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'climb the mountains & get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you & the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.' _John Muir
Needed to use a roll of CineStill 800T that was doing nothing other than languishing in the fridge. I was holding out on where I was going to shoot it. 'I know' I thought, i'll go up to the West End and shoot it in and around Piccadilly and Soho. I was met with utter disappointment mixed with a little sadness when getting there. As a kid in my Teens, we’d go to Soho to have a laugh and generally just kick around and well, just being teens (this would have been around 1980). We stared with big, wide open eyes at the woders that were before us. Porn, sex, strip clubs, peep shows and everything else you care to think of…and…lots of neon. As a teen it was an amzing place. Fast forward to 2021 and what we find is a sanitized, clean, safe and socially cleansed area that has had the heart torn from it. Gentrified to the max, all the ‘danger’ from the past has been eradicated. When I say d ‘danger’ I’m not saying it was a dangerous place to be but its edginess, its sleeze and rough underbelly that made Soho what it was. OK, not for everyone but to to remove all this history I really find quite depressing and sad. Anyway, we cris-crossed Soho and found nothing so moved onto Chinatown and Piccadilly. At this point my whole focus on what I was doing had ebbed away so the composition of these photos is (in my opinion) a little sub-par. I decided to use the Minolta X-700 as its metering etc is second to none. I also used a vintage Rokkor f1.7 50mm lens. Initially, I was expecting the photos to come back from the lab as horrible under/over exposed pix but lo-and-behold I got back a full set of 36 of which most were quite striking. The effect is stunning. So, there you have it. I’ve since bought two more rolls and am about to go to Berlin for a few days so the next trip out with CineStill and my Minolta should be interesting. Thanx for looking. Dean 10/2021
