Photographing an event. Cressing Vintage Fair.

The Vintage Day at Cressing Temple Barn in aid of Helen Rollason Cancer Charity.

Back in January 2020 I enrolled on a Street Photography course with Magnum Photos. See: https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/learn-with-magnum/

Little did I know that within three months we would be all locked down and unable to travel far. Well, that put a stop to my course. I’d gone as far as Martin Parr teaching how to photograph an event only to be at a point where there were no events taking place.

Jump on about 15 months and I had an opportunity to go along to a vintage fair in aid of the Helen Rollason Cancer Charity and photograph the event. The Vintage fair is now in it’s 11th year. I had been involved, along with some other members of our local camera club, in photographing events put on by this charity. This was an ideal opportunity to catch up with my course and make some images of an event and also try to make some money for the charity. We would take the photos and then supply them to the charity so people who attended the event could buy them from the charity web site.

As it was a vintage event I also thought it a good opportunity to try out a recently acquired vintage camera. A Mamiya C330 ‘Professional f’ twin lens reflex (TLR) which was produced from 1969 and using Kodak Ektar 100 colour film. Maybe the colour film was a bit recent for some of the eras portrayed at the event but I was anticipating some colour in the attire and the classic cars on display. I wasn’t disappointed!

There were also may vintage cars and motorbikes on show.

I had anticipated there being a few old vintage cars around at the event and had thoughts of trying to get some close up views of the colourful cars. With the Mamiya TLR you have to allow for parralax error because the image taking lens is below the viewing lens. When you get up close the image taken isn’t quite the same as that which you are viewing. The Mamiya C330 gets round that by having a line move down the viewfinder showing the top of the image that is captured. It seems to work very well as I got the shots I was after.

After getting through a couple of rolls of colour film I tried out the camera with some black and white film. I used Ilford fP4+ which I was able to process myself at home.

A great day out with many photo opportunities. Think I’ll have to go back next year.

Helen Rollason Charity: https://www.helenrollason.org.uk/