A couple of days ago I discovered on my desk a couple of sleeves of 120 film. These turned out to be from a small set I made nearly 2 years ago in the Borromean Islands in Lago Maggiore.  They are all 6x7 shots taken on Kodak Portra 400 (it’s what all the cool kids use, you know) using the Voigtlander Bessa III 667 (probably the best fixed lens medium format camera ever made - certainly the last, along with its 667w close relative).

Portra 400 - photography’s answer to Dad Dancing.

Enough blabla, here’s some pictures.

This is just a post about some photos. The Italian border town of Ponte Tresa is but a hop and a skip from my front door. It's not really a tourist attraction, although it gets a lot of visitors on market day. It's basically a working border town, a bit shabby, chaotic, noisy, but all in a good, characterful way. It contrasts quite a bit with its clean, tidy (but also rather run-down) Swiss counterpart. I may have mentioned this before...

Anyway, the photos: just from a hour or so wandering around on Saturday morning while waiting for Saturday morning stuff to get down. They're all "fake film", processed in Alien Skin Exposure X2, which I really do quite like. I could even stretch to the heresy of thinking that it might even be better than Nik Silver EFX for black & white, but since I don't really have a clue about black & white, I won't.

This first batch has the Exposure X2 Kodak Tri-X 400 preset applied, slightly tweaked.







... and this set has the Kodak Portra 400NC preset applied.

So, I've been have a bit of a play with Adobe Spark, which offers the opportunity, it says here, to "Easily create beautiful images, videos, and web pages that help tell your own story". Sounds promising. Here's my first attempt.



The complete lack of any kind of manual is a bit irritating - how hard could it be to provide something ? - but it seems all quite straightforward. It doesn't appear possible to customise themes much, if at all, for example by change text font or colour, but I suppose that is to save me from making horrendous style decisions.

Maybe I'll do some more...

Every once in a while there comes along a photo which will just stick in my head. Some of them I didn't even actually take - there's a fantastic shot I have from New Zealand 15 years ago which I didn't actually take - but in the case I did.

The location is the Antarctic Sound, 2 weeks ago. There was an absolutely insane storm blowing, with unearthly lighting that I'll never manage to convince anybody isn't Photoshopped. The ship was being blown through an expanse of tabular icebergs, providing non-stop shots of a lifetime, provided you could find somewhere to wedge yourself in to avoid getting flattened by the wind or thrown over the side by the motion.

Most people had, sensibly, retired to somewhere sheltered with things to hang on to, and sturdy paper bags nearby. We hung on. And then this happened - an iceberg, loaded with frantic Adelie penguins careened crazily past. There cannot have been more than 30 seconds to grab a shot, but for once I kept my wits about me and got four. Here's one of them. Ok, yeah, it isn't absolutely pin sharp at 100%, but I'll take it.