Light Boxes

No idea why these advertising light boxes are the way that they are, but they are each end of the S-Bahn platforms at Hamburg Airport. Having walked past them, and occasionally taken the odd digicrap of them, here they are on film. In this case Kodak Portra 800 in the Natura Black.

It turns out that blue lights in a dimly lit underground station are about at close to a torture test as you can get for fast colour negative film. The obviously different light levels really didn’t help with a point and shoot. All of which made them an adventure to process – the white balance still isn’t consistent, but i give up!

Mystery why there are they and never contain any advertising… all other slots are always occupied, with these left open. Maybe they are a token gesture towards making the airport more relaxing / less commercial… or art? Ha!

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And then…

Look what turned up in the post this week, right after me posting about it a few days ago.

 

New Challenge

Now for 7 days of unseen vertical XPan shots… not sure if this is going to work. Vertical XPan can end up looking a little weird, but that doesn’t appear to have stopped me occassionally giving it a whirl!

You can tell it’s taken in Hamburg by the honking great big water stain up at the top. Oops.

Caffenol Workshop

My mate Tom Lehne is putting together a Caffenol film development workshop. If you’re around Hamburg, Germany, it’d be well worth looking into. He’s working with Larry of Lazarus fame, who, having 40+ years of professional printing experience, is inspiring to watch at work.

You can see the amazing results Tom is getting with instant coffee and a dash of special sauce on his website. This most definitely isn’t a case of “those who can’t, teach!”

[One of the alternatives i’ve been considering as my stock of Presto runs out is finding one of these old emulsions sold under brands like Fomapan or Efke and moving to Caffenol for development. It would be perfect if there was a decent, non-toxic replacement for fixer, but i’ve not seen much mention of that… perhaps it’s not that important, the fix is always going to contain the un-oxidised silver, and that’s never going to be good in the grey water. All that said, the Rodinal habit is hard to kick and i can see myself going Tri-X / Rodinal!]

Pink Pipe Mystery

A few weeks ago… or was it months… not sure, i noticed the strange pink water pipe flowing into the river. Every time i’d go by on the train i’d tell myself that i’d go back and investigate. The river froze and unfroze, the snow fell and melted… but i never got round to investigating the pipe.

Then last week a contact on Flickr posted that, linked to an explanation in his blog. Which meant the end of procrastination, and a walk in the sleet / snow to ‘follow the pink pipe’.

In the last picture you can see the pipe in the middle of the shot, at the far end of the foundation pit. From there it runs several hundred meters to the river (the Alster, a tributary of the Elbe).

After giving Robert some (good natured) grief about thinking that Berlin was the only place with pink pipe, i noticed that the Hamburg pipe is supplied by the same company – Pollems Gmbh… in Berlin.

The mystery is solved!

The Neverending?

That is it then. Back to work tomorrow.

Twelve days ago,tranquility stretching out endlessly, and now the grind…

Berlin / Hamburg Snaps