The Spaniard in Kinsale. If you don’t see the giant colorful mural on the side, not pictured here, I bet a regular in 1966 could walk up in 2026 and not notice a difference, aside from local fashions and modern cars.
And here it is just a few weeks ago.
I kinda new this one would be my favorite as soon as I looked it up online and saw how little it had changed. My one regret is we were short on time and I didn’t have a chance to go inside. I wanted to hand the bartender the printed copy of my grandmother’s photo.
This one took the help of the good people of Reddit, who found the spot within a few hours even though I think I posted in the middle of the night over in Ireland. Downtown Cork.
It has changed quite a bit. I leave the butcher-to-fashion-store jokes as an exercise for the reader.
Here is the second in the series of photos my grandmother took in 1966 that I have attempted to recreate on our trip in 2026.
Bowes, Dublin, Ireland, 1966
This one has changed a bit over the years but is still quite recognizable.
Bowes, Dublin, Ireland, 2026
The clock is a nice addition, but the small signs beneath it are not as cool as the old sign.
You grammar pedants can discuss how in both versions, “Bowe’s” is written with an apostrophe on the sign right above the windows but without on the signs higher up. This means something, I’m sure.
I recently digitized a roll of film my grandmother took on vacation in Ireland in 1966. I can tell she it was her roll and not my grandfather’s because every single one of the photos is shot horizontally EXCEPT a picture of her in front of a waterfall.
In anticipation of our trip to Ireland a few weeks ago, I printed copies of a few of her photos and tried to recreate them. The Where Was This Taken Reddit sub was enormously helpful.
First, this shot of downtown Dublin
Wasn’t too hard to recreate, and it hasn’t changed a lot.
Some new trees. The walkway extension over the water.
Next we have the famous O’Connell Monument in downtown Dublin.
The seagull and the Burger King are new. Otherwise, sixty years hasn’t done much. Again, the trees are bigger.
Since I got the F5, I’ve unsurprisingly been shooting more film. I just shot a roll of Cinestill, which is motion picture film that they’ve done something to so you can shoot it in a film camera and develop it C41, which is the standard developing process for color film since forever.
Cinestill has some troubling corporate tendencies. I am not dismissing these, but when I bought the roll of film I was not really aware of them. I’m probably not going to shoot any more of their film, but I am ALSO not that interested in discussing the company.
I recently picked up a used Valoi Easy35 from someone on the Dupont Photo Walk and I’ve been using that to scan film. It’s great for scanning my dad’s and my grandfather’s old stuff, but I’m struggling a bit to get results I’m happy with for my just-shot film.
So here’s a shot from that roll processed with negpy, a really nice piece of software focused on taking DSLR-scanned negatives and making nice positives out of them.
And here’s the same RAW file converted using DarkTable. DarkTable has about a billion more features than negpy but it also requires you to know how to use those features, which I largely do not.
I really want something in between these two. I want the pop from the negpy image with the detail from the darktable image. I get that sometimes you have to choose one or the other and that’s ok, but I feel like these are both the extremes and what I want is in between and it seems reasonable that I should be able to get that.
What I really need to do is learn how to use DarkTable, but the documentation is meh and that’s a lot of work, and I’m lazy. So lazy.
Since this blog uses the ActivityPub plugin and you can follow it on your ActivityPub client of choice, I’ve been trying to figure out how to alt-text images without editing the raw HTML, which is annoying.
So here is a door in Barcelona that you can enjoy even if I don’t get the alt-text working as desired.
I’m really impressed by this group. Super welcoming, people who just love photography and want to share it with others. I didn’t get many shots I was that happy with, but it was a good day of being outside with other humans.
I didn’t mean to get this woman running in my photo but I like how it turned out
I wandered around DC with the F5 today. Ran into two problems. First, it’s been so long that I’ve been shooting digital with essentially unlimited “film”, I’m having to relearn the balance between “scared to shoot anything” and “oh let me take that shot 15 times in case one is good”. I found myself struggling to take anything.
I did get a few I’m happy with on my phone.
I love how they even painted the gas meters.
Anyway, the other problem I’m having is being intimidated by other people around when I’m taking a photo. I’m just constantly worrying about what other people will think or do and I end up walking past a shot I should have taken. It’s something I need to work on.
It’s been a while, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought I loved the smell of a roll of film, fresh out of the canister. And in particular, Fuji smelled better than Kodak. This might have been because Fuji had some deal with Ritz when I was working there so their film was cheap. And because it was sort of “our” film, we were very much Fuji fans. It generally had a bit of a cooler look to it than Kodak. And Kodak was the first to start putting awful 800 speed film in disposables without a flash and telling people that was ok for indoor shots (it wasn’t) and then they’d come in with these awful, grainy, underexposed shots and complain to ME that the prints didn’t look good.
Sometimes you could show them the negatives and tell them, “hey, there’s nothing THERE. I can’t print a picture from nothing”. But mostly they were just mad.
Anyway, the roll of Fuji 200 I got this morning didn’t have much of a smell, and I was disappointed. The F5 made a really satisfying noise when it grabbed the leader, though.
