哈蘇不賴的 HASSELBLAD 哈蘇XPAN2隨便拍拍

Hello, Alex here. And apparently we're doing one of those videos. So yeah, in the last couple of years, I've been travelling a lot more than I used to. Mostly around Ireland and the UK, but also a bit of Western Europe. Just places I've never really been, just to kind of branch out. You know, I wasn't able to travel much in recent years for fairly obvious reasons. So when I go to these places, I take lots of photos, I take a few videos. So without a real script, let's see how we get on. I am actually from Kent. I am English. And from time to time, we go on family trips back home to see friends and family who are still over there. I brought one camera for the trip, because it wasn't a photography trip. It was just a family trip. The Hasselblad Expand 2. I decided against bringing the 4x5, even though that was my original plan. And I brought a whole breadth of film to cover pretty much any possible situation. And even then, I still had to buy one roll of film when it was over there. Aside from that, I didn't really record anything at the family events and whatever that we held when we were over there. So pretty much every evening is just food, dogs, a couple of cats, depending on who we were visiting, barbecue or beautiful cooked food, and general merriment and enjoyment. But yeah, this video is just about the photography that I did. The hardest part of this entire trip was getting up at 3.30. And though it was very difficult for me, I'm pretty sure Trixie felt it harder than the rest of us. My mom doesn't like flying, which is totally fine. So we drove to the port to get the ferry across to Fishguard over in Wales. And we arrived stupid early, because, you know, if you have to be there an hour early, you have to be there three hours early. So we hung around in the lounge for a bit before eventually queuing to board, where we saw all the local strays in the port queue up waiting for the coffee shop to open and get their own breakfast. Honestly, sailing wasn't a big deal. I quite enjoy it. And it had the added bonus of meaning that my film had no chance of being X-rayed. We were actually the first people to board on account of being so ridiculously early. And even though I didn't really sleep the night before, I don't really do naps. So I just inhaled an unhealthy amount of coffee, loaded up a roll of Superior Premium 400 and just went, did a bit of shooting around the ship. And honestly, the morning light was quite nice. So a lot of these shots came out really well. Once we landed in Fishguard, we started our five-ish hour drive across the breadth of the UK, which ended up taking eight hours because of all the car crashes we came across. Once we eventually arrived, we checked in at the hotel and went to visit my uncle, who had adopted a second dog since we had last visited. He wasn't too sure at first, but it only took a minute for me to make friends and he was pretty comfortable with me pretty quickly. After some absolutely incredible fajitas my aunt made, it was like 9 p.m., so it was time to turn in after such a ridiculously long day. We started the second day off with a trip to a car boot sale, or I guess trunk sale? I don't know if that kind of counts as a flea market because it's out of cars and not just market stalls. Whatever. And the light was very bright. It was a bright day, but it was like a thin overcast haze of clouds, so the light was pretty muggy and horrible, so I didn't really have high hopes for these photos because I've said it before, I really don't like color-negative film on overcast days. And in the end, I just decided to go F16, hyperfocal, and just blast most of the roll. I'm honestly not really happy with most of these pictures, and I had to do a lot of work in post to get them looking OK, but that's kind of my own fault. When we actually got to Whitstable itself, we saw some kite surfers near where we parked, so I scrambled down the beach, threw my bag on the ground, started just blasting with all three lenses, the 30, the 45 and the 90, metering by eye, because it was kind of a hard scene to meter, all things considered. And yeah, I didn't do a great job. I underexposed some of the pictures, and even like that half a stop of underexposure was way too much, and some of these pictures had to be turned black and white to be able to actually salvage something from the negs. They weren't overly thin, they just looked really bad after inversion. I kind of wonder if Superior 400 is like Pro 400H, where it's like barely a 400-speed film and it looks way better at 200, but I don't know, I might have to test that at some point. The main thing is that a lot of these pictures didn't really come out well, but at least my favorite compositions are the ones that did. As it came around to noon, we got one of those rare sunny British days. So when I finished up the roll of Superior 400, I loaded a roll of Cinestill 50D, which I rated at 80 for reasons. I just did some street photography and landscapes and boat photography around Whitstable and then into Favisham afterwards. This was only my third roll of 50D, and I was still trying to learn how to get used to color grading these vision films. So it took a bit of work, but that kind of muted pastel look worked out very nicely for a lot of these shots and I'm really happy with the results. That said, I'd probably just go with Ektar most of the time in future, because I do prefer that higher saturation look or just shoot slide. From there, we made the epic two-week journey to Herne Bay, or so it felt with the traffic and the roadworks, and I had one frame left of Cinestill 50D, so I shot that at the pier and then loaded up a roll of Kodak's Ektachrome 100. I've shot a bunch of slide film in the XPan and I know that the internal meter is good, but I was really worried about ruining these shots because I had a lot of sky in them and I was using the 90 a lot, so I decided to rate the film at 125, which was pretty much just a placebo thing. I mean, how you meter is probably going to vary by or change your exposure by like half a stop or more, so a third of a stop in the internal meter is really just to keep me calm and placate myself. At one point on the promenade, I came across like a biker meet-up, which was pretty cool, and although none of them were OK with their having their portraits taken, which is totally fine, a few of them did allow me to take pictures of their bikes and kind of their backs while they were sitting down, so that was pretty nice, and I'm pretty happy with how these came across. The chrome looks really good on Ektachrome. Then again, we went to my uncle and aunt, had an absolutely incredible barbecue, and then afterwards, just to kind of burn off some calories, I went for a short walk just to finish off the roll of Ektachrome. We wanted to spend a day in Canterbury, because that was our local big city, or big city, relatively speaking, when we lived over there, and we all had our own things we wanted to do, so once we arrived, we split off in our own various directions. The main thing I wanted to do was go and see the cathedral, because, I mean, architecture, 30mm, panorama, ultra-wide, yeah, I wanted to shoot the cathedral. When I got there, I was able to take a meter reading and see that it was way too dark, though. I had finished the Ektachrome at this point, so I could load anything, but I didn't want to load the Cinestill 800T. I thought that might be a bit cheesy for, you know, church architecture, and the T-Max 3200, not really great, because I wanted to shoot color, so I went to the Canterbury camera center and picked up, amongst other things, a roll of Portrait 800, a pack of Ilfred 8x10 paper, and a small pack of ID11, because at this point, I hadn't actually used ID11 or D76, and I wanted to give it a go. On the way back to the cathedral, I came across this kind of like underground passageway under one of the major roundabouts, which was pretty neat, a nice easy way to get, you know, from one side to the other without having to cross like six sets of traffic lights. Took some photos, and then took some street portraits and general bits and pieces on the way back to the cathedral. In hindsight, that might not have been the best, because it meant I ran out of film when I was in the cathedral, but I think these pictures came out quite well. I couldn't really decide how to shoot the main cathedral hall itself, so I did both. Vertical panorama with the 30mm, and then three landscape panoramas stacked on top of each other to make a giant square shot with a huge field of view. The stitching wasn't perfect, because I was doing it handheld without a tripod, but still, I really, really liked that shot. When I was walking around the back rooms and like the undercroft, if you want to call it that, I met this older Japanese guy, I think his name is Tsubasa, who was shooting with an older Panasonic, a Micro Four Thirds model, and his English was very broken, you know, props, I don't speak any Japanese at all, and we were just about able to figure out that he was asking me if he could like follow me, and if I could judge his pictures, because he saw the camera and my camera bag, and probably thought I knew a bit more, and I was happy to help him out, he took some really nice pictures in there, and shooting digital, he was able to crank the ISO and do a little bit more than I could, I mean, you haven't got OIS in an X-Pan, but he got some nice pictures, and I got some pretty nice pictures as well, mostly just the architectural stuff, but also this one really nice picture of a family by one of the stained glass windows, like I said, I ran out of film when I was in the cathedral, so the Portra 800 was done, and I needed to decide what to load next, the weather wasn't incredible, so I decided against loading my Addox Color Mission 200, and hold that off for a hopefully sunnier day, because we still had a few days, so I loaded up my Fomapan 100, this was actually my first time shooting Fomapan 100, and in the end, it actually worked out well, as you'll see, I did a little bit of street photography with the Fomapan 100 on the way back to the car, but not before making a quick mandatory stop at Greg's, our next stop was Folkestone, where we wanted to go to the harbor and walk along the beach, and I wanted to go to one of the camera shops down there, they had some really nice rare kit, like a 5 lens Pentacon 6 kit, and an old quarter plate camera from like 1910s, from the 1910s, which was in absolutely beautiful condition, I didn't pick that up, but I picked up a Kenro mini flash that I want to use with the X-Pan, as well as a roll of Kodak Goat 100, and an EL Nikkor 75mm F4 from my enlarger, because the 80 that I have was a bit crusty, but you know, that one was free, walking through the harbor, I came across this scene with all these boats and this one house on the top of the hill, and I spent genuinely three or four minutes just stepping back and forth to find the right composition with the 30mm, just looking through the viewfinder, here I really like the clouds and the masts in the top right, because they kind of balance the bit of sky above the horizon, so it doesn't feel too empty in the top right, and everything is just really nicely balanced with that boat in the lower right foreground, and again, that house and hill in the top left, and honestly, this might be my favorite shot from the trip, even though it's black and white, it came out so super nicely, Fomapan 100 with a good lens and developed well is not a bad film, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, Fomapan 400 though, yeah, it's a bit crusty, whatever, Fomapan 100 is pretty good, although we weren't going to get the boat tour at the White Cliffs of Dover, I decided that once I finished the Fomapan 100, I would load the Adox Color Mission from on the 90mm lens and take a picture of the cliffs from the harbor as best we could see them, just to have some memory of the cliffs themselves, albeit from afar, after that, we went back to my uncle and aunt again, and I make a pretty good carbonara, so instead of them cooking for us every day, although they were still hosting, I made sure to cook for everyone, and it was pretty good, the next day was all about Dover and Dover Castle, the architecture of the castle itself, as well as the whole complex and the way everything was laid out, was pretty interesting to see from a historical and technical perspective, and it was nice to see all of the preserved World War II equipment, like the artillery cannons on site, I had heard of Operation Dynamo, but I didn't really learn about it in school, because I moved from the UK to Ireland before I really learned about it in history class over there, and you bet that I was not going to learn about it in a six-person class in a 55-student school, you know, with the principal in rural Ireland in the late 90s, so actually learning about it on site where everything happened or the base of operations from which things happened, was pretty cool, it helped kind of, I don't know, make it more real, you know, it's easy to dissociate from historical events, but when you go to these places, it's pretty nice. One of the things we did do was the tour of the tunnels underground, but it was too dark for regular photography, even if I loaded the T-Max 3200, because the X-Pan lenses top out at F4, and you can't use a flash, so I couldn't take any pictures, but it was really nice to see, you know, the way of life and go through the various scenarios that they had play out down there, like bombings and doing surgery in the dark, that kind of thing. I would like to go back there one day maybe and shoot it with a much faster lens and just push some black-and-white film through a ridiculous speed. Either way, it was nice to go, even if I don't have any film photos from the inside. And then, like I said, the castle itself was pretty cool. I couldn't take some of the shots that I wanted to, like some of them were half a second or one second braced against a wall because I was shooting 200-speed film. But at the same time, it was nice to get something, and I would say this role overall is probably, on average, my favorite role from the trip. On the way back, we stopped at this farm shop, which is kind of like a permanent farmer's market, you know, like an established shop thing selling local produce, and we stocked the hell up with lots of bags of goodies because we're paying for the ferry ticket for the car anyway, so why not fill the car up? We got some really nice stuff that we enjoyed on the way back and then obviously in the weeks afterwards when we got home. The last thing we did that evening was stop at the old chipper or chippy, the place that I got my last meal before we moved back to Ireland. And, yeah, the portion size nearly killed me, but the food was so, so good. If you haven't had, like, chips wrapped in paper, newspaper, it's an experience. The last morning was pretty chill, and we just hung out at a coffee shop for a few hours before eventually setting off for our five-ish hour trip back to Fishguard. Once we arrived, it was blue hour, so I loaded the Kodak T-Max P3200, and I just climbed down to the water where I saw this one boat bobbing back and forth, and it was bobbing quite aggressively, so I couldn't decide whether the one shot I took was going to be OK because I was shooting at, like, a 15th, and that was still two stops underexposed. So I took a second shot, and just to make it different, I shot one panoramic and one normal 35mm format in vertical, and I definitely prefer the panorama here. It worked way better. Once we boarded and got settled into the lounge, I pulled the old 'Oh, sorry, my mother forgot her insulin in the car. May I go and get it, please?' with no bag and just an X-pan in my hands, so I was able to take a picture of an old board down in the lower deck after it was closed so there would be no one there. Even though it was late, I decided to hold out until we got home to sleep and not nap on the boat, so I went out, took advantage of the fast film, and went to take some shots out and about on the ship itself. Only Ilford Kodak would just make the T-Max 3200 in 120 format, please. I know that's not happening because the Eliris team told me, but, you know, I'll still take every opportunity to hope and wish for it. Once we got home, both Trixie and our neighbors, Cat Regan, were very happy to see me, and when I got inside, Remy was half asleep on the sofa, curled little feetsies, and she didn't really care that we were gone or that we were back. She just kind of looked over at me and then went back to sleep, so I retaliated in my own way by taking a picture of her, and the noise of the X-Pan did actually disturb her, so, ha, that's what you get. I know I said before that I didn't really think anyone would care to watch this video, and it's fine if people don't, you know, I'm not one of the big personalities, but this was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. It's not easy to talk in front of the camera, but it just kind of flowed a bit more easily when I don't have to worry about tech specs and development agitation patterns and whatever, just talk about the time. The reason I'm doing this, mostly, is because there is a trip I want to do a video on, and I can use these kind of less important trips that I've just randomly gone on without a video in mind, just for practice, I guess. Looking back, I'm surprised at how many of my favorite pictures from this trip were shot with the 90 and just how much I used it, because I really don't use it a lot, but when I do, I get really nice pictures with it. I'm more of a two-lens person when I travel, 20-35 and a 50, 28 and a 58, 30 and 45. I'm not really a man for bringing three lenses, because choice paralysis is a real problem for me a lot of the time, but when I do bring the 90, I get really nice pictures with it, and I think on reflection for making this video, I should probably force myself to bring it more. Maybe I can go 30 and 90 instead of 30 and 45. That might be worth something. I don't know. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this video in some way or another, and stay safe, and bye-bye for now. If you don't already, follow me on Instagram at Shaka1277 for new pictures everyday. 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