DM: 23 March 2022 Oxford!

To start, what a great day we had; excellent weather (if a little bright for photography) and even better company. I'm sure the participants will all have their own angles to show, and I'm looking forward to seeing them, but before we begin I am sure I speak for us all when I offer a big Thank You to @Howard_S for leading us through the city and keeping us informed throughout the day. It could't have been better.

I have just loaded all my Oxford photos into LR and will post some later today as they get sorted. But to start us off, here is the group photo:



L-R: Brian (@bonneville), Alan (@alanfrombangor), Phil (@Phil Wood), Martin (@mgjsmith), Howard (@Howard_S) and Bob (@Bob J)

It was great to be back in a group again.

However, I fell foul of the law of not using Alpha gear...

I'd brought along my recently aquired Sony R1 and had charged the batteries the night before (the standard charger is in-body, but the battery fits the A-mount battery chargers). While I had a battery out the camera lost its memory settings, so I had to reset the date when it was scwitched back on...

...through the day I was saying to people that I'd be intrigued to see what I could get out of the SR2 RAW files - however, even the fact that the camera was beeping at every opportunity failed to alert me that the camera had set back to factory settings - which include JPG output. So not as much of a camera test as I'd expected...

OK, I'll continue with a brace of film shots. My thanks to Alan for the donation of a 7000i body for Oxfam with the extras that (a) I can say it is film tested and (b) that the PB-7 programmable back works.

First off, through the ancient core of the University ...

H-1

Muse summons the photographers

H-2

Radcliffe passage

H-3

Dyxummers
Note the date stamp, bottom right showing that the ellectronics will work well in to the 21st century

H-4

White rabbit in the Covered Market
Figures from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by Oxford don Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), decorate the market.

All the film shots will be posted in the One-Third Keepers film thread in due course, but the DM meet comes first. Processing was by Sanppy Snaps and it took 37 minutes from handing it in to the shop desk to receiving a download link for the scanned files.

The film is Fujicolor Superia 200 of unknown expiry date.

What a pleasure to see.
A real live DM with unmasked old codgers out and about in Oxford, one of the greatest University cities of the world.
Armchair travel at its best.
Love this first instalment and looking forward to much more.
H-2, P03 and P04 hit the spot for me.
Thanks for sharing.

Whilst waiting for the others to arrive I did a little people watching outside the Weston Library. Sony A6300 and Sony 70-200/f4 G

MS-01 Thrashed


MS-02 Lady In Red

Now, I'm a little out of practice (as we all are) and it wasn't until we were in Oxford and had met up that I realised that I'd actually brought along a main camera that wasn't an Alpha system camera.

The AMAE team are currently looking at relaxing the rules on postings from non-alpha cameras, but we are not there yet, and I'm a great believer that those nominally 'in charge' need to be even more observant of the rules than the general membership (I was never cut out for politics).

In general the team doesn't enforce the non-Alpha posting rules harshly where meeting threads or experimental threads are concerned, but I'm going to be quite strict with myself. With the exception of a select few shots of people, I won't be posting the bulk of my shots from the day in this topic. Instead I'll include a link to the Smugmug gallery containing them all.

Bob's Sony R1 shots from the Oxford meet

I'll start with R1 shots though. The first is a stitch from my favourite panorama tool. Unfortunately Micosoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is no longer available for download, but I managed to find the last version I had downloaded and re-instaled it on my new PC...

Bob1: Phil, Martin, Howard, Brian and Alan

Sony R1 * 14.3mm * f/2.8 * 1/30 * ISO 320

This shot is a stitch of two hand-held shots - I has done very well in the foreground, with just the background at the Library where we met up looking a bit 'cubist'. The table shows more of my non-alpha bring-alongs, a Vectis S1 and a Minolta SRT (it looks like an SRT Super, but it is a 101).

Bob2: Alan & Brian. Howard and Phil are in the background, while Martin was over the street doing what Martin does best - looking for the unusual/quirky that the rest of us had not noticed...

Sony R1 * 34.9mm(!) * f/4.0 * 1/200 * ISO 160

Bob3: Martin and the pavement

Sony R1 * 33.3mm * f/6.3 * 1/250 * ISO 160

I'm rather amazed at how precise the R1 is in its EXIF about focal length..

Bob's shot of Martin prompts me to post one out of sequence

P05 Martin & Bob


Also out of sequence, before meeting the guys I passed this school group by the Bodleian
P06


Back on track - the Sheldonian:
P07


Radcliffe Camera.
P08


Howard explained how the first plate in the first photography book was of this scene. Fortunately the shot I took was croppable to a fair imitation of the original view. A downside of the B&W treatment (in honour of FT) is that the Ukrainian flags hanging from the windows lose their impact.

Channelling Fox Talbot.
P09