Bowler hats and ghosts

My wife and I visited York in December to see the Christmas markets. As always tends to be the case at these things, the wares on offer were not cheap! That didn’t put us off buying some treats, and we came away with selections of cheeses and biscuits and other bits and pieces. It also seems set in law that there must be a stall selling bratwurst cooked over a charcoal fire at all these markets. I had a concoction of bratwurst, chips, and various toppings for my lunch, but there was some sort of jam stuff on there too which wasn’t really to my taste and I wish I’d just had a sausage in a bun instead.

Wandering round York city centre I took some pictures where I could with my Yashicamat 124G (and a few with my Olympus XA-3 which was tucked in my jacket pocket). It was pretty busy and trying to get pictures without someone walking into frame while I set up the shot or (more annoyingly) just as I pressed the shutter, was difficult.

The two shots here were taken at The Shambles, York’s famous medieval shopping street. This quaint street with it’s hundreds-of-year-old buildings is busy at the best of times as a tourist trap, but is made even busier by the fact of having a Harry Potter shop at one end, and The York Ghost Merchants at the other.

It’s the latter shop from which the two bowler-hatted gentlemen featured in today’s pictures were from. There was a queue of at least fifty people waiting to go into the shop to acquire their very own unique ghost (including a lot of overseas tourists. These spooky figurines are clearly popular!), so these people (of which there were at least four) were acting as crowd-control in the very narrow and very busy street.

The first shot was taken from close to minimum focus distance with me backed right up against the window of a baker’s shop. The second doesn’t look too busy, but you’ll notice that it’s cropped from the Yashica’s usual square format. This is because I has perhaps a quarter of a second to photograph the guy outside the shop before the crowds closed in again. There are people entering and exiting frame at the left and right of the full frame version.

Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°

Taken on 16 December 2023