STILL LIFE 28 – CONCRETE BLOCKS, SUNLIT (MONO)

 

 

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Concrete blocks – aka breezeblocks – piled up in the sun, at the former Willows Garden Centre, near Westhay, on the Somerset Levels; 19 Sept 2004.

Simple interplay of form, texture and light / shadow.

Long ago, well a decade anyway, I used to really enjoy using Agfa Scala black and white slide film.  It had a nominal speed of 400 ISO if I remember correctly, but could be pushed up to 1600 ISO or more, and I loved the gritty, black and white images it produced – which were the only mono shots in the slideshows (remember slideshows?) that I used to present in those days.  Sounds like something more from Victorian times, doesn’t it, rather than only a decade back.

Agfa Scala film is no longer available of course, it was a relatively early casualty of the digital revolution – and to me, for quite sometime, it was the most serious of those casualties.  But I no longer give slideshows, digital photography has opened up unimaginable creative possibilities – and there’s no doubt that the most successful road to black and white imagery is via full colour, Raw digital files and – for me at least – SEP2.

So, a bit of a blast from the past I suppose, but I still remember Scala with a lot of affection.

OM-4 with 75mm-150mm Zuiko; Agfa Scala monochrome slide, rated at 800 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Strong Infrared Low Contrast preset.
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