Ethan makes more progress

 With the end of July approaching I thought we could say goodbye to the rain for a bit, but no. Rainy days still outnumbered sunny ones and I didn't get out much. When a sunny afternoon presented itself on the first day of August, I didn't need telling twice. It was time to go out for another photo walk with my Grandsons, Ethan and Joseph.

For this walk I decided to have us both shoot the same film and I loaded a roll of Wonderpan into my Pentax SP500 and Ethan's Dynax 500si. I tried to explain pushing film to Ethan, but it's a bit too soon for that, I think. He doesn't care what it's called or what speed to shoot it at as long as it's film, he just wanted to concentrate on finding good compositions. We set his camera to use aperture priority and headed towards the farm to say hello to the Horses and see what we could find along the way.

I enjoy a walk with my Grandsons, it gives us a chance to have a natter and spend quality time together. It also gives my wife a chance to rest as she's been in momma bear mode since the boys arrived. We spoke about composition and finding things that catch our eye and I left the rest up to him. Ethan has been doing well lately and he soon began finding things to photograph and even walked away from one or two compositions because they didn't look quite right to him when he got closer.

This walk was all about flowers, horses and reflections. It's good to see Ethan getting choosy over what he wants to take a photograph of. It shows he is thinking about his photos and in turn that bit of thought shows in his results. He was exploring the things that caught his eye, trying different angles in order to get the shot he wanted rather than snapping away and hoping to get a good one here and there. We were enjoying ourselves and it wasn't long before we finished our film and headed home.

It was a day later when I developed our film using Zone Imaging 510 Pyro for the first time. I had seen James Lane's shots taken on Wonderpan and liked the look of them so I used his times and dilution of 17 minutes at 1-100 at 20 celcius. I am always apprehensive when using chemicals for the first time, despite what I have seen from other photographers I always fear making a pigs ear of it.

Thanks to the confidence I have built over the last three years I managed to get our films developed without any bother and soon had them hanging to dry in my bathroom. As always I scanned our film with my trusty Ion Slides2PC 35mm scanner and removed dust spots and scratches with Affinity Photo 2.

I am impressed with Ethan's composition skills as they are growing exponentially, his horse photos are rather excellent. I enjoyed watching him go about his photography on our walk and growing his skills. Ethan is doing all the right things, with just a gentle nudge in the right direction he will only get better. Here's a few of his best shots from our walk and I have placed them and a few more in an album on my Flickr account you can visit using the link below. I hope you enjoy them.

Ethan - Wonderpan - Minolta Dynax 500si