Laocoön and His Sons

This is pretty much all you see in the Vatican Museums, I plan to go back off-season (if there is such a time) so I can actually pause and contemplate the pieces I want to see.

This is in the Cortile Ottagono in the Vatican Museums, a beautiful courtyard that was a welcome breath of fresh air on the way through the labyrinthine galleries, where I was stood admiring the sculpture when I was unceremoniously trampled by this marauding herd.

(The sculpture that's out of shot is Laocoön and His Sons and this enlargement is from a scanned strip of negs originally intended just for making a contact sheet, brightened up in photoshop; shot in June 2014 on Ilford FP4 with a 35mm f/2.4 lens)

Colour negative experiment...

Today I tried something I've been meaning to since I first got into a darkroom and never got around to it - I made a black and white print from a colour negative.

My first few attempts were a bit on the grey side, but after a little experimentation I finally achieved the image below; exposed for twenty-five seconds at f/8 with the cyan slider at +50 (not really sure if that made a difference though) on a sheet of 9.5x12in Kentmere VC Select.

Rome: Colour Contact Sheets

Vatican City:

 Florence:

Our last night in Rome, messing about with an expired roll of 35mm...

Rome: B+W Contact Sheets

In June this year I took a trip to Rome; an even though I took both my DSLR and a film SLR, every photograph I took there was shot on film, the images below were taken with a Canon Eos 5 (simply for it's built-in exposure meter), with my beloved Carl Zeiss 35mm f/2.4 lens and shot on Ilford FP4.

I've yet to make any enlargements of any of my photographs (although I hope to soon!), but for now here are the black and white contact sheets...

 

St Peter's Square, Castel St Angelo and along the banks of the River Tiber:

 

I'm a bit of an anorak and love railways, so I made sure we took the opportunity to ride the Frecciarossa to Florence:

 

On our final day in Italy we visited the Vatican Museums; friends recommended I pay extra to get a guide and skip the queues - I personally would advise against this, you save a lot of money if you arrive early and are prepared to wait, then you get freedom to roam around the museums without being in a herd, bumping into groups was always a nightmare and I was grateful to not be a part of one.

Colosseum:

Colour contacts to follow shortly!

Piazza della Rotonda

Taken shortly after we left the Pantheon in Rome, near the corner of Via del Seminaro, this is one of the photographs I'm looking forward to printing in the darkroom in the near future...