Boo! 

Everytime I walk past the Poundland shop in my local town centre, I always remember the Trigger Happy TV sketch where Dom Jolly walks round a pound store asking how much everything is to the increasing exasperation of the shop assistant, it goes something like this:

“So how much is this?”

“A pound”

“What about this”

“A pound. Everything here a pound”

“Really, so how much is this then”

“A pound. Everything a pound”

“So is this a pound?” etc.

I mention this not just because it still makes me chuckle, but because I’d heard that the Poundland chain were selling Kodak colour film for a quid a roll. OK, so it was cheap 200ISO 24 exposure colour, but it was Kodak, and a quid a roll is significantly less than Ektar or Portra which I normally pay about a fiver for.

At that price, it seemed a good choice to run through a recently acquired second F100 body I’d bought as a bargain, just to ensure it all worked. As I’d got no excursions planned, I thought I’d use the roll on my little girl Eloise, who is the subject of most of my photographs these days.

I couldn’t get a slow enough shutter speed to get a properly blurred background on this roundabout, although in retrospect, the latitude of film is such that I could have slowed the shutter speed by a stop or two and still have got away with it.

All said and done, it performed OK. I took the film for processing at my local Tesco as it’s quick and cheap, so it’s hard to make a truly objective judgement on the quality as certainly the prints appear to have a slight colour cast, but the scans look OK and reasonably neutral. I’m sure that both scans and prints would look better if I’d have sent them to Metro Colour Labs for processing, but it was hard to justify the cost given that it was cheap film being run through a recently acquired second-hand camera.

All images Nikon F100 and Nikkor 20mm.

They say that wide angle’s shouldn’t be used for people photographs, but being a contrary sod, it sounded like it was worth a go. For close in photography a 20mm proved a good choice as it allowed me to get more of the surrounding  environment in around Eloise.

Playing with daddy’s old toys at nana and grandpa’s. Thirty something years ago, I was doing the same thing in almost the same spot!