Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Spurn Point, Yorkshire, UK
I drove over the M62 very early one morning in June and after bypassing Hull arrived at Spurn Point peninsula at about 8am ... a very strange place.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Circular Quay by Rolleicord Vb
I am in love again. I am in love with medium format - my Rolleicord camera in particlar. I am in love with Fuji Neopan B&W film. But most of all I am in love with the light that suffuses Sydney in winter. I walked out today with my camera intending to take a few random pictures to use up the 'useless' B&W film I had put in it. I wanted to 'crack on' to the Ektachrome. But when I developed the film this afternoon (in LC29 1+19 for 4.5 minutes) it was a revelation. It's just like those wonderful Hedda Morrison pictures I used to see of Beijing. Or the Harold Cazneaux pictures of Sydney. I love B&W medium format. Forget the Leicas and Contaxes - Rolleicord here we come.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
West Tanfield, near Ripon, North Yorkshire
On Thursday 11th June we drove up from Leeds to Ripon, via Pool Bank and a beautiful village called Leathley. The scenery from Pool Bank was intoxicatingly beautiful to my greenery-starved antipodean eyes. We crossed the river Wharfe and carried on up, bypassing Harrogate, through the fields and along the winding roads until we reached Ripon on market day. Carried on through North Stainley, to West Tanfield, which I remember as a serene village that we used to visit in the evenings during our summer camping visits to nearby Sleningford Watermill. As you can see from the pictures, it is still as beautiful as ever, though the calm of the village is now marred by the constant thundering of large trucks trough the place. We had a look round the old churchyard while waiting for the Bull Inn to open at miidday, and came across the 14th century Marmion Tower tucked away next to the river. It used to be the gatehouse to a long last mansion owned by the Parr family (who gave us one of Henry VIII's wives). Some mansion that must have been.
Had a nice lunch at the Bull, sat inside rather than out in the beer garden next to the river because the weather looked a bit iffy.And after a walk around the village seeing the donkeys, we drove down to Sleningford, which is still functioning as a campsite and canoe centre - but the day charge of five quid per visitor put us off from staying more than the minute it took to take a few snaps.
And then we went on to Fountains Abbey, but that's a whole other series of pictures ....
Monday, June 29, 2009
A short break in England ...
It's like Briggate round here ... and I will be posting some of the pictures I took on my return 'home' (is it?) in June. I had my nifty new Nikon 35ti and the Leica R7 and took quite a lot of slide film ... so watch this space. I also salvaged a load of old photos and negatives from the attic of my brother's house where they have been in storage for decades. Wil be scanning and posting some of them too.
Images from the attic: Carolyn Gledhill, Kings Rd, 1980
Hello Carolyn if you're out there. I used to sit next to you on the number 6 bus back to Bramley from Cardinal Heenan, remember, and once plucked up the courage to ask you out. To my surprise I think we even went out on a date once - obviously just to humour me. This was taken on that day trip to London, where we went down the Kings Rd to see the punks at World's End.
Then you went off to Canada and transformed into a North American almost overnight. I paid a visit to Kitchener-Waterloo in the mid 1980s after visiting NYC, and you were engaged to ... Scott? It all seemed a very long way from Swinnow.
Suits you sir
Here's another good one from under the floorboards. This must have been taken at Janet Richmond's wedding to 'Roxy Paul' Roberts in Leeds around 1980. I remember that suit very well. It was my first and best ever suit, made to measure in mohair by a bespoke tailor who worked in a little room down one of the ginnels off Briggate. We used to take our alterations to him from Huggy Bears and I got into conversation with him about the possibility of having a suit made up like Bryan Ferrys. This was the result. It cost me a lot of money in those days when I earned five quid a day working at Huggy Bears on Saturday.
To the left are my co-workers Janet Wilkinson and Tracey Radford. I always enjoyed a good gossip with Tracey - she was from Wortley and on the same wavelength as me. I kept in touch and used to pop in and see her at her travel agency after I moved away from Leeds - she always represented what I liked best about Yorkshire girls (down to earth, friendly and always so slightly cynical).
Where are they now? Sarah Busbridge, Norfolk, 1980
Sarah Busbridge ... I found this picture in the attic in Leeds and It is one of a wonderful set (see my Flickr site) that I'd quite forgotten I had taken. In 1980, while I was at St Thomas Aquinas - or just after I left, I can't remember now - I went fruit picking to Wroxham in Norfolk. It was a strange place, a fruit picking camp called Tunstead Farm, I think. There was a group of us, mostly British, but an Australian and a few Poles, from behind the then quite-hard-to-breach Iron Curtain. I'm afraid I can't remember much about the camp, except that it was bloody hard work and i didn't make any money. But I do remember very fondly the long summer evenings when we would walk out along the country lanes to some of the local pubs. One I remember near Coltishall had a ridiculously small bar, even smaller than my living room at home.
Sarah was from Surrey - Bookham, near Leatherhead, and seemed very posh to me. She played the piano and was very intelligent and - I know it's a cliche - had a great sense of humour. I didn't deserve her attention. We met up again in Leeds during the summer holidays in Leeds, but I was stupid and shallow enough to stop seeing her, I think because the way she said 'vegetables' annoyed me at the time. I must have been fixated with the prospect of moving to London that autumn for my first year at university and the delusion of a glamorous student life that awaited me. The ignorance of youth.
Phil, me and John Bourke, Liverpool 1980-ish
Just thought I'd post this as a tribute to my good friend JB, who died of cancer this year. This is how I remember him.
(These are scans of some old negatives I dug out of the attic on my last visit to the UK.)
Melbourne winter dawn
Nikon 35ti and Agfa CT100 slide film, which leaves a funny violet cast that kind of looks alright on this pic, but I've photoshopped it off the rest.
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