JamesT

No not a letter from the Mikado. But four rolls of Ferrania P30 pre-ordered many months ago. Just hope there will be enough light to try it tomorrow.

Under the stairs.

The regular trails are quite usual, I'm only about 20 miles from Heathrow. It's the gap made by something lower that caught my eye.

There's a Moskva 5 in the post between the Ukraine & the UK with my address on it right now.

Suddenly there is depth, which wasn't there against the flat screen background.

Never seen anything quite like this before. Bit noisy as the old 400D was the first camera with a suitable lens attached that I could lay my hands on.

A future apple pie (or ten).

I thought the Rotunda was "for the chop" when I left Birmingham about 10 years ago. Did it get saved at the last minute or is it just awaiting the dynamite?

A lot of the Soviet-era cameras were copies or evolutions of the high-end German models from Leica and Zeiss, as a result you have most of the know-how at a fraction of the price.

The one constant in a swirl of changes around it. I suspect that in some parts of the city a whole generation of buildings came and went between the mid-70's and the mid teens. Alas, colour prints (and negatives) of that era tend to fade unless they have been kept very carefully, but very worth preserving.

I think it would be of interest to see some of them as then and now pairs.

... by a swallow. Not the sharpest image ever. I didn't notice the swallow until looking through the jpegs to see which ones to process.

Nice. If that's where I think it is (from one of the bridges by the indoor arena), I can remember when there was just a BIG hole on the right, and semi-derelict warehouses on the left.

This article about Minolta's lens design philosophy may be of interest to some of the vintage lens enthusiasts here: http://www.dyxum.com/columns/other/Historical_perspective_Minolta_lens_design_philosophy.asp I saw it via a comment on the Minolta Manual Focus Flickr Group.

I scan the negatives with VueScan (to 16-bit tiff), then most of the processing is in RawTherapee, but I use the gimp first to clone out any seriously intrusive dirt on the images (there was for example a nasty bit right down the middle of the water on the first image). Generally the PP is pretty basic -- typically a gradient filter to darken the sky a little, some local contrast enhancement and a tweak of the tone curve to bring the ends of the histogram close to black and white.