Today's random film is Red 0787, a roll of Kodak MAX 400-8 dating from the winter of 2006-2007. This one seems to have rather grainy photos - yes, it's an ISO 400 film and fast films do tend to have more grain, but this seems worse than usual. I know Nikon scanners are known to suffer from some aliasing with film grain but here the same noise is present in the prints.
In some ways the grain adds to the charm of using film instead of digital. A lot of digitally-filmed big-budget films and TV shows actually have artificial film grain added in post-production!
Anyway, these photos begin in winter, with snow in Brighton of all places (it's been known to happen). Snow always seems very hard to photograph as I find it horribly confuses the white balance of digital cameras. With film there's no in-camera white balance (unless you add coloured filters) and while scanning I've generally set VueScan to apply a neutral balance. This I find works well for most outdoor photos as colour negatives are often designed to give a correct white balance under sunlight.
For reference, here's almost the exact same photo a few days/weeks later...
Next, to Brighton proper! These were presumably a bit later after the snow had melted - first up is the Brighton Pavilion.
And then the seafront.
You could probably date my Brighton photos by the state of the West Pier.
Cross-posted to
deviantArt
Sussex University! The Gnu tells tales of how when he was a lad enterprising students would climb the tuning forks (the concrete pillars in the first photo) and toss a Frisbee back and forth at the top of them.
And finally, this may amuse some of you: here's my desk from the Brighton house, covered with no end of random stuff. I was down to a single monitor at this point as the other had failed. The Aptiva wasn't my main machine - that was a tower underneath the desk - but was rigged up as an experimental Linux system running Slackware of all things (I blame
pewterfish for that suggestion...).