in my book
This weeks blog is courtesy of my lovely Olympus OM2n with a zuiko 28mm wide angle lens shooting some Rollei Retro 80s film which I bought from the lovely folks at Nick & Trick Photo https://ntphotoworks.com they also developed the film for me and I think you'll agree that they did a pretty awesome job - go check them out!
I think that the film works best in high contrast scenes as can be seen in the image above - the lovely deep, rich dark tones - yum!
I flipping love these images!! it was a beautiful bright spring day with hardly a cloud in the sky, conditions that were clearly ideally suited to the Rollei Retro 80s film - I love the tonality and depth of the shadows, I've done very little/nothing to these images in terms of post processing so these are basically 'as is' (or for the pedants out there 'as the scanner sees them' but you know what I mean) I am definitely going to get a few of these developed in a proper dark room and make some prints - i like them that much.... if only I had the time.....
well done to any eagle eyed readers who said "that's in Leeds not Sheffield" yes I was left with a couple of frames on this roll of film which i used up on a subsequent visit to Leeds, very pleased with this shot in particular
Who knew that the Tyrell corporation had it's HQ in Leeds? ;)