General Photography | London Through The TLR

It would be remiss of me to write posts about the cities that I have visited and not put one up about my closest and most favoured city of all, London. As you can probably guess I have taken a lot of photographs when it concerns London. But, recently whilst going through the photographs on my hard drive I found some that I had all but forgotten about. These were taken with my Rolleiflex camera. The same one that I took the Pisa photographs with. If you would like to see my photographs of Pisa please click the link below

Travel Photography | Pisa Italy
Date Posted: Monday 23^rd August 2010

As mentioned in the Pisa post, the camera was manufactured in 1935. I found this out by verifying the serial number. It is a twin lens reflex camera that takes 120 film that is still readily available. And, in stark contrast to cameras made today, it still works perfectly. Even at 75 years old. I do not expect any of my digital cameras to still be working fifteen years from now, let alone 75.

These photographs were taken in January 2009 with the camera and were processed by Jessops who also made the scans which this time weren’t as bad as I have previously. Half of the photos in this post are what I would call your standard shots of London. That is something that I try not to do but I do like the way they came out with the 120 format. And the other half are of the London Astoria Theatre. The London Astoria was a music venue that was shut down in early 2009 and so I went up to London that day to get some photographs as I knew that it would be getting demolished and I wanted some photographs as a record of the building.

For more information on the building and it’s history, please click the links below;
Wikipedia Entry on the London Astoria
History on the London Astoria

As far as I am aware I used Ilford HP5 ISO 400 120 Film. I believe that this is the film that was used because it was the film I use most in the camera. And I’m quite happy to say that these photos were all taken sequentially on the same film. The reason that this post is called ‘General Photography | London Through The TLR’ is because I am pretty sure that in the future there will be more posts with London as the main subject matter and I wanted to give this first post a unique title.

I have placed the standard London shots as the first four of this post and the photographs pertaining to the London Astoria at the bottom. The reason for this is to keep the subject matter similar throughout the photographs. The London Astoria was demolished last year, making these photographs a very small part of the venue’s last days. It was mentioned previously in the post but I’ll say it again. In this post I have included eight photographs all in black and white taken with the Rolleiflex Twin Lens Reflex 120 camera.