I’ve recently returned home from my latest sabbatical – I’m lucky enough that my day-job employer gives me an extra 6 week break every 5 years!
While I was in Austria, I stumbled across a couple of camera shops (I was actually looking for somewhere that would do same-day development of what I’d shot so far on my travels, but no joy) – I did, however, stock up on an extra couple of rolls I’d not shot before, one of which was Harman Red.
By the time I returned back to the UK from the Europe portion of my travels, I’d still not loaded it, but I was only home for a day before heading off to New York, so decided to try it there.
This was my first time shooting a “redscale” film, so I wasn’t sure what would make for the best subject. I had watched a few videos, read a few articles, but there wasn’t much consistency with “you have to shoot THIS with it!” – so, towards the end of the trip, I loaded it into the camera…
The first two images were shot in Central park on a fairly cloudy morning. The second isn’t too bad, but the first image was disappointing, although this is maybe more compositionally rather than the film itself! We next visted the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) – while I didn’t take any images there, I did grab some afterwards – a typical street scene, and a couple of shots of the interesting architecture of the Guggenheim.
These are starting to look a bit more interesting – bear in mind I had zero idea how these would come out at the time of capture! I parted ways with the other half for a few hours, and made my way down to the southern tip of Manhattan. On the way to the subway, I captured a rather typical piece of New York architecture- fire escapes on the side of a building. Images like this are what make travel shots so interesting. Most New Yorkers would probably think nothing of this scene as they walk past each day but to me it was so stereotypical of the city (or at least of the country) that it was worth capturing. I wonder what an American tourist would photograph in my home town?
I then headed onto the subway to travel south and grabbed a couple of shots, trying to remain fairly subtle!
That was it for the day. The next morning, we headed quite a way north to the Cloisters. Another branch of the Met, this focuses on medieval art. Looking rather like a cross between an old European castle and abbey, it’s not that old, built in the mid 1930’s, and is actually a bit of a mix of styles, including some pretty Italian garden style courtyards.
The first of these three is rather underexposed, but I like the end result. The chapel shot came out nicely – halation around the window edges (Harman Red is basically Phoenix rolled backwards, if you weren’t aware) along with the tomb illuminated by the windows works nicely. The final outdoor shot has a very different colour temperature to the rest of the images – I will mention this a little more towards the end of the article.
After the Cloisters, I headed back down to the southern part of Manhattan to capture some things I’d seen the day before. Rather like the fire escapes from earlier, plumes of steam are another New York feature that fascinate me as a tourist but the locals most likely ignore or endure! This came out OK – I think in a colour shot the steam would stand out more, but it’s visible enough.
The office worker and Miffy was very much a grab shot – zone focused (not something I am well practiced in) and shot from the hip – so it did need straightening in post – but I liked the juxtaposition and I’m pleased with the end result.
The church is disappointing as my exposure was off – being in shadow, it’s disappeared into mush with the buildings behind being correclty exposed.
The oculus shot works well, although the building does benefit from an ultrawide to show the scale (with my digital camera I was using a 15mm lens as opposed to the 35mm my Minolta was equipped with…)
After that, I took a quick walk around the Staten Island ferry terminal. A few interesting things to capture here, but my favourite is the final shot of the corrugated metal building – the round windows in the doors are something different, and the patches of sunlight reflected from a glass opposite add some extra interest.
I then headed back up the west side towards Hudson Yards to meet the wife (she’d decided to hang off the side of the “Edge” skyscraper!) but before that, I wandered around “The Vessel”. Opening in 2019, it’s essentially a large art installation designed by Thomas Heatherwick, and comprises a honeycomb of staircases in a large cylinder. Annoyingly the elevator was “having a lunch break” so I couldn’t get the lift up and walk back down. Also, only 2/3rds of it seemed to be open (based on circumference, not height!) so I kept hitting dead ends! Anyway, I rattled off a bunch of shots here, some working better than others.
Next, it was up to the viewing platform level of The Edge. The platform sits at 340m, and gives great views across the Midtown area (towards the Empire State Building, Times Square and so on) along with more distant images to the southern part of the island. Two images from here.
The tone of these, especially the first, are great – the first image especially reminds me of a scene from Blade Runner 2049 with that post-apocalyptic orange haze everywhere. Definitely a favourite from the roll.
Then, it was the final morning. And I needed to finish the roll before heading to the airport so I could request a hand scan of my films. We were staying in Brooklyn so I went for a post-breakfast walk around some of the nearby warehouses. On the way, I took a photo of the elevated roadway I’d passed under, although I don’t feel it was the most successful image.
The warehouse district itself worked really well, and these are some of my favourite shots.
I think the lighting helped here, with the still-low sun giving some nice contrast. One or two are similar to the Cloisters image mentioned earlier, with a more pastel tone, which was something I discovered during my processing.
The roll was processed with my usual workflow, in Lightroom, using NLP. As per usual, I set my white-balance from the gap between frames, and then opened them up with standard settings. Many of the images started out quite bright, with the shadow areas being very grainy with a blue tinge to them. For these shots, I found that changing the preset from NLP Standard to NLP Rich “fixed” them – the shadows dropped to black, and the tone of the image changed to a deep orange-red, which I was expecting. Subtle changes to exposure would affect this tone quite a lot – adding brightness would immediately reduce the colour saturation to the more “peach” version. This meant I was quite limited in the adjustments I could make, and why some shots (such as the dark church in Lower Manhattan) couldn’t really be rescued – at least, not in a way I liked.
Overall though, I was pretty pleased with the end result from this roll, and certainly I had more keepers than not! For what I thought would be a novelty, I really like some of the images, and I’m definitely going to get another roll or two in stock now I understand it a bit better.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! You can find more of my images shot on film over on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/james_billings_analog/
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