My son is working in Wensleydale at the moment, on a Polar Express experience aboard a steam train and we drove up to Darlington on Friday afternoon, watched Wicked at the VUE, stayed overnight, battled with the large amount of snow slowing us down in the morning and having a good laugh riding on the train with the actors playing roles from the book and the movie.
Then on Saturday afternoon I had to drive back the 200 miles to Shrewsbury and have a chill out before deciding if the Sunday would be the right day to revisit the Dudley Zoo and Castle for a reshoot. I had done some miles over the last few days but a quick look at the weather in Dudley seemed promising so I packed up the Bronica ETRS and my 5D Mk IV, along with a go-pro to set off the next morning.
Back To The Zoo
My last shoot at Dudley Zoo with the Redscale XR film proved to be not very successful and many of the images I captured out of the 45 frames were unusable. Mainly as I’d metered the exposures with a light meter and the ISO set to 200. Reading up on it since I see that this film likes to be flooded with light, and the more it gets the better it behaves. There is an argument that the less light, the more red it is, but my results from the second shoot, the first with the redscale film, were so red there was barely any usable information on the negatives. It was time to take some more Redscale back to the zoo and this time I planned to expose all frames by at least two stops over what the meter said.
Upon arriving in the rain I unpacked everything, set up the tripod, fixed the Bronica to it and screwed in my shutter release cable ready for the longer exposure shots on this dull grey day. I had sent an email ,as documented in the last post, to Dudley Zoo to see if I could get a comp ticket but I heard nothing back, so had to cough up the £20 for the entrance. This might be the last time I go to the zoo for a while.
Entrance Gateway
Before going into the entrance I walked around to the original Entrance Gateway which is a series of turnstiles underneath a set of differing heights concrete wave roofs. Here was the first of the listed buildings I would photograph, it’s a grade II listed building and I set the camera up using the AE II metering prism to aid in the set up of the framing and metering, as well as using my Sekonic light meter. Last time I came I used the Waist Level view finder and the sekonic meter, this time I would use the sekonic again, and the AEII to see which was more reliable.
I began taking photos with the camera at the bottom end of the turnstiles and only when I changed to the upper end did I notice that the metering prism viewfinder was set to Auto, meaning that the changes I’d made to the shutter speed to allow an extra two stops would have been overridden by the auto setting. I changed the dial from A to M, and now the meter in the viewfinder would advise me of the proposed shutter speed but it would have no impact on the shot. It allowed me to check the meter against what I saw on the handheld Sekonic and it was mostly close in comparison.
Documenting the Shoot
I had taken a GoPro camera with me also to see if I could grab any usable data in terms of settings rather than writing it all down in my notebook. It was a wet day in the end and having to write on wet paper would have been a challenge so the GoPro came good. It allows me to remember what the settings were for each of the shots I videoed and I can refer back to these as soon as I get the films back from the Lab. They went into AG Photolab so should be back soon. Using a digital camera the metadata records all the details of each individual shot, with film on this Bronica ETRS it’s either, remember everything, write it down, or video it. I chose the last.
This video with some narration and information can be found on YouTube at the link embedded below.
The video does not fully show the quantity of rain that was falling that day except you can see a few drops on the camera and the scenery. At one point the black coating was peeling off my AEII viewfinder, I don’t know why this happened but it doesn’t seem to have done any real damage.
The video contains stills captured on my Canon 5D that I was shooting with, in the event that the rest of the films are ruined and the shots unusable, but I’ll not know whether I need to fall back on these until the negatives are returned.
Amazing Architecture
The architecture at the zoo is amazing, though the visitors to the attraction, there weren’t many, are pretty oblivious to the significance of the structures that surround the animals that they are fascinated by. I particularly love the differences in the angles and curves that are on display The overlap of different structures in the zoo so that a curve from one aligns with another, or the sharp and straight edges appear to cut into a curve on another piece of concrete.
The fact that the buildings are still here after eight decades and are listed, in most cases, is a testament to their quality and uniqueness. They have obviously been through some tough times and there was some major restoration works done on them as can be seen here: https://tectons.dudleyzoo.org.uk/
I talked in the previous post of how the scenery, structures, locations and animals are a massive part of Dudley and the Black Country too. Millions of people across the 80 plus years have been through the gates and I would hazard a guess that anyone who has been into the zoo in their lifetime might recognise the architecture in a photograph when confronted with it on the wall.
People from further afield, outside the Black Country, will have also been to the zoo in the past and must remember the experience and hopefully hold onto good memories of the area and the attraction. If these shots are used in the “The Matter Of The Black Country” exhibition at Centrala Gallery in Digbeth, January 2025, it will likely prick a few people’s recollections of their childhood or when they have taken their kids, nieces and nephews to the zoo in the past. Whilst they may not have much knowledge of the significance of the architecture to the modernist or brutalist design aesthetic I’m certain that the features might trigger a long forgotten memory of being a child buying som econfectionery from a person behind the kiosk or running around on the observation platforms looking into a ravine to see the dangerous animals.
I’ve only been to Dudley and the Zoo three times in my life but I would guess that almost every person in the Black Country has been to the Zoo at some point in their formative years. To me this makes it a part of each Black Country person and part of the “Matter” that makes up people in the region. They might argue with me to the amount of relevance the zoo has to their upbringing but there would be no denying that this is a central point where the life stories of millions of people have intersected over the preceding decades.
Examples
Some of the photos I captured on the Canon 5D can be seen below and I made these for two purposes. One, as a set of reference images to see how the film behaves, and two, as a backup collection of photos in the even that these three rolls of film are damaged, lost or just didn’t work as expected.
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