A Project Idea

Back in the summer of 2023 I bought a bunch of expired B&W 35mm film (Ilford XP2 Super 400 to be precise) and I was unsure of what to do with it. I decided to spend the summer months capturing the Ards Peninsula, a stretch of Northern Ireland straddling Strangford Lough and the Irish Sea, an area which I live quite close to.

The Ards Peninsula is a very beautiful, very rural part of the country and one that doesn’t get a lot of tourists (probably due to it being a Peninsula). Although very close to Belfast, parts of the Peninsula feel very isolated and cut-off from the rest of the island. There are areas where it even feels like stepping back in time.

My idea for this project was to shoot around this area all summer, explore and capture what I found and see what themes arose from the images.

Out of this project came a photo zine I titled ‘Life & Death On The Peninsula’ featuring some images I captured that summer. I handed the zines out to some friends and sold a few on my website. Have a flick through the zine below and if you’d like a physical copy, shoot me a message on Instagram. I think I still have a few lying around here somewhere.

Have a flick through the digital version of the photo zine below…

Life & Death on the peninsula

by Ross McConaghy

What I Learned

This was the first project I shot entirely on 35mm film and it was a really fun experience. Each day I was exploring the Ards Peninsula, I was super focused and present on what was in front of me. Shooting the project on film made me really decisive with my photographs and whether each scene ‘deserved’ to be captured or not.

I would definitely shoot a project like this again in the future, maybe even in the same area as this one. Maybe next time round the project could be focused more on the people of the area, something I feel was lacking with this one. Who knows...

* Note to self. Don’t buy expired film again. I thought the weird effects of the expired film would add to the story of these images (in some cases it did), there were however some scans I got back that I wish had been cleaner. The effects of the expired film on some frames was just too distracting to even print.

Putting the ‘Life & Death On The Peninsula’ photo zine together was a really great learning exercise for me, choosing the layout and what photographs to display together on each page. It was only when I was forced to pair images for the zine that I started to see common themes and links between them.

All of the photographs from this project were captured in July/August 2023 and were shot on expired Ilford XP2 Super 400 film using my Minolta SRT 100X and three ROKKOR lenses.

(28mm MC W.ROKKOR SG f3.5 // 135mm MC TELE ROKKOR PF f2.8 // 58mm MC ROKKOR PF f1.4)

Thanks to Jack’s Lab for developing and scanning all of the images from this project. Check out more photographs from this project below…