Half an hour’s walk from my house is historic Greenwich. It’s the most famous name in naval tradition, forever associated with the Royal Navy and the admirals and seafarers that helped create the biggest empire in human history.
One of the highlights is the National Maritime Museum, opened in the 1930s to celebrate Greenwich’s proud maritime history, located in Greenwich Park. Just inside the museum is an enormous model of the British battleship King George V, launched not long after the museum was built. It’s one of the ships which chased down the German Navy’s flagship, the Bismark, in 1941, and later accepted the surrender of the Italian Navy’s battleships.
I took a similar picture to this a while back in Istanbul’s Koch Museum, a treasure trove of things that drive, sail or fly. You can see the pic here – taken on black and white film, it looked like something that might shimmer into view in a dreamy underwater film sequence
This time – it being a blazingly sunny day outside – I was shooting on slide film in one of my Pentax ES IIs; I’ve been lucky enough to find a few last rolls of LOMOgraphy’s Chrome 100 film; rebranded Kodak Elite Chrome 100, perfect for cross-processing. Those classic cross-processing colour shifts give the old battleship a greeny-gold glow, the barrels of the cannons making it look like some kind of multi-eyed monster.
Check out more pics taken on the Pentax ES II on Flickr.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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