Worcester in Film with the No.1 Pocket Kodak Camera
This year I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel around the country for work, many of which have been new to me. One of these places was the historic city of Worcester, the founding of which goes back well over one thousand years. Walking the streets, it certainly gives off an impression of age, the long, cobbled streets flanked continuously by tall buildings and with few gaps can make the place a bit disorientating upon first arrival.
There’s plenty of old independent shops alongside the more modern fare and of course the building that stands above everything else (quite literally) is Worcester Cathedral whose construction dates back as far as 1084. It never ceases to amaze me just how grand and spectacular Gothic architecture can be, and this cathedral is a perfect example of this. Beyond that is equally impressive stained-glass windows, signs of damage from the English Civil War and the tomb of the infamous King John, who was forced to sign the Magna Carta.
With all this history in mind it made perfect sense for me to photograph my time in the city with my oldest film camera, the over-90-year-old No.1 Pocket Kodak, loaded with fresh rolls of the finely grained Ilford Pan F+ to maximise the detail. Having spent a large amount of time playing around with it previously I had a good grasp on how to get the best out of it and this was a great opportunity to try out what I had learned.
Shooting with it inside the Cathedral proved to be a major challenge, however. Despite the low ISO of Pan F+ it has some of the worst reciprocity failure characteristics of any of the Ilford range. Coupled with the fact that I needed to shoot at F22 to get as much as possible in sharp focus and I was onto some really long exposures, up to ten minutes in fact. Thankfully using T mode and my watch this was fairly straight forward, it just required some extra patience and praying that no one knocked the camera while exposing. As I’d never done anything like this before I was slightly questioning how it would come out but the hard work paid off and I was really happy with the results. It was certainly a lot easier when I got the camera back out in the daylight to photograph the rest of the city.
At the time of writing this it has been a few months since I’ve used this camera but looking back through these images does give me some more inspiration to get it out again. Although I seem to be accumulating even more film cameras these days, which has pushed this one down the pecking order. More about those in future blogs. As ever if you have any questions or comments then please do leave them in them down below.
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