One of the buildings at Avoncroft Museum is a tollhouse which was originally located at Little Malvern, Worcestershire. It was built by the Upton-upon-Severn Turnpike trust in 1822 for a total cost of £56 (equivalent to around £6,400 today – if only new houses cost so little now!).
The house was manned by two volunteers – a married couple both dressed in vintage attire and carrying out tasks using the equipment of the day. The lady was in the kitchen, preparing a whole array of baked goods – bread rolls, rock cakes, pies, and a joint of pork to be roasted. While the food wasn’t being prepared for visitors to the museum, we went back to the tollhouse later in the day and were kindly treated to a sample of some of the wares. I had a rock-cake, which was very nice, but one of our party even went so far as to take some of the bread rolls – spread with fresh hand-churned butter – home with him!
The house was fully fitted out with period furniture and appliances, including this wash-stand in one of the upstairs rooms.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fomapan 400 (shot at 200asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
As I mentioned in yesterdays post, back at the beginning of August I took a trip to visit Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings, which is situated in Worcestershire (that’s pronounced “wustersher” for any non-UK folks that are reading) in the West Midlands.
The trip was a get together of photographers form an online forum that I’m a member of. There were only three of us present – well, four actually, but the other person arrived separately and we somehow managed to miss each other for the entire time we were there!), and after some introductions – it was the first time we’d met in “real” life, we spent a few hours wandering around the place taking photographs.
The museum opened in 1967 to provide a location for the reconstruction of a 15th-century timber-framed house which had been carefully dismantled in Bromsgrove in 1962. The site is an open air collection of now over 30 buildings that have been rescued from demolition and rebuilt on the site. It was the first open air museum in England.
As usual, I spent more time looking for photographs than I did finding out about the different buildings, but I’ve added a few notes about some of the structures below where I have them…
This dovecote was originally located at Haselour Hall Manor, Staffordshire and was constructed in the early 17th century.
The windmill originates from Danzey Green, Warwickshire.
This 16th threshing barn was originally located at a farm in Cholstrey, Herefordshire.
Known locally as the ‘iron church’ or tin church’, this church was built in the parish of Whitbourne, Herefordshire, in 1891. This type of inexpensive kit-built church were built in newly established industrial areas, and isolated rural and coastal locations to promote Christianity and combat non-conformism.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fomapan 400 (shot at 200asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
A couple of months back I visited Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings and have quite a few pictures to share from the day. However, as I still haven’t had time to sit down properly to pull that post together, here are a couple of shots taken during the visit NOT of historic buildings.
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fomapan 400 (shot at 200asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
I promise I’ll get back to the film stuff soon – I’ve got loads of it to come! But after spending the last hour shredding garden waste, I’m not in the mood to write a lot, and my next film related post will probably be one that contains a lot of images.
So, for now, here’s another from the digital archive. I was going to post this in it’s original 3:2 ratio, but then I experimented with some crops and much prefer this panoramic “X-Pan” version. Even after cropping away a significant portion of the original 24mp frame there’s still a ton of detail. Click through to see the original on Flickr for a better view.
Who needs an expensive 100mp Hasselblad X2D II? I do, please… :D.
Continuing my dig around my archive of pictures I took and then never published. In part because I have another post that’s film-related that I haven’t had the time to write, and doing this is quicker, but also because it’s fun to look back and see things you missed before.
As of today I have seven rolls of film waiting to be scanned. All 35mm rolls, all 36 exposures except for a single bulk-rolled short roll that just has 15 shots. So somewhere in the region of 230 pictures yet to scan.
I addition I also have three rolls that have been scanned, but not yet post-processed. Again, all 35mm, but this time two 36 exposure rolls and another short roll, which bumps the total up to around 320 images in total.
I have another 36 exposure roll in one of my cameras with perhaps two or three frames remaining, so when that is finished and developed I’m at nearly 360 photographs.
Usually my dev>scan>process workflow is much quicker, but I’ve been holding back recently, in part because I’ve had a bunch of already processed shots to upload and so wasn’t in a rush, but also because of something I saw in a YouTube video I watched a while back from Sean Tucker. The video is all about how to choose your best images and in part refers back to one of his earlier videos where he interviewed landscape photographer Rachel Talibart who explains her approach to reviewing her images.
She says that, often, after a day of photography, she returns home on a high about the pictures she’s taken and can still be tripping about the experience for some time afterwards. This mood, she says, is not the best for objectively assessing the photographs she’s taken. Because she’s still tripping on the experience, the photos will often be a disappointment and no match for the fresh memories of the experience. She also finds it very difficult to edit the photographs while still on the high.
Looking at the photos straight away distorts her appreciation of the images. She’s often looking for something very specific and can discount the images that don’t meet this preconception. As a result she can miss good pictures. However, if she looks at them later – six months, a year, two years, the good images she might have overlooked initially present themselves much more readily to her now more objective eye.
I’ve recently been looking back through older, mostly digital, images and found this to be the case, finding pictures that I did nothing with that are actually, to me at least, quite good and more than worth revisiting.
So, while I have a glut of film pictures, I’m trying to take a similar approach and waiting to scan and process them. I still have an idea what is on most of the rolls I’ve shot, but many of the individual frames have faded from memory so when I come to scan them they will appear fresh to my eye and, hopefully, I’ll be able to objectively assess them and see which are good.
This obviously comes down to my own subjectivity in terms of what I do and don’t like, but I’m looking forward to see how this technique works. At the very least, the anticipation I feel is making me very much look forward to revisiting the scenes I felt worthy of a picture back when I photographed them.
Ironically, some of the photos I have been uploading recently are more recent ones that have jumped the queue, including this slightly apt picture…
Nikon F80 & Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 ED VR on Fujifilm Acros II. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 9mins @ 20°
Another picture that’s been sat unpublished since 2019. A little cropping, rotating, and a black & white conversion, and this has turned into a really nice picture, I think.
Panasonic Lumix GX7 & Panasonic Lumix G Vario 12-60 mm f/3.5-5.6 Asph.
