At the same time I got my scans for the disaster that was my roll of Lomography Berlin, I also got my scans for a roll of Ilford HP5 Plus that I had taken with my Minolta X-700 and my MD 50mm f/1.7 lens. Thankfully, that roll mostly turned out fine. I did make 1 costly mistake which I’ll describe below.
I went out 3 times to finish the roll.
The first time was to explore a part of South Philadelphia my wife and I hadn’t been to before. There’s the part of South Philadelphia that is easily reachable by foot from where we live. And there’s the South Philadelphia that is home to the sports stadium that we need to get to via the subway. The leaves a small stretch that we don’t walk to and that we bypass on the subway.
We decided to check out Marconi Plaza which is a relatively large open area in an otherwise crowded part of the city. It was the end of January so all the trees were bare and there weren’t many people around. It’s probably a lovely, vibrant place on the right day.
I only took 2 photos there: one of the Marconi statue and one general shot of part of the Plaza. It was a little cold which undermined my enthusiasm for taking pictures.
Reading the plaque which reminded me who Guglielmo Marconi was triggered a memory. At first, I couldn’t place what I was thinking of, but it hit me a few days later:
A nice little blast of nostalgia from my youth.
Anyway, we walked up Broad Street which bisects Marconi Plaza until we hit the part where we’ve walked before, and which, conveniently is near one of our favorite breweries, Second District Brewing. Did we stop on the way home for beer? Yes, yes we did.
I took only a few more photos in that stretch.
I took the majority of the roll on a walk Holly and I took to the Fairmount section of the city. We had heard about a small art installation on a side street and decided to find it.
Part of the art was chalk drawings in the street. Unfortunately, they had been there for a while and were pretty faded. But there were a couple other works of interest.
I took many more photos on the walk to and from there.
I finished the roll the day before the Philadelphia Eagles were in the Superbowl. I wanted to find Eagles paraphernalia to commemorate the achievement (yes, they lost the Superbowl but it was fun watching them get to that point).
Not surprisingly, I had some success.
I had taken a few more, but here’s where the costly mistake comes in. My habit is to rewind my film as soon as I finish the roll. I did not do that this time. When I got home, I popped open the back of the camera to find the film still threaded. I quickly closed the back but lost 5 or 6 photos.
There’s 1 where you can still see the Eagles flag, but the rest are in pretty bad shape. I could probably crop this into a square but decided to leave it as evidence of my carelessness.
Losing a few photos because I made a stupid mistake is, in a way, less frustrating than losing nearly an entire roll and not being sure what happened, as with the roll of Berlin in my Minolta XE. As I mentioned, it was a relief to get this roll back at the same time as the Berlin, to get some good news along with the bad.
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