Chasing shadows in Saffron Walden.

DECEMBER. 03, 2019

Monday 2nd Dec 2019 – A cold start to today with temperatures just above freezing. A nice clear blue sky though which bode well for some high contrast photography. I decided to take a drive up to Saffron Walden in Essex, a nice town just north of where I live.

I thought I’d try capturing some street photography with people walking through shafts of light which should be achievable with the low sun at this time of year.

Just to make it a bit different I also thought I’d use one of my old film camera lenses on my Lumix GX8 so I would be using manual focus. The lens I used was a 35mm which gives an equivalent on 35mm of 70mm, f2.8 Olympus OM series.

A suitable shaft of light.

One of my Olympus film cameras was still loaded with Ilford HP5 rated to 800 ASA so I thought I’d take that with me too.

After taking a few shots on the digital around the Cross keys pub where I found some suitable lighting I ventured on up to the Old Sun Inn and St Marys church.

Some great light inside the church.

After taking a few shots my battery gave out on the GX8 and annoyingly, the battery that should have been charged wasn’t.

I thought that was a good opportunity to use the film camera so started shooting with that. After some shots the normal click – clunk of the mirror and shutter just went click. That meant that the mirror was stuck up, normally caused by not enough battery power. So, I thought ‘time for a coffee break’ whilst I changed the batteries in the OM40.