Here are some photos and a short film from our holiday in Cornwall over the May half term. The photos are a mix of film and digital, as always. I’ve added locations as captions but if you want to know exact spots for planning your own trip to Cornwall, they’re all geotagged on Flickr, too. I’d like to recommmend a visit to Potager Garden Café if you have the time and are in the area. It’s a lovely little cafe, tucked away in the deepest Cornish countryside and they have a really good cake menu with lots of vegan options. We stayed near St Austell on the Roseland Heritage Coast, but made a daytrip down to the south taking in Lizard Point and Cadgwith, stopping in at Potager on the way home. The short film at the bottom of this post was filmed at our favourite beach on the Roseland Heritage Coast; Hemmick near Boswinger.
Just before I turned 30, Ed and I spent a few days in the Scottish Highlands. We got the sleeper train up from London, hired a car in Inverness and stayed at SYHA Ratagan. It was a lovely way to end the summer and celebrate the last days of my twenties. On my thirtieth birthday, I woke up on the sleeper heading south with Ed passing me his card and whispering “happy birthday” to me quietly so as not to wake the other people in our carriage. It was low-key but absolutely perfect. I gave up alcohol when I was 21 and, being an introvert with somewhat niche and solo interests, don’t have a huge group of friends, so it was never going to be a loud or raucous celebration. That said, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate a birthday than spending time with Ed outdoors in a beautiful place like the Scottish Highlands. I can’t wait to go back there again, perhaps for a bit longer and out of midge season!
Up until this holiday, I hadn’t been to France since Ed and I spent a week by the ocean near Bordeaux for our honeymoon in 2010. I love France, but it’s quite expensive to visit as most self-catering places are for large groups. We like to be self-catered as it’s just easier that way since we’re both vegan. We went back this year for Ed’s cousin’s wedding in Roscoff, and stayed a few extra days camping down on the Quiberon peninsula. Our campsite was really good, though the emplacements could have done with a little shade. The whole peninsula is very exposed, with very little forest cover, so I guess it was to be expected. Next time we’ll take a tarp and some extra poles and rope to make sure we can have some shade by our tent.
The first few days of our trip to Brittany were spent in Roscoff and Saint-Pol-de-Léon for the wedding, and then we carried on further south in Brittany, enjoying the heatwave that made it feel like we were down in the South-West. On the last two evenings, we went to watch the sunset on the coast further up the peninsula from our campsite and filmed some footage together which I made into a short mood film. The first evening it was calm, and there were lots of children playing on the sand and surfers out on the water, but the second evening was much more wild and savage; a good reminder of why that stretch of coastline was named La Cote Sauvage. The footage was shot on a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera with a vintage Zuiko 28mm F2.8 lens. I kept the setup simple with just the camera, a tripod and a USB battery pack as we were camping and I didn’t want to overcomplicate things.
Here are some photographs I took during a very short trip to the Czech Republic in mid July. The reason for the trip was that a school friend of ours was getting married in the Czech countryside outside Prague but it was during term-time (Ed is a teacher) so we couldn’t make a longer trip of it. We flew out on the Thursday evening, spent Friday walking around Prague, Saturday with friends at the wedding in a little village called Chodeč (I was taking pictures for them), and then Sunday back in Prague before we had to fly home.
I visited Prague in 1992 with my parents when we lived out in Germany. I was only 6 at the time, and so didn’t fully take in the details, but it was obviously a vastly different experience visiting in 2016. I was pleased to see that carpet puppets and traditional marionettes are still a popular tourist product as they were when I was a child.
I wish we could have spent longer there as there was so much to see, but we still managed to pack in a lot of walking and see all the major sights in Prague itself. One day I’d love to go back and visit Karlovy Vary too. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson and love his film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ which was inspired by visits to European cities and towns such as Karlovy Vary. I love how bright and colourful the town is!
The photos are a mix of film (Portra 400, Noritsu scanned, Fujicolor C200, self scanned) and digital. If you’d like to know more about each of the photos, they’re hosted over on Flickr and I’ve geotagged them / added information about film and scanning in the tags.
In this post I show you how I make my digital images look like they were shot on modern 35mm film. It is one of my most popular blog posts and was most recently updated in February 2018.
In case you want the TL;DR version of events here’s how I do it, largely in camera:
ETTR to minimise digital noise and achieve the correct shadows exposure in camera; use vintage or legacy lenses; boost the luminance in the midtones in post-production; use film presets to mimic the colours of 35mm film stock. Remember though, the most important thing is your base file. No amount of post-production can turn a bad photo into a good one.
If you want to know more of the hows and whys, as well as my suggestions for good quality film emulation presets, read on.Read more…
