Thursday 29 March 2012

Perpignan Provia


Perpignan
Yashica Mat 124G
Fuji Provia 100F

"From the ice age", sang Morrissey of The Smiths, "to the dole age, there is but one concern". Whilst in France I took a lot of film with me, and had a bit of a film-off. Kodak Ektar, some old expired Ektachrome Plus, some new Ektachrome 100VS, some Fuji Provia slide film, Pro 400 negative film, even a couple of rolls of Velvia. Here's some Provia.

Provia is Fuji's conventional slide film. It has a straightforward colour palette, neither purple nor green nor yellow, and of course Photoshop can work wonders with it. Point it at grey concrete, as I seem to have done, and you get the colour of weakened sunlight. As far as I can tell, Provia is Latin for for the road, or something like that. People called Roger they go the road. Overall it's a bit boring. No, perhaps a better word is transparent. It gets out of the way, rather than stamping its personality all over an image.

Underexpose it a bit and you get nice colour saturation, generally without Velvia's purple skies (they go deep blue instead):

Perpignan itself has a university, which probably explains the graffiti. It has an attractive central boulevard with a river, which is a five-minute walk from the train station. The town doesn't really have many tourist attractions - the castle in the centre, and the cathedral, which was being renovated when I was there - but it's very attract-ive, despite being surrounded by giant roads.


 
It's only a few miles from the Spanish border, and didn't feel very French (there's much less dogshit on the pavements, for example).

I didn't fall in love with anyone there.

it'll get you like a case of anthrax
and that's something I don't want to catch