Urban photography in Águas Boas with the Sprocket Rocket and Lomochrome Turquoise, 11 January 2024

Urban photography in Águas Boas with the Sprocket Rocket and Lomochrome Turquoise, 11 January 2024

After a disappointing experience with the KMZ Horizont I loaded the remainder of the film into my other panoramic camera, the Sprocket Rocket. I was a bit nervous about this since my last experience with the Rocket had also resulted in a broken film (which is still actually in a cupboard somewhere undeveloped).

However, I 'bit the bullet', as they say, trimmed the broken film leader to size, and loaded the remainder of the Lomochrome Turquoise film into the Sprocket Rocket. Unusually it was actually a sunny afternoon, although by the time I headed out the sun was starting to dip towards the horizon.

I took a walk around a few of my favourite spots in Águas Boas, including the church which to my mind for a modern building is quite spectacular, and the recently improved park, which now gives a lovely view of the bandstand from the road. (I could have gone onto the park and photographed from my preferred location below the bandstand but even though it was a sunny day it was still really muddy.)

The Sprocket Rocket is a simple Lomography camera with just one shutter speed of about 1/100s (and 'bulb') and two apertures, one for sunny and one for cloudy weather (about f16 and f11, respectively). Given the 100-400 ISO latitude of the Lomochrome Turquoise film I kept the aperture mostly on the sunny setting, which worked quite well.

After several exposures around the village I came to the end of the roll. Remembering my previous experience with the Sprocket Rocket rather than rewinding the film straight away I went home and readied my trusty dark bag in case it looked like the film might jam in the camera again. I needn't have worried, the film rewound smoothly back into the cassette. Along with the strip from the Horizont I took the remainder of the film to Forever Blue in Aveiro and a few days later the image files, scanned beautifully with the sprockets and all, arrived in my in box.

I was really happy with the results. Yes, the views of the bandstand were a little dark, but by this time the sun was going behind the trees and even opening the aperture to the cloudy setting wasn't enough to get much detail out of the image. The earlier photos though, especially of the church, came out really well. 

I'm still waiting to see what happened with the Horizont, the images weren't returned with the rest of the files and I'm keen to see the negatives, but the panoramas from the Sprocket Rocket were lovely and of course it was a treat to use Lomochrome Turquoise again. 

#Street, #Architecture, #Building, #Townscape, #SprocketRocket, #Panorama, #Lomography, #Portugal, #AguaBoas, #Urban, #Turquoise,