Wow, it has been a long time coming! I had to check the date twice, but it has been more than 4 years since my last post. I have no real excuse, just life getting in the way. A few injuries, slow recovery, moving house, and making some life changes. Nothing major 😉 . But I finally found the energy to start a new post, so let’s see where this will lead me.
I decided to start with a trip my man and I took two and a half years ago, to my beloved Scotland. Where else to start? We have visited Scotland on numerous occasions, but this was different for two reasons:
1. We drove the North Coast 500 touristic route. This means doing a multiple-day road trip, packing up and moving to different locations almost daily, where I normally like staying in a holiday home for at least 4 nights. We combined the North Coast 500 trip with a few days on Skye. We drove the route anti-clockwise, which I recommend as the landscape gets more dramatic from start to finish if you drive it this way.
2. I rented an XPan! I have long coveted this camera, and about a month before our trip I noticed that my local analog camera store (Fotohandel Delfshaven) started renting out equipment. Among which an XPan, so you can imagine my excitement! I packed a few rolls of my favourite film, and off we went :-). For those of you who don’t know what an XPan is, it is a film camera produced by Hasselblad capable of shooting both panoramas (24mm x 65mm) and conventional format (24mm x 36mm) on 35mm film. If you are interested, google it, there is a lot of information online. I only shot panoramas with it while in Scotland 🙂 .
After the holidays I had a dilemma, what to do with the photo rolls? I normally develop and scan myself, but I have a dedicated 35mm scanner, so the XPan negatives won’t fit. A lot of labs do not offer the possibility to scan XPan negatives, for the same reason, it doesn’t fit the normal process. I thought about renting a flatbed scanner, I have used an Epson Perfection V800 in the past, but I sold it to upgrade to a scanner with higher resolution. It would feel weird to finally shoot with an XPan, but use a lower grade scanner from what I normally would. So I decided to take the recommendation from my local shop and send the rolls to Carmencita film lab. The photos posted here are the result of their development. I did some tweaking in Lightroom to get the scans to my personal liking. Nothing major, I generally made them a bit brighter and cooler.
I really enjoyed shooting the XPan. It is bigger than my Leica M2 of course, but still manageable. I really like the wide panoramic format, it works well in these gorgeous landscapes of Scotland. I could not justify buying one as prices have become even more exorbitant, but I would definitely would like to shoot it again. I think if I could scan the negatives myself I would have already.
One downside of the XPan is that it can easily become a point and shoot camera. What I mean is that for these landscapes you set focus at infinity, lighting is done automatic, so you only have to consider framing. I know that that can also be considered an advantage, but I like the technical challenge of shooting the M2 in more creative photos. At some point I realised I that I was mainly shooting these landscapes from afar, partly because most of these were taken form the roadside, but I thought it had become almost too easy. So I tried to challenge myself a bit more, by trying a vertical approach, and to look for something to be closer in the foreground. I don’t think it resulted in the best photos, but here are the best results in my opinion:
Well that’s it. My first post after a long break. Let’s see if I can keep it up this time 🙂 . If there are still any readers here, thanks for waiting!
If you just stumble across my website, I know older posts do not work because of my changing the theme for this website. Maybe I will fix it one day, but the galleries still work, and hopefully there is new content on the way.
I hope you enjoyed the photos. Thanks for reading!
Welcome back, Aukje! And thank you for spoiling us with beautiful photo’s again!
Thanks!