On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I am hoping to sit down at my computer and write about London today but I also have 90 other things I need to really also do so my apologies if I don’t get a chance to… Here are a few photos from Stephanie Dosen’s gig however that was at the Bush Hall in Shepherd’s Bush on Monday 28th February. (Today is a week ago since I went to London, gone so quickly!)

I will be uploading more but these were on the end of a roll of Delta 3200 and the next lot were snagged on Tri-X… Click on them to jump to Flickr and enlargements of them

If it’s not a migraine (before Christmas), a dodgy back (January) or just feeling sick as a dog (cough, sneezes, lethargy and dull headache – now) I’m typically ill before I go away and I can ill (no pun intended) afford time off work at the moment as I have so much to do. Hopefully an early night will cure much of my ills… Being single is great except for that bit where you get ill and when you need someone to just nip out and get some paracetamol or Lemsip!

Anyway aside from feeling dog rough (and looking a right dog too, blodshot eyes, grey pallour — for I am not an image of health and wellbeing…) I have acquired a new toy. Along with splashing out in some ways on the EOS 3 just after Christmas (not intentionally but shit happens) I have really come to love it. It’s one heck of a piece of kit. However it has one thing that it doesn’t do quite as well — discreet street photography.

The EOS 5 wasn’t a small camera either (not like the Rebels/three digit EOS series’) but it was I would say a quiet SLR. The EOS 3 has a noticeable (but not a terrible) mirror slap that immediately I aware of on the first frame I fired. This isn’t too much of a problem but with the size of the EOS 3 and the mirror slap, it’s not easy with a prime lens to snap a shot in the streets and carry on with people unaware the majority of the time. Sure if I had a 70-200 f/4L I would not have a problem, but I don’t — at least not yet. (Maybe by the end of the year.)

So the next best thing was a discreet good quality point and shoot which was cheap and unobtrusive with a good lens. Somehow and I cannot remember how I stumbled upon the Olympus Trip 35.

Photo Copyright mrlob (click on picture to open it in Flickr)

A solar powered camera that requires no battery, is constructed from metal, durable, accurate, automatic, small, rugged and of course can shoot a mean roll of Tri-X.  It has a 40mm f/2.8 Zuiko lens, and automatic aperture control and shutter speed between 1/40sec and 1/200sec depending on lighting conditions metered by the selenium meter. Not too bad for a camera launched in 1968. (My example was made in October 1970.)

It’s basically a good solid point and shoot with a bit of a rangefinder capability on it too.

Photo Copyright twentyhertz (click on picture to open it in Flickr)

Now I’m not for one minute thinking that this will take pictures reliably that are anywhere near as good as some of results from my SLRs (notably the EOS 5 and 3) but by all accounts it doesn’t appear to be useless either. Ken Rockwell’s site has some interesting information on the Trip 35 and how it stacked up to his EOS 5D and 17-40 f/4L lens… Should I mention at this stage the Trip cost me less than a tenner with postage?

I’m off to London on Sunday for a couple of days and I’ll have the EOS 3 and Trip 35 in tow but something tells me that the EOS 3 is going to be resigned to the night shots underneath Westway and that during the daytime the Trip will be champion… I’ve already loaded it up with one roll of Tri-X, which to me seems its natural film. That said, here’s a great photo taken with this little camera:

Zabriskie (Flickr)

Of course this is assuming I still don’t feel like a bag of shite come Sunday.

I’ve had a right busy week me. It started on Saturday which I will go onto, then Sunday I put together my new wardrobe. On Monday and Tuesday I roamed the seafront with my camera snapping with glee and painted two walls of four of my front room which is good progress. Last night admittedly I was creamed* and tonight I have just sat about watching telly and cleaning up. And now to update my blog.

If you’ve been living under a rock, or just generally not heard any news – you might be aware of a ship called the Ice Prince that sunk off the Dorset coast shedding a lot of its cargo of timber. Long and short of it is that a wood slick was heading east for the English coastline and it so happens that my dear town of Worthing with its five miles of coastline was hit the ‘hardest’ with timber stretching as far as the eye can see and further still.

I had a bit of a ‘heads up’ on this as I put the press release out on the worthing.gov.uk website on Friday (not that I’d be the only one to know of course even at that stage) so I duly headed off down to the seafront Saturday morning. Took a number of snaps before the wood really came in. You only have to do a search on Flickr for Worthing and order it by most recent to see that practically every photo for nearly a week has been of the ‘wood slick’ for photos tagged with Worthing.

As such I got this shot of the pier and a few planks (no not me) that were starting to come in early on Saturday before the beach was closed and well the scenes you can see from Flickr occurred:

Taken on the EOS 3 with XP2 at ISO 400 and the EF 50mm f/1.8 II. Worthing Pier is in the background. I also got rather wet taking this photo. My bottom for one (bending down to angle the tripod’s elevation) and feet the other (my trainers I was wearing have one or fifteen holes…)

A deserted house on the foreshore at West Worthing. This one took a while for me to get right by which time I had it framed and the gate just right (which I didn’t move… Just worked it as-is) an estate agent said to me “You need a hand there?” — I said no no, just taking photos. He thought I was interested in the property (which I was but not to buy) and explained the problem with squatters.

Again taken with the EF 50mm (great lens for the money – nothing basically.)

And finally a Holga-esque inspired homeage to a photo in January ’08’s Black & White Photography magazine:

Worthing Palms

This came out much better than expected. Again the EF 50mm at work. (Eschewed the wide angle the past couple of days.) The light was fading fast but this was a cracking sunset on the foreshore at Worthing and the palms so still in the winter sun with a striking shadow just caught me whilst everyone was fixated on the washed in wood. This was probably taken with a slow 1/10th sec shutter speed if I remember rightly and it was a dead difficult job to get enough DOF while keeping the camera steady (caught without my tripod as I was walking home from work) — in the end the slight blur has given it a fantastic quality. This has been blown up to 16 x 12 and I am pleased as punch with it. For the living room no less.

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So there you go. All shot with Ilford XP2 Super 400 C41 process B&W 135 film on Canon EOS 3 with EF 50mm f1.8 II lens. The XPS film does induce some grain but it gives a bit of quirky character I find in these. A very enjoyable and creative week photographically.

Check out my Flickr page for more shots and a growing catalogue!