Gloucester Old Shots

Class 26 Diesel-Electric Locomotive

I must say, I felt much happier loading the recently serviced FED (below) with a cheap and cheerful Colour Film than the (even cheaper) Black & White roll I'd tested the camera with. Don’t get me wrong, I like monochrome well enough, in fact I like it a lot in the hands of really good photographers. But for myself I'll continue to use powerful editing software for the less colourful stuff, particularly when it helps papers over the cracks of some of my poorer photographic efforts.

The scans from this Fujicolor 200 film, exposed as they were through a relatively inexpensive 1950’s Collapsible Lens, are perhaps not the best quality images all told. The colours are somewhat muted, slightly washed-out I'd say. They have, for want of a better word, that 'vintage' look that's so popular in photography now, and yet somehow they look realer to me than the hyper-real images from my phone camera.

This is partly a nostalgia thing of course, because this is what photographs looked like in the golden age of cheap Point and Shoot cameras and High Street Kiosk developing (ask your parents!). I think it also reflects something we’ve become all-too familiar with, the tendency for phone cameras to deliver a level of ultra-contrast and colour that's certainly attractive, but doesn't necessarily represent what we actually see with our eyes/brain.

Concrete Mural by Joyce Pallot and Henry Collins
Sainsbury Store, Gloucester

As we know, even the most expensive film emulsions can struggle to reproduce what we actually see, but we also know that camera phones come with all manner of image-enhancing software, designed to produce the perfect exposure under a wide variety of lighting conditions.

Unfortunately there's rarely an option to turn these 'enhancements' off, so what appears on the screen may well be pleasing to the eye but it's rarely what we actually see in reality, and of course the temptation to tweak, edit, and enhance digital images even more is something that few of us can resist.

Class 37 Diesel-Electric Locomotive

The main reason I was keen to load the FED with colour film was a long anticipated day out with friends at a Heritage Railway in the Cotswolds. A day spent trundling up and down between Broadway and Gotherington Station on the Gloucester Warwickshire Steam Railway, vintage camera in hand, hauled on this occasion by vintage Diesel traction rather than 'fire risky' Steam Locomotives.

Now I’m certainly not a Rail enthusiast, but my goodness, don’t these old-fangled locomotives look great captured on old-fangled film! A fact that seemed to be lost on the many enthusiasts filming the action on the day with high-end DSLR's. Pretty much everyone had a camera in tow, but as far as I could tell I was the only one shooting 'era-appropriate' film on the day, which of course marked me out as more of a casual tourist than serious Rail buff. So the question is, were those sideways glances looks of envy, or pity!...

Other great photo opportunities were taken/missed throughout the weekend in Gloucester, and during a walk on the sunny Stroudwater Navigation from Nailsworth to Stroud.