Snow

Something a little bit different to my last set of photos today, a little bit darker, a little bit moodier, certainly not so many bluebells. We had a few days of snow earlier this year and on the first day when it was quite heavy, my parents and I went for an evening walk up to the old cemetery near where we live. I don't know why. It was Mum's idea. I've tried not to make the pictures too creepy but, well, we were in a cemetery close to sunset so there was only so much I could do. Please enjoy this very small collection of uncharacteristically gothic pictures. Right up until the last one that I took on the walk back home. That one is slightly less gothic.

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Bodmin Beacon.

The beacon itself, which you can see through the trees there, is a war monument, but the area surrounding it is actually a protected nature reserve. I've lived in this town all my life and yet I had never really gone up there before this day so I had no idea how nice it actually is. Isn't that always the way? I guess you're never a tourist in your own town. Or maybe it's just me who is completely oblivious to my own surroundings...

There are lots of beautiful wild flowers everywhere but the real star of this post is coming up at the end so get ready...

We found a beetle!!! I was taking pictures of flowers when my dad found this little guy. He called me over and picked the beetle up on the end of a stick and then very nicely stood there, holding and twisting the stick around for a good long while so that I could get some good angles. Honestly, it made my whole day. I took fifteen pictures of the beetle. It was great.

Look at him go!

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Bodmin Moor on film.

Can you believe it, this is actually the first roll of colour film I've ever shot?* We always used black and white film at school, and I got my first digital camera when I was pretty young (a cute little thing that didn't even use a memory card so if the batteries fell out, which they often did, I would lose all the pictures I had taken) so, although I'm sure I took a few colour pictures when I was younger, this is the first roll all of my own. And I shot it twice...

This roll of film sat in my camera for three years. Three whole years. I took a few frames while I was at uni but last year I decided it was time to finally use it up. Only when I got to the end it kept going. And kept going. Eventually my dad took the camera into the coat cupboard at home to take a look and discovered that, as we had feared, the film had never been wound on in the first place.

For three years this film had sat in my dad's old Olympus OM-10, the camera I had used and loved so much at school, and I had not actually taken a single photograph on it.

If it hadn't been so funny I would have been furious.

Luckily, I have a good sense of humour. So when we went back out to Minions for another walk around Bodmin Moor a few months ago I decided it might be time to finally, actually, use up this film. I took a lot of pictures (and there were a lot of jokes about hoping the film was wound on this time) and these are honestly the only ones that are any good, but I don't think that's too bad going. I'm pretty pleased with them.

I'm not crazy about the film I've used though, it's honestly just the only film I had. I got a whole lot of it with a Lomography camera a few years ago and I've still got a whole lot of it lying around, so I will use it up, but if anyone has any suggestions for a good colour film to use with the OM-10 I am all ears!

Hopefully this will mark a little bit of a return to film for me. Hopefully I will find a film I like better and get better at editing the results. Hopefully the films will all, always, be wound on.

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EDIT: It isn't. I somehow forgot that I shot a few rolls with my Lomography camera years ago, even though I mention that camera later on in this post. Sorry! This is my first "proper" set of colour prints though. My Colorsplash camera is not exactly designed for serious photography. 

'Roid Week, day five.

My framing may have been a little off (hello tiny tower top of the gaol at the bottom there) but I'm quite pleased with this one. Even the dust from my printer looks a little like stars in the sky. I hope you'll agree that this is a nice end to 'Roid Week 2015.

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