As happens most years, I went into town on the day of the annual Classics on the Moor car show in Sheffield city centre. I took my Yashica Mat 124G with me and shot a couple of rolls of film, one black and white, the other colour. Here are the black and white images.
The same owners and cars are often present at the event, so some of these cars will have undoubtedly featured on the blog before. The little Fiat 500 certainly has.
Castle Hill overlooks the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield and has served as a settlement for more than 4,000 years. The remains of ancient hill forts can be found there, but the most striking feature now is Victoria Tower, a considerably more recent addition, dating back a mere 126 years to when it was opened in commemoration of the then-queen having sat on the British throne for 60 years.
The tower is 106 feet tall and you can climb to the top (or near to the top) for a small fee. There are a number of landings with seats at various levels of the tower for the weary climber to regain their breath. The bottom picture was taken from one of these, with the distant (and considerably taller, at 1,047 feet) Emley Moor television transmitter visible through the window.
One of the interesting things about the area around Dean Clough Mill in Halifax is the way that the inner city road system crosses the deep valley. Look one way and there are Victorian factory buildings and smokestacks, look the other and concrete flyovers criss-cross the sky like something out of a Judge Dredd story.
In places they contrast, such as in the first three images below – in fact the first picture is actually an alternate view of the famous snicket photographed by Bill Brandt, which I posted about a few days ago.
It’s a very interesting location to make photographs.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford XP2 Super. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Many pubs have shelters for their customers who choose to sit or stand outside the premises with their drinks, often in the form of gazebos or large umbrellas. The Hop Monkey in Halifax has taken things to a whole new level though, placing a shelter over the entire pub…
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford XP2 Super. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Another batch of pictures from Halifax, including at least one more that mimics one of Bill Brandt’s compositions from almost a hundred years previously. While the usage of this area has changed, much of the architecture remains the same as it would have been way back then.
Yashicamat 124G & Fujifilm Acros. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°. (except the final image, which was shot on Ilford XP2 Super and lab developed)
Back in the early 1930s, German-born photographer Bill Brandt moved to the UK and began to document British society. Part of this work took place in the norther English town of Halifax, and included a photograph of a cobbled snicket (a narrow alleyway) which has become quite famous. Brandt’s version, which can be seen in this article was photographed in 1937, when the mills and factories were still in full industrial operation (indeed, you can see a small cloud of smoke at the top of Brandt’s picture from a chimney obscured by the top of the mill building).
The buildings in the area still exist today, although their occupancy has moved from industry (one of the world’s largest carpet factories at the time) to hotels, offices, and leisure spaces.
Brandt’s snicket still exists too, and has undoubtedly been photographed by many other photographers since, so while I was there, I made my own version. The snicket has a lot more weeds these days!