Week 31 continued: More Mamiya

My second (and final) roll through the borrowed Mamiya RB67 was another Fujifilm Neopan Acros.I enjoyed using the camera, but it is just too big for the kind of photography that I enjoy. Even the action of getting it in and out of my bag was difficult. The focusing knobs, mirror reset lever and other extremities all felt vulnerable to being snagged or sheared off. While it would make a great ‘set piece’ camera, installed on a tripod, in a studio where the subject comes to it, it’s just not too practical for the photographic flaneur that I imagine myself to be.

I did lug it about on a couple of local errands at the weekend though and as you can see, the results are very nice. Most of the pictures feature the wind turbine at the nearby Wanlip sewerage plant. Severn Trent, the water company that runs the plant, have installed one of these turbines at each of their main sites in the East Midlands. Apparently, it’s the biggest model that can be installed on land in the UK, with 50m long blades and a total height of 132m.

It’s only been around for 18 months or so but has become a local landmark. There was of course opposition to the construction because of the visual impact it might have, and it’s true that it can be seen from far and wide, with a feeling that it looms over some streets in Rothley.

And that omnipresence is what I was looking to catch in these pictures. Wherever I went at the weekend, it always seemed to be watching me…

On the same roll, I also shot a couple of night time long exposures. It’s something that I like to shoot and have done so a lot digitally for this set over on Flickr. I’ve never really done the same thing on film too often, but after our street had it’s old, orange sodium lighting swapped out for LEDs, it meant that if I were to use the Mamiya to shoot more pictures for this set, I wouldn’t have to carry it too far.

And finally, I took a couple of pictures of a house that I remember being abandoned when I was a kid. There’s now just part of one wall that remains and I’ve driven by it for 30+ years thinking that one day I’d visit and take a picture…

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Gubbins:

Mamiya RB67, 127mm f/3.8, Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100, Ilfotec HC for 6 minutes. Scanned at home on an Epson V500.

This was roll 50 of the year! For the previous 49, click here…