Fifteen Years On

 At previous points in the life of this blog coiniciding with the anniversary of its first post, I've used the occasion to take stock of the landscape of film based photography. The last such post, Ten Years On was more a reflection on trying to use the camera from that very first post–the Olympus Pen EE3–through the first year of hte pandemic only for it to develop a fault and the quality of the resulting photographs suffereing as a result. I haven't posted very much in recent years, partly to circumstances in life, wokring on the PhD which I finished in 2024, and for work and financial reasons simply taking fewer photographs than I had done habitually in the first ten years of this blog. Interesting things had been happening in film photography during the last five years, Harman producing a colour film, the expansion of Kentmere films into 120 format with a new speed point in the 200 ISO film; Orwo also brought out a colour film and a new 100 ISO black and white emulsion; Foma produced an ortho film in 35mm and 16mm, and black and white negative ciné films to augment their long-established R100 film; Ferrania also produced an ortho film (colour film of all types continued to get more expensive, of course). I haven't had the opportunity to actively explore these new films, whihc previously would have been ideal subjects for this blog–they still are, but without the novelty of trying them out when new, as I had done with a few films in the past. These often provided the most popular of the posts on this blog. On that, I thought it mght be worth sharing some statistics for this blog over its lifetime. The screenshot below shows the ten most visited posts over the fifteen years.

Of the film posts, Rollei RPX 25 and Foma Retropan 320 Soft were truly new when I wrote about them; Rollei RPX 400 (with its 100-speed version) was also relatively new and becoming more available in the UK. Fomapan 400 by contrast had been around for many years, and I'd used it in medium format a lot more than 35mm before I wrote the post; Ilford Pan 100 was not generally available in the UK, and I was told that it was being discontinued in favour of Kentmere Pan 100, similarly to the Ilford Pan 400/Kentmere Pan 400 (I suspected the addition of 'Pan' into the Kentmere name also seemed to be a deliberate decision to position these films as replacements). It's also instructive to see the camera posts which are the most popular: the post on the Canon AV-1 is in itself not very detailed about using the camera, but this does seem to have been useful for quite a number of visitors, and, I surmise, the fix for the camera being jammed that I walk through would seem to be a common problem (the procedure I used for the fix was based on one for the AE-1, similar, but different enough that it was worth properly documenting). The subminiature Rollei 16 camera does not seem to have much specific information about its use online, which probably accounts for the place of that in the list–the presence of the MPP is no doubt similar. For this small corner of the internet, and for what I have tried to do with this blog, is to give a full account of the cameras I have written about in use–as well as researching, I generally like to devote some time with any camera to get to know it before I write; the posts about different films are largely the same. At the time I began this blog, although I had always used film, I had returned to developing again after a few years of not doing so, and began to take this seriously as a process: as much as anything, this blog was a place to record whatever I was discovering for myself, and useful as a reference: and, if I was doing so, it seemed worthwhile to share my research and discoveries.
 

127 Day January 2026

Ikonta 520/18 with Kentmere Pan 400

For a many years on this blog, I've followed the 127 Days faithfully, until January 2024, which was the last time I observed one of these calendrical oddities. There are a number of reasons as to why I'd not taken photos on any of the three 127 Days since then, with perhaps a little regret, which applies in general to the Photo-Analogue blog itself. I resolved to shoot at least one roll on Janauary 27th this year, two weeks ago today. This turned out to be a working day, and in addition heavily overcast: I had anticipated needing a fast film for the day, and cut-down a couple of rolls of Kentmere Pan 400 to cover the possibility of less-than-ideal lighting conditions. I also chose the Baby Ikonta camera, with a full range of shutter speeds and a relatively fast lens in comparison to some of my other 127 cameras, more limited in that respect. With the cloud cover at the time of day I left the house in the morning, it wasn't fully light; at the other end of the working day it was after dark. The lens and shutter were sufficient to accommodate the former conditions; for the latter, on my way home, I found a few places to prop the camera and use the shutter's T setting for a few long exposures to use the roll of film. In between, I managed a handful of frames around the working day; if nothing else, it served as a reminder of the appeal of using the Baby Ikonta.

FAST

A12, Leytonstone, January 16th 2024

Two years ago I made a series of posts about my photographs of the M11 Link Road, posting on the dates on which I had taken the original pictures in 1993 and 1994, thirty years on, but with comparison photographs I had taken of the same locations twenty years later, already ten years old. I took new photographs then as well, but, apart from a set of pictures taken in August, I didn't post those at the time. I recently came across the scans of some of the negatives from 2024, mislaid through switching desktop computers. I had taken colour photographs in January 1994 (and in 2014; the post 'SQUIBB' compares these), so did the same in January 2024; the 16th of the month, the date I had taken the original pictures, was a Monday, a working day in 2024, which meant a detour to take the photographs before going to work, and, being January, the first photographs were taken just before sunrise. I got the handful of photographs I had wanted; the day before, I'd also taken a set as security, of the same locations as well as some in Wanstead which felt like too far in the wrong direction to shoot before work.

The image at the top of this post looks across the A12 (known as the M11 Link Road during its construction) towards the remaining sections of Dyers Hall Road, replicating one of the shots from 1994; in 2024, I also waited for a train to cross the railway bridge (the rebuilding of which–the green section–had been one of the first visible signs of the coming of the road), something I'd photographed in black and white a couple of weeks earlier in 1994 (the colour photograph from 1994 is first below).

 

The most striking images from January 1994 were those taken on Claremont Road; Claremont Road was almost entirely swallowed up by the new road, and now exists as a very short dead-end stub. A few new houses have been squeezed into the space between the houses and gardens on Grove Green Road and the A12 itself, with its characteristic yellow and red brick wall. In the previous post, I had reckoned that my position in the picture of the new houses would overlap with that of the partially demolished house from 1994 at the top of that post; see the pairing below. I think the short driveway in the middle of the picture from 2024 should roughly match up with the two doorways to the left of the photograph from 1994. 

 

What I didn't notice in 2014, when I took the photographs after a twenty year gap, is that there was a small section of the original houses on Claremont Road still surviving, like a remnant of Roman Wall sandwiched between contemporary buildings such as one might find in the City of London; I photographed this on the Sunday; the shot below (with detail) is taken to the left of that immediately above.

The rest of the photgraphs from Claremont Road are impossible to replicate: this would require levitating above the A12 (in August 2024, I used the strategy of taking some photographs across the A12 from the cemetary on the far side with a long lens, something that I didn't consider in January). The other photographs were from Colville Road, which lost all its houses on its eastern side, and a few facing these at the northern end, but was a little easier to replicate: after thirty years, the plane trees on the other side of the Central Line are still recognisable. My main difficulty in January 2024 was photographing into the rising sun above the wall of the A12 as below.

 

 

The other shot from Colville Road can be approximated; the 2014 photograph didn't take into account the fact that the road changes its angle at the northern end. Even taking this into consideration, the picture from 2024 should still be much closer to the contemporary wall (the graffiti on the gantry above the A12 gives this post its title).

 

The final two images from 1994 were taken from the footbridge over Eastern Avenue in Wanstead; as previously explained, I shot these in 2024 on the 15th rather than the 16th. The pairing of the first two shots below suggests that the footbridge was rebuilt slightly further down the slope over Eastern Avenue from that of 1994.

Unlike the photographs taken in 2014, I didn't attempt to use the same lens design for the photographs in 2024: these were all shot with the Canon A-1. I did use the same film, Kodak Gold 100 (however similar it may be the Kodak Gold 100 of thirty years ago); the positions for the photographs in 2024 was, in the main, closer to the original photographs taken in 2014, as much as can be achieved within the built environment as it currently exists between Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead. Although not replicating a photograph from 1994 (I regret not taking more photographs then), I took a photograph from the footbridge in Wanstead looking up the A12 to where it enters the George Green tunnel, site of some of the early and visible resistance to the road scheme–with the occupation of a 400-year old tree–as this was to go thanks to the use of cut and cover, a less expensive construction technique than tunneling itself.