At least I *think* it’s barley. I’m never quite sure which is which and have to look it up, but these have awns – the thin bristles poking out of them – so I believe barley is correct.
One thing that wasn’t correct was my exposure of this roll of film. I think I’d changed the metering setting on the camera and the resultant negs were extremely thin, with a sizable number ruined as a result (losing a few pictures I think would have been pretty nice). Luckily I was able to rescue some of them and I’ll post them in the coming days.
Nikon F80, Nikkor 70-200mm f/4 ED VR & Fomapan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9 mins @ 20°.
A big picture dump today. All taken while I wandered around the railway station in Bury which is now part of the East Lancashire Railway heritage line.
I visit Bury each year to meet up with a bunch of middle-aged video game fans to spend the day in the marvelous, four-story Arcade Club, where we relive out youth playing free-to-play arcade games all day. I usually have time for a wander around before it opens though, and there’s often something interesting to see at the railway station – usually a steam train or two.
I came here with the intent of photographing views from the hillside over the city, and took a few pictures, but the best shot was this – looking in the opposite direction.
It really pays to look behind you when out with a camera. Sometimes the best views are the ones you’re walking away from.
It’s very rare that I use my phone’s camera for any creative photography. I’ll take pictures of my family, selfies, and photos of “stuff”, such as a book I might want to read at some point, or maybe some random oddity I spot while out and about, but it’s unusual for me to take a picture with the same intent I would when using a dedicated camera.
Today’s picture is one of those rare exceptions where I used my phone to take a picture with creative intent. I visited the seaside town of Withernsea this weekend gone – a place I have not visited before – and shot a bunch of photographs on film, and these will hopefully be shared in due course.
As Withernsea has a lighthouse (now a museum), this was an obvious attraction, and I made a number of pictures of it from various vantage points. One place where my film cameras were not up to the job, however, was inside the lighthouse tower itself. Maybe if I’d had a tripod and a cable release, I could have worked something out, but I didn’t. So my only option was my phone, and on this occasion it served me very well, with this resulting image of the inside of the tower looking up at the underside of the flag-draped spiral staircase being the result.
I did climb the staircase – quite a hairy experience given my mild, but still quite quite present, fear of heights – and was interested (and a little scared!) to discover that the metal railings you can see in the picture were not always present – there just used to be a rope!
This is the Castle Armoury in Bury, Lancashire, a Grade II listed building dating to 1907 and so named because it was built on the site of the former Bury Castle. Originally built to house the 8th Lancashire Rifle Volunteer Corps, which eventually evolved into the Lancashire Fusileers. They remained there until disbandment in 1967. Various other battalions and detachments were then housed in the building, including cadets and air training corps until the building was finally closed in 2022 on safety grounds due to lack of funding for repairs.
It’s quite a commanding structure, and all that stonework really pops with contrast in the right light.
A handful of remaining Woodhouse washlands pictures. Just snaps, really, but I like the tonality of them. The slight vignette of the XA3’s lens doesn’t go amiss here either.
I’ve noticed that WordPress (or possibly Flickr) seem to have altered something this week and I now have to use a different URL to embed my pictures. I used to use the Flickr share URL and paste it straight into my posts, but now I have to use the URL in the browser address bar. Anyone else had anything similar?
Steel City Snapper photography 