It’s too hot to sit at my PC typing this evening, so this will be quick post.
A couple of pieces of street art a stone’s throw from each other – you can see the second piece in the first picture if you look closely.
I’m not sure of the artist of the first, but the second is by Phlegm and decorates the rear of the building that housed the now sadly departed Rare & Racy store. It closed because the building was compulsorily purcheased for re-development, but years have passed and not a sign of this has yet appeared.
This is the entrance to the former Christ Church Central building in Sheffield city centre. The building is no longer used by the church – it appears they’ve moved just across the road to what looks like a bigger location.
I’ve never been in either building but used to work nearby when I was younger and also found it interesting how the church resided in a low-rise building mostly indistinguishable from the other small industrial units that surrounded it.
Now it looks like a group of weeds are awaiting the doors to be opened.
As with yesterday’s post of 35mm photos of Emley Moor, today here are a couple of 35mm shots of Denby Dale (or, more specifcally, the viaduct) taken on the same visit as the medium format pictures I posted here.
Of the two pictures, the first one (above) is my definite favourite. I also have a medium format version of the same scene but, despite it’s increased resolution and detail, I prefer the more gritty look of the 35mm image. It would perhaps have been nice to have a train crossing the bridge, but my time was limited and I didn’t know the running schedule.
The second shot is another variant of one of the medium format pictures I made (which can be seen in the linked post above), but taken from a vantage point a little further up the road.
A few more photographs of Emley Moor transmitter, this time made with my Canon Sure Shot Supreme. I bought five rolls of Agfa APX 100 a few weeks ago to see how it looked in 135 format – I’ve shot it once before, but that was 120 (plus it was an expired roll) – and the first roll I’ve developed has been a little hit and miss.
The whole roll looks slightly over-developed, with overly bright results and, while some frames have little grain, others look like they’ve been shot with agrainy high-asa emulsion. I don’t think that this is an exposure issue as the camera used hasn’t suffered in that way on anything else I’ve shot with it, so it’s either the film and developer combination, or something that has occurred as a result of my scanning and post-processing.
I shall be interested to see the results from the next roll when I shoot it.
It’s one of those horribly humind days here today. I had plans of finishing work for the week and getting on with a few things I wanted to do. But then, literally just as I was about to down tools for the day one of my sons infomed me that his internet wasn’t working. All the other network connected devices in the house were operating as expected. Cue the next 1.5 hours of me faffing around trying to find a solution.
At first I thought it might just be a case of resetting the router, but that failed to resolve things. Then I tried swapping his homeplug for one from a working device. No luck there. I tried deleting his PC from the router so it would reconnect. Nada. Eventually I found out that, for some unknown and annoying reason, the plug socket in which his homeplug was inserted was at fault. Despite it looking like it was fine – the homeplug lit up and flickered as though connected, and it had been working perfectly well for years up until today – for some reason it now wasn’t. Connecting the homeplug to another socket six inches away resolved the issue.
And now, here I am, hot, sweaty and pi**ed off at having to start my weekend in this way.
Here are a coiple of photos of windows on office blocks for no real reason other than I uploaded them both to Flickr today.
This telephone box at Shireoaks is slowly being engulfed by ivy. Perhaps it wants to make a call?
It was slightly awkward to make the shot as, firstly the sun disappeared behind the largest cloud in the sky, and then a guy in a van pulled up behind our car and asked if we could move as we were blocking a gate (although there were no signs or markings stating that this wasn’t allowed – it wasn’t a gate that vehicles could pass through, and it could be easily entered be people). As a result I had to grab the shot pretty quickly as soon as the light re-appeared.
I’ve been meaning to visit the Emley Moor television tower for some time now so, while on a week’s leave from work recently, I decided to take the opportunity.
The transmitter is visible from miles around (although not from where I live, it being fully obscured by all the hills around Sheffield) and can easily be seen from the M1 or A1 roads whenever we’ve driven north. As well as it being an impressive sight, it also provides a pang of nostalgia for my childhood where, on days I was up early before television had started for the day, there would be a bombastic start-up broadcast announcing that “Yorkshire Television was broadcasting from the Emley Moor, Belmont and associated transmitters of the Independent Broadcasting Authority“, accompanied by a stirring orchestral piece that gave the impression that a bunch of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers were fighting off an attacking German force or something, so much like a WWII movie theme it sounded.
Although I’ve seen the tower on numerous occasions, this was my first close visit since one time I went to one of my friends’ relatives houses who lived close to it. That would have been the better part of forty years ago! My, how time flies!
It took a little over half-an-hour to drive there (most of the trip being on a fast route up the motorway) and there’s a small car-park beside the road near the transmitter. I’d planned some potential shots in advance from the comfort of my PC by using Google Street View. As the cameras on the Street View cars have super-wide-angle lenses though, it’s difficult to know exactly what your own shots might look like, and unless I moved away a considerable distance from the tower (it’s already quite a distance from the road as-is), it was impossible to fit it into the frame with the 80mm lens on my Yashica Mat 124G, so the first couple of pictures here show only the base of the tower. Well, towers actually – the thin metal mast is a temporary structure that was constructed in 2018 to maintain broadcasts while the main tower undergoes maintenance. The upper sections of the metal mast were lowered into place by helicopter apparently.
The concrete tower is 1,084′ tall and the metal mast 21′ shorter. The concrete tower is the tallest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom and was built in 1969 after the previous mast (the second one built on the site) collapsed due to an accumulation of ice. Although not open to the public, there is a lift that takes people to the equipment area that operates at the top of the tower. It apparently takes seven minutes to reach the top in the lift.
The official name of the structure is The Arquiva Tower, after the company that operates it, but it is commonly known as Emley Moor.
I had to drive further from the tower in order to get the full structure in the frame, and even here I’ve had to correct some very noticeable converging verticals. I like the way it towers over the farmhouse in this shot.
Another wide shot from even further away. I like the cyclist that has just entered the bottom left of the scene. Because of the angle of view, the temporary tower appears to be much taller than the main structure in this picture.
In all it was a nce trip. There isn’t an awful lot to do at the tower given it’s privately operated with no public access, but it’s very impresive to behold from close up.
Yashica Mat 124G & Ilford Delta 400 (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
This small trophy and key-cutting shop was bathed in some nice light on the same evening I made the scarecrow photos I posted yesterday.
While I’m having more success scanning E6 film when using Vuescan instead of EpsonScan, I still find I have to tweak the colours somewhat. I think a purple / magenta cast is a factor of the film emulsion when shooting Provia and Velvia, but it still seems to be somewhat overbearing still in my scans, so I tweak the colours to try and get them as close to the original transparencies as I can. I’m mostly successful I think, but I’ve not quite nailed the reds yet.
A few weeks ago we drove through the village of Harthill (the same day I made the photos of the person magnet fishing, the house with the pointed roof, and Shireoaks station) and noticed a whole series of “scarecrows” dotted about the place. I call them scarecrows as it seems a reasonable term, although that wasn’t their purpose. They had been installed as part of the village carnival – held virtually for this year – in celebration of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I didn’t have any film left in the camera or on me when we encountered them, so I drove back out to the village later that afternoon to photograph some of them before they were removed.
Steel City Snapper photography 