Images shot on Kentmere Pan 100 in Pentax MX with SMC Pentax-M 50mm f2
If you’ve already read my Kentmere Pan 100 film review and are particularly eagle-eyed, you may recognise that scaffolding in the shot above. If not, maybe just have a quick look now.
Now that we’ve got that out the way and you can be sure I really do take my own photographs for my film reviews, we can move on to what this post is really about – finishing off this roll of Kentmere around the streets of Mansfield.
Having shot most of it at Holme Pierrepont with the 28mm SMC Pentax-M lens on my Pentax MX, I put the 50mm SMC Pentax-M on for these. To give myself a tighter focal length than I usually prefer, and so I couldn’t just ape the shots from the previous time I’d shot a roll of monochrome film around my town.
As it turned out I only had nine exposures left on this one, so this is going to be a short blog post. Which means we should get into it now, with no further waffling from me.
Contents
Finding things to shoot in your home town
Back when I lived in Shanghai and shot a lot of film out and about in the city, I remember wondering how much similar photography I’d be able to do when I moved back home.
How much photographic opportunity would the streets of Mansfield really give me before what I was doing got repetitive – both in the results, and in the idea of going down Mansfield with my camera again and trying to find new stuff to shoot.
Because as much as I think people should have some hometown pride pretty much wherever they’re from, there’s no doubt that Mansfield just doesn’t offer the same photographic opportunities as China’s biggest city. In terms of size, interesting and photogenic scenes, and places to visit I mean.
However, I have managed to drag myself down there a few times already – like here and here and here – and still feel I could do it plenty more too. So when I needed somewhere to finish off this roll of Kentmere Pan 100, I had no qualms in nipping into town to do so.
It’s easy to get through nine shots on a sunny day like this also. Just point your camera at whatever is well lit and you’ll end up with an image that has good light, shadow, and contrast if nothing else.
And for me, mainly just wanting some example shots for that Kentmere Pan 100 review I wrote, that was enough.
A fine old building that really should be used again
There’s a good rundown of the buildings on one of Mansfield’s main shopping streets here. Unfortunately though, some of them are today just run down.
One of these, which is in the next shot below and dates from 1901, is the Grade II listed old Boots building at 11 Leeming Street. According to this site, it remained a Boots dispensary until the mid-1970s and became Dickie Dirts – for jeans and shirts – for a couple of years in the 1980s.
Bearing in mind the Superscoops discount store that followed covered over the previous Dickie Dirts signage with their own when they used the building, it’s kind of weird to see the latter still up there today after the former has been long-removed.
It’s like having a time capsule in plain sight around two decades after this business actually existed – especially when you consider the building has been empty since 2004. How has nobody done anything with it for this long?
Personally, my only memory of ever going in there was to go to the cafe upstairs in the mid-1990s. That too is now long gone, and I can find no evidence online that it ever existed. But from what I recall of it, it’s not really a loss to the town anyway.
A few Mansfield street shots with people in them
Going back to when I shot a lot of film in Shanghai, I would pretty much always have people in my images. It felt easy to do this because nobody ever seemed to care about what I was doing.
For some reason though, taking street photographs of strangers in the UK worried me more. Like I would swiftly run into some aggro or something. This is maybe why I started shooting things like ruined abbeys too, and not just town or city centres.
But I still wanted to get a couple of shots with people in them here, just while I was using up what was left of this roll of Kentmere Pan 100.
And because I was shooting with the 50mm SMC Pentax-M lens, I could do so from a little further away than if I’d left the 28mm one on there.
So here are a few of those, just to finish this post off with. They’re not great. They’re mainly just people walking past stuff. And the final one doesn’t even count for what I’ve just described as the people are in the shadowy background and out of focus.
None of the above matters though. It’s just three photographs. And maybe it’s me dipping my toe back in the water and there’ll be more and better of this kind of thing to come in the future.
Wrapping up from shooting in the streets of Mansfield
That’s really all I’ve got for you. As mentioned a few times already, I was just finishing off this roll of Kentmere Pan 100 here.
Having shot most of it around the water at Holme Pierrepont and a previous roll around Southwell Minster and the quiet streets of that small town, I just wanted a few different images from a bigger urban conurbation.
They are what they are, and this blog post is what it is.
And what this actually is, is me having had a very unproductive few days with very little motivation to do anything for most of them, but feeling better on this Sunday morning and just wanting to get something – anything – written up and published.
I didn’t want to write about a whole roll’s worth of shots like I have been doing recently, and I didn’t want to research much. I just wanted to get this little post done so I can go back to work on Monday and feel like I at least did something while I was off.
While I do talk about getting out there and shooting and creating as much as you can on this site, we can’t all be motivated all the time. It’s okay to have a few days off when we need them.
I probably need to tell myself that more. But I also love doing this, and getting this done has made me feel a lot better.
It might be worthless to anyone else, with average photographs and not many practical takeaways, but the process of doing it has been priceless for me. And I can only thank you for reading it until the end. 🙂
If that post with some pretty throwaway shots from Mansfield piqued your interest for some more, better film photography essays, why not have a look at some of these ones:
And if you somehow think others will find this post worth a read, help them find it by giving it a share 😀
