Rollei Retro 400S in Paris, with a Minolta X700

I recently headed back to Paris for a long weekend, for the first time since I started shooting film again. Having taken photos there many times in the past using my digital gear, I decided to “travel light” and take just my Minolta X-700, the 50mm 1.4 lens it came with, the 35mm 2.8 lens I picked up off everyones’ (least?) favourite auction site a couple of weeks before, and the TT Artisans 75mm 1.5 (which I can use on both the Minolta and my Sony digital cameras).

The next decision was which film to take – I had a feeling that Paris might suit black and white nicely, and as I’d recently been finding I liked the results from Rollei Retro 400S in 120 format, I took along 2 rolls of it in 35mm. This proved to be a good choice, as the weather was sunny the whole weekend, which gave lots of contrasty scenes to work with.

The image above is actually the second shot I took on the first evening. I was aiming to photograph the aesthetically pleasing cafe in the background, although without the light on it, the shot would have been a failure. The person pushing the bicycle happened to stroll through just as I was about to take the shot, and ended up turning this into one of my favourite images from the trip, although you could argue the striped top is a bit too much of a French cliche…

We were staying close to the Canal Saint Martin, and I took this early the next morning. Much of the image is dark from the tree cover, with the water lit brightly in the distance where the tree cover ended. I was a little indifferent to this image, but it was one of my wife’s favourites so I am including it here!

The walk through the city led us to the Pompidou Centre. Scattered around the exterior are several of these large funnels, appearing as if they have transported from a cruise liner of a decade ago. They made for a great subject in black and white, with their white paint contrasting nicely with the dark building behind.

I later ended up at La Defense- the business district of Paris located a little way to the west of the city centre. Tall buildings (with the obvious exception of the Eiffel Tower, and the slightly-less obvious exception of the Montparnasse Tower) aren’t allowed to be built in the centre, and as such, they have all clustered in their own area.
The architecture of the La Defense area is well worth exploring if it’s something you like – as well as a variety of modern skyscrapers, there’s a whole host of modern art installations (including a giant thumb!)

The centrepiece is probably the Grand Arche. This sits on the same alignment as the route from the Louvre, up along the Champs Elysee and through the Arc de Triomphe making for a great view from the top of the steps. When there, you might notice the building isn’t quite aligned correctly – it had to be built a few degrees off the ideal axis due to the large underground station for the metro and RER beneath it! The geometric shapes in bright sunlight worked well here too.

The final image was taken on the final evening, in the Montmartre area. The sun was catching the light from Sacre Coeur nicely, and this particular image (while not the cleanest composition) gave a nice crisp result on the stonework of the famous church.

Overall I was pleased with a lot of the images from the trip – Rollei Retro can naturally be fairly contrasty (which makes sense given that I’ve read the native ISO is more like 200, so the box speed is really a push…), and my new 35mm lens performed well (once I’d lubricated the slightly oily aperture blades…)

The rolls were developed at home using Rodinal at the usual 1+50 dilution, scanned using a Sony A7R2, and processed in Lightroom with NLP.

If you want to see more of the images from the weekend you’ll find them on my analogue themed Instagram

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