The Limbo Connection's photos with the keyword: film

In ipernity groups, if you are the member with the second-greatest number of photographs and the top dog is expelled for smoking behind the bike sheds, you get bumped up to administrator like it or not. Like nearly all organisations, ipernity is hierarchical and defiance is ultimately useless. This has happened to me twice and each time only a handful of people were left in membership of the group and not all of them had posted any pix for ages. This is the problem with creating groups: eventually old age, attrition, being skint, losing interest, becoming mired in Highland Toffee, amnesia, illness, kidnapping by aliens, you name it, the result is a group existing more or less in name only. So: using my newly-acquired powers I have given my latest group, the 50mm group, a new banner, and thus energised all the ordinary members (two people from Australia) will get posting, and hundreds of new people who use 50mm lenses will emerge and enlist. Yeah, that’s what’s gonna happen.

I met a fellow photographer in the garden of Hauser & Wirth in Somerset. She kindly agreed to have her picture taken. It's wonderful when this happens. Nikon D40 with a Tamron 35mm f/1.8 lens. Field of view equivalent to a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. 400 ISO; aperture priority set at f/5. Shutter 1/320th.

You know where you are with a 50mm lens. It's a good reference point for anything else you might need, or think you might need. (Often you don't need anything else). If there is a poor 50mm lens, I have yet to hear of it. A few are overpriced but for the most part they are cheap, and excellent gatherers of light. Photographed with an AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.4D lens on a Nikon D700 at 200 ISO. 3 seconds exposure at f/16. Cropped to remove an extraneous road atlas. I guess that the availability of sat nav and digital maps means that the once ubiquitous road atlas has pretty much gone the way of the Praktica camera. Anyway, I didn't want it competing for attention in this picture.

Reg Lancaster worked for the Daily Express for over 40 years. Photographed with a Canon EOS 40D with Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens.

Scan of a print from the time I owned a Nikon FE.

A photograph of a Nikon FG-20 with a Soligor 80-200mm f/4.5 zoom lens, hanging from a peg with a raincoat, alongside some dandelion clocks which I also photographed because dandelions are majestic and indomitable. All art is the result of observation. Often we see yet do nothing. Sometimes we do not notice at all. Ideas are fragile. They quickly vaporise if they are not preserved and developed. The universe is full of broken fragments of ideas.

A whimsical reflection on digital and its analogue and mechanical predecessor. Photographed using a 58mm Helios-44 f/2 lens on a Canon EOS 40D camera.

A bricolage of bric-a-brac, if that's not too many bricks to introduce in a description of a photograph lacking any masonry at all.

Lots of reassuring metal in a simple sturdy camera built to last. But along comes Cowboy Danny Digital and the gunfight is short and one-sided. So let's concentrate on the lens which came with the camera. M42 thread. Crude, and was later jettisoned in favour of bayonet fitting when electronics were introduced so that exact register could be guaranteed (not a possibility with screw thread). Construction metal and glass but surprisingly light in weight. 55mm focal length - they liked an extra 5mm in those days. Six iris diaphragm blades. Auto and manual capability (auto being the ability to focus with the aperture wide open and on pressing the shutter it closed down by itself to your selected aperture). This is a later version with a rubber focussing ring, introduced around 1972. Earlier types had the hill-and-dale focussing ring which looks much cooler in my opinion. F/1.8 maximum aperture. Not especially fast but certainly not useless indoors so long as you had loaded at least 400 ISO film (called ASA in those days - ISO came later). Very nice handling from this combination. But I no longer use film and therefore I sold it to some lucky eBayer several years ago.

The theatre beyond the dray to the right hand side is the Apollo Victoria, Wilton Road, SW1. It was originally a cinema, opening in 1930. Its days showing films ceased in 1976 and it languished for a few years before being converted into a theatre. At the time of this photograph, it is host to Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical 'Starlight Express'. Photographed with a Minolta 7000AF SLR and 50mm f/1.7 lens.

The Chinon CX is a 35mm SLR film camera with the M42 lens mount. It was on sale betwen 1974 and 1976. It is a basic yet sturdy instrument, and was offered with a choice of decent 55mm prime lenses - an f/1.7 (pictured) and an f/1.4, for an extra few pounds.

AF Nikkor 35-70mm f/2.8 lens on a Nikon D50.

Canon EOS 40D + Chinon 55mm f/1.4.

Photographed with a Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI lens, made sometime between 1977 and 1981, in combination with a Nikon TC-16A teleconverter on a Nikon D2Xs camera. This provided a focal length of 320mm and a field of view equivalent to almost 500mm on a full frame SLR. The TC-16A was designed to work with Nikon's first AF cameras during the 1980s. It enables photographers to mount manual focus lenses and, within certain limits, use them in automatic focus mode. By some strange design quirk, it functions on the D2Xs, Nikon's last professional camera to use the APS-C format. The people pictured were part of a production team for some mediaeval drama being filmed at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, which I happened upon by chance.

The Nikon FG-20 was introduced in 1984. Its production run was less than a year. Compact and even lighter than the EM, it was aimed squarely at the consumer end of the market. Whilst it had a better specification than the EM, it was a reduced-spec variant of the FG which had been introduced two years earlier as an up-market variant of the EM. Sales of the FG appear to have been disappointing; perhaps it was too complex for potential buyers. Hence the pared-down (and short lived) FG-20. In appearance and design its ancestry is clear with similarities to the FE, FM family. It was to be the last in this line. Its successors would have more rounded body styling with extensive use of polycarbonates, DX coding for film, built-in winders and flash, and automatic focus. Thus the FG-20 is something of a scene-closer and for users of film is so compact that with a small-profile lens attached you won’t want a kit bag if you have a largish pocket. It is the sort of camera that gets taken places when others do not. The lens you see in the photograph is a Vivitar 28mm f/2.8 Close Focus AiS lens made in Japan under contract by Komine. This photograph was made with a Nikon D90 in manual mode using a Nikon Series E 75-150mm zoom lens.

The APS system was introduced in 1996 with participation by Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, and Konica. Other companies got in on the act, such as Boots, the English chemist chain. Many people bought new cameras and many film developers invested in new processing equipment. The directors and shareholders of the companies behind the 'innovation' rubbed their hands with glee. It was an inferior system and lasted until 2011 although anyone with half an eye on the camera market would not have bought into APS for a good many years prior to 2011. APS cost more and gave inferior results to 35mm. Like all the cartridge-based systems before it, it ultimately failed. Caveat emptor. Nikon D2Xs and 55mm Micro-Nikkor f/3.5 AI lens. 640 ISO, 1/100th sec, f/3.5.