Quick Blast: Alexandra & Moel Tryfan Quarries

After a busy day at work the weather man said it would be a decent evening for photography, so how could I refuse? With little time to wander round I headed somewhere easy – Moel Tryfan. I always like going to Fron, it’s a strange little village but with so much interesting stuff surrounding it! Anyway, I got to the quarries and it was still spitting rain, but there was some great light from the low sun over Caernarfon so I got snapping.

I only made a quick pass through the pits and out to the top of Alexandra quarry and back again before running out of light but it did allow a few half decent photos and a good idea of what to see next time I’m in the area.

As an aside I was most gutted to see that the Vron Quarry Mill has been demolished. It was still standing last time I visited the area, and I’d hoped to get a snap or two on this visit. Still it’s that ever changing nature of these places that draws me back. Anyway, on with the pictures!

More procrastination!

Sorry, sorry, sorry! I am ashamed I have been away for so long. Basically I bought a project car – meaning all the days where I’d normally be out with a camera were taken up wielding tools and swearing at my new purchase, then I damaged my old ankle injury again which further hindered things, but anywho, the car is in the paint shop and I’m back to hobbling about with the camera!

I managed to make it to Maenofferen in Blaenau in March, though I clean forgot to post about it here (another sorry!), followed by an unsuccessful venture in Golwern due to manky weather and then just the other night I decided to head over to Trefor to watch the sun go down, so here’s a selection.

As always, prints are available at http://www.quarryscapes.co.uk

Dinorwic on Ektar

The last couple of rolls of Ektar seem to have missed the processor!

Here’s a few examples. Have to say I’m loving this film under blue skies, not so much under my favourite conditions of cloud cover with sun spots though, it always comes out flat and doesn’t pick out the sunspots at all. Not to worry, I have Velvia for that, and the newly acquired S3 of course 🙂

Adox CMS20: Like T-max on steroids!

Adox CMS20 is an ultra fine grained document film, which boasts not only invisible grain but also an ultra high resolution of around 400lp/mm, that’s pretty damned imoressive! Why isn’t it popular then? Because it’s slow. Glacier slow.

However Caffenol can change that! Caffenol can up the useable speed to 160, Provided you like the look if gives which I have decided is T-max on steroids! You get the same dark and deep shadows with cris detailed highlights that you get with Kodak’s own wonder film, but you get none of the grain and a lot more detail!

To try it out I took t to Dinorwig on a forum meet up, and it didn’t disappoint. These are all straight from the scanner without any dust removal. (The dosnside of a film like this is the dust is bitingly obvious when there’s no grain to mask it!)

It works incredibly well in flat light, bringing out tons of detail that would otherwise be murky. The climbers were shot handheld at 1/125 on a 135mm lens at f2.8necessary I’m afraid, otherwise there would be a whole lot more detail available in the rock. The slate fence and the compressed air pipe both show amazing texture detail!

The film has a fantastic dynamic range, well beyond my scanner’s capability which is a shame, and means grads will be a necessity for landscape work.

The recipe for 300ml:

Coffee 5g; Decahydrate Soda Crystals 10g; Ascorbic Acid 0.7g.

Development time 21 minutes, constant agitation for 1 minute then every 5 minutes.

This stuff fixes nearly instantly – if you use rapid fixer at 1:4 strength then it probably would be instant i na fresh mix. I’m using a seasoned 1:6 mix and it still fixes in around 10 seconds flat! The fixer is turned bright pink, which goes after a while back in the bottle.

So there you go, a new film to play with, capable of remarkable enlargements when done optically, (not so if scanned, film scanners suck) and offering remarkable detail in a 35mm negative!

Treforus

Treforus is an unfinished and abandoned village in Cwm Ystradllyn. It was begin in the 1850s to accomodate the workforce of the Gorseddau Quarry – a pathetic excuse for slate but nonetheless investors stumped up a massive amount of cash which was promtly squandered on projects like the satellite mill at Ynys y Pandy and Treforus.

I didn’t get long up here, less than half an hour, but managed to squeeze off a few interesting shots in that time. Here are a couple from the LX5. Film shots to follow.