Now the weather is looking a bit nicer, in the office we’re trying to arrange a weekly photo walk on Thursday. This week, Paul, Alex and I wandered down the hill to the dockside, and back via the Trenchard Street car park. I was shooting film, and these are my favourites from the roll.
Geek info: Canon AE-1 Program with Canon FD 28mm f/2.8 wide-angle lens, Ilford FP4+ 125 film and red filter.
First we started by the @Bristol complex, including Lloyds bank. It’s actually a circular-section building, but standing at the centre of the circle and using a wide lens it actually looks quite flat.
Moving on to the docks themselves…
The fairly crude 1970s lens I was using gives heaps of distortion when you don’t aim it levelly at something. This building was quite distorted so I decided to over-correct it and exaggerate the distortion in the other direction. The sides of the building are actually parallel in my photo, but it looks like it gets wider towards the top. And check out that bus…
Compositionally, I think this is my favourite of the day. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get the shades of grey quite to my liking. When I boosted the contrast of the ground, water and sky the sun disappeared and became invisible. For me, the sun is an important element in this picture, so I had to sacrifice some contrast to keep both it and a little detail on the seated couple.
Once again, the wide-angle lens comes into its own with these views from the top level of the Trenchard Street car park.
All in all, a pleasant day and a fun walk. Lots more of these over Spring and Summer, I hope!
Jonathan Gazeley 