ilford Archives - Martin W Smith

No Gear No Fear Contest Update

Martin Smith — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:00:06 +0000

No Gear No Fear Contest Results

The No Gear No Fear contest that I wrote about in this previous post is now over and the results have been announced over on Ribnar’s website. I didn’t win of course, the winner is Tashia Walters, well done to her, but I did manage to get second place. I really didn’t expect to get any points at all let alone come second, so I’m really happy with this result. I even had the top score for two of the categories, which I’m so pleased with. Thank you to Ribnar for organizing this fun contest and all the hard work he put into taking all those Ilford cameras apart, developing and scanning the film and then uploading them all to Flickr. I think maybe Ribnar has too much time on his hands, but I’m glad he did take the time to do this. Thanks also have to go to the four judges who must have had such a hard time scoring all the entries. This has been a fun contest, that proves you don’t need the best or latest gear to create images. I’m not going to pretend these are the best photographs I’ve ever taken, but they’re not bad considering they were taken with a single use camera.

My Entries

These are my 4 selections for the categories, all the shots taken for the contest can be found here.

No Gear No Fear Test Camera

Martin Smith — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 19:50:19 +0000

In the month of May there’s will be a competition running called No Gear No Fear run by @Ribnar over on Twitter where you shoot 6 shots for 4 themes on an Ilford HP5+ single use camera. Each participant shoot a single camera, send it to Ribnar who will process and scan it, before you even get to see your images. The camera is the no gear part and the not seeing the images before submission is the no fear part. Before the challenge starts in May I bought a couple of the cameras to test out first, to see what they can do, below are some of the results from the first camera that I took to work with me last week, developed in HC-110. They aren’t the greatest photos in the world but it gives me an idea of what I can do with the camera. I’m glad this wasn’t the camera being submitted to the competition.

Ilford HP5 Single Use Camera, London

Ilford HP5 Single Use Camera

Ilford HP5+ 400 ISO Film

Martin Smith — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 13:00:34 +0000

Ilford HP5+ is one of the first films I tried when starting to shoot film again a couple of years ago, it is readily available in places like Boots in the UK. I’ve tried all sorts of films since, but I keep coming back to HP5, I think this is due to it’s versatility, it can be shot at box speed or pushed a couple of stops with very pleasing results. Below are just a few examples using this film.

Ilford HP5+ Samples

Photos shot with either the Leica M6 TTL or Nikkormat FT3, some shots were developed by a lab, but more recent ones were home developed in either Rodinol, D76 or HC110 and scanned with Epson V550 scanner and Silverfast 8 scanning software.

London

Reigate

London

Reigate

London

Crawley

Reigate