(Previously: A few pictures from 2020: 3. The living)

I started developing my own black-and-white films at home a couple of years ago. There’s nothing quite like toiling through the process before emerging with a strip of negatives which you have to hang up and let dry, knowing there are pictures on them but being unable to tell what they actually are.

I’ve tried a few different types of film, and I’m most fond of Ilford FP4+. It’s relatively low-contrast, grainy (the accompanying text describes it as fine-grain but I think it must have been written in 1935), very attractive in sunlight due to a bit of sympathetic halation. I like a black-and-white photo with almost no solid black in it. I like it light, airy, and otherworldly. I haven’t ever been keen on reportage-y gritty, contrasty films like Kodak T-Max.

But this post is about the opposite of FP4+. Film Washi “Film S” is a film originally intended, apparently, for optical recording of film soundtracks. It’s not gritty or grainy. It’s a slow film, very smooth, high contrast, tricky to expose properly. The result is a fabulous texture in things like reflections and water surfaces as well as remarkable contrast and deepest blacks.

This is the view below the Westway at Paddington Basin. (All the photos here are from September to November 2020.) The bundles, the stains, the footprints, the textures on the uprights, the terrifying precision, the shiny car.

The building site at Whiteley’s, on Queensway, London W2.

A pedestrian corridor under the Westway.

The Thames, from the south bank at Nine Elms, looking toward Battersea. With a mudlarker searching on the beach.

A new, not-yet-filled retail unit at Paddington Basin.

A rubble disposal barge on the Thames outside the MI6 building. (This looks like quite a small boat, until you check the scale against the railings over to the right.)

(Previously: A few pictures from 2020: 2. Cinefilm. Following: A few pictures from 2020: 4. Deepest black)

In March I discovered that the jammed Minolta Auto-Rokkor 55mm lens I’d just cleaned and lubricated was lovely for portrait-distance shots. But I didn’t use it as much as I should have, because I also discovered I’d reassembled it with the wrong focus at infinity, so it was only good for portrait-distance shots. I never did fix that. Anyway, the nice duck above was one of those shots.

In May I discovered that, if you walked along the sketchy bit of land between the Westbourne Bridge and Royal Oak tube stations just beyond Paddington and peered down over the wall toward the tracks at the right time of day, you would find a family of foxes playing. I came back with a long lens (cheap Soviet Jupiter-11) and took these, a sequence of photos I really love. This was such a joy during a pretty bleak time.

I took the Jupiter lens again to the park in September to try to get a photo of magpies in flight. I do like magpies: they’re beautiful and they move in a very interesting way. They’re quick and sudden, they hop a lot, and they never exactly take off — they just hop and hop and, at the moment they want to take flight, suddenly the last hop turns out to have been liftoff.

There’s a superstition that it’s bad luck to see a lone magpie, but I decided a few years ago that I would always look at a magpie, and appreciate it.

But they’re really hard to photograph in motion, because they move in such unexpected ways. Here’s as good as I managed, a group giving way to an approaching dog:

A crow is simpler in motion. Here’s a crow taking off from the ground. Um, or I think it might actually be a raven. I am not very good at this. It’s much bigger than a magpie and takes a relatively long time to get airborne – but isn’t it fantastic!

(Previously: A few pictures from 2020: 1. Keep Going. Following: A few pictures from 2020: 3. The living)

A company called Silbersalz35 sells 35mm cartridges loaded with various sorts of motion-picture film, at a price including processing and scanning. The films have to be developed with the ECN-2 chemical process, so the inclusion of processing matters, as most still film processing labs don’t have ECN-2 facilities.

The Silbersalz 200T film is (I believe) Kodak Vision3 200T cinefilm. The T stands for tungsten: it’s colour-balanced for studio use and has a cold colour if used in natural light without filters, as I did.

I really like the look of these, but they are hard to display online next to digital photos. The typical bright, contrasty, heavily sharpened modern digital image makes these naturalistic images almost invisible when seen on the same page.

* * *

A tennis court next to the West Cross Route in west London. Closed when I took this in May. The buildings in the background are, I think, halls of residence for Imperial College under construction.

Scaffolding on Craven Road, near Paddington station.

Here’s the Bakerloo Line station entrance at Paddington in February. A couple of days later it will be closed permanently, to be replaced by something fancy at an unspecified later date.

This film is really nice for photographing people – I take a lot of photos of family but I’m reluctant to make them public online, so here’s one of me (taken by my wife) on the 15th of March, very close to the official UK it’s-all-over pandemic date.

Smithfield Market, in May, with construction for the Museum of London at the back.

Paddington Station in May. I felt very conspicuous taking this.

(Following: A few pictures from 2020: 2. Cinefilm)

At the start of January 2020, I hopped on a bus to the North Circular to take a couple of photos of bleak, slightly alarming empty urban scenes. Had I known how redundant that would seem later in the year, I might not have bothered. Though it may have been the last time I took a bus for fun.

A distinctive disused storage company in Neasden. Prominent from the North Circular, I’ve always rather liked it.

A rotting board path along the back of the industrial estate in Neasden Recreation Ground ultimately leads to a small pier in the reservoir. I used to go for walks by the reservoir here when I lived near Brent Cross, but I had no recollection of this path. Is the text sinister or welcoming? On the 5th of January I thought sinister, but from this end of the year it feels like an encouraging message from the future.

* * *

Just over two months later, we’re in west London in late March. The weather is bright and the shops are colourful and shiny. But this is bustling Portobello Road and it isn’t really supposed to look like this.

Other streets nearby are equally peaceful.

* * *

Getting photos in the park without lots of people in them is a trickier prospect. I’m very fond of the cluster of small oak trees in the bit of Hyde Park known as “the cockpit”, where a roundish ramped area slopes down to the Serpentine. This is a damp June day.

Or a sunny one in October.

* * *

One industry that seems to have been at least at normal levels all year is construction; here a worker adjusts some fencing on the “cube” building site next to Paddington station.