Steel City Snapper photography
35mm, medium format and large format film photography (with the odd bit of digital every now and then…)
Another digital shot dropped into the mix.
This was taken in the beautiful Monte Palace gardens on the mountainside above Funchal. There will be more pictures to come from this location which I shot with my trusty Olympus Trip 35, but I’m currently wrestling with a daunting backlog of images, so it might be a while…
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 15 August 2026
One of those rare instances where I post a picture on the same day I took it – although that is much easier when it’s a digital shot.
I visited a photo exhibition in the central library today, and this was the view up from the bottom of the (squared) spiral staircase.
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 15 August 2026
A quick post today as I don’t want to miss the eclipse (it’s getting darker as I type!).
So here’s a picture I quite like that I took the other day. The lion looks much too friendly to pounce, doesn’t it. Doesn’t it?
I took a similar picture on film too, so you might see that at some pint as well.
Ricoh GR III
Taken 8 August 2026.
UPDATE!
My eclipse photos, taken with my ancient 8 megapixel Canon S2IS bridge camera with two ND filters Blu Tac’ed to the front. I doubt they’ll impress NASA, but I’m still glad to have gotten them.
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!
Samsung Galaxy S25+.
Taken on 25 July 2026
I took a few shots of this scene, including on film, but I like this one where the guy’s red hat matched the shirt of the person beside the pool.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 28 June 2026
I noticed the way the light was passing through the curtains in our hotel room one day and took this picture.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 1 July 2026
It’s a whole degree cooler than yesterday’s 33.9°C in my home office today. That’s still over ten degrees hotter than I’d like it to be.
My expensive new fan arrived this morning, and is doing a decent job of taking the edge off the heat, but it’s not an air conditioner and there’s only so much that moving air flow can achieve, so it still feels oppressive and it’s been pretty hard to get motivated while working today.
Thankfully the temperatures are forecast to begin dropping over the weekend to a much more manageable mid-20s range (and, more importantly, overnight temps below 20°C, so there’s a chance to open the windows and flush out the hot air).
The sub-tropical climate of Madeira felt more manageable than this, mostly due to infrastructure designed to deal with it – air-con, tiled floors, window-shutters and the like, most of which go against the standard UK building methods that are designed to keep heat inside. If the summer temperatures in the UK continue to rise in future, then there is going to be a real need for change to prevent severe disruption.
But anyway, this is meant to be a photography blog, not an essay on climate change, so here’s another shot from the holiday. It’s another digital picture (although I have received four sheets of film negs back in the post today, so plenty of those to share too when I get around to it).
Being a Portugese territory, you’d expect to see plenty of Portugese flags in Madeira, but there were probably more than usual due to the World Cup tournament taking place while we were there (Madeira also being the birthplace of their famed striker, Christiano Ronaldo – there’s even a museum in Funchal dedicated to him). At this stage Portugal had not yet been knocked out…
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
It’s currently 33.9°C where I sit in my home office, so this will be a quick one.
Here’s a picture of a woodpecker. A woodpecker made entirely from flattened Pepsi and energy drink cans.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
I like the way that these concrete coastal defences have been painted. Looking down on them from above (they’re maybe 5 feet long on each side) reminded me of some sort of puzzle videogame.
If you click through on the image to the larger Flickr version, you can see where footprints have set into the surface of a few of them before they hardened.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 27 June 2026
A few days into the Madeira trip, I took a walk from the hotel to an old fortress that I’d seen featured in an online tour guide. While only half a mile or so from the hotel “as the crow flies”, it was a somewhat more meandering hike “as the human walks” – and not just side to side, but also up and down as the fort was on the other side of a ridge from where we were staying. The final leg of the walk was particularly steep, proper thigh-master stuff.
Once at the fortress the views across Funchal and out south across the Atlantic were very nice. The fortress had scope for a bunch of pictures and I shot several on both film and digital (I’ll share the film pictures on a later date). In terms of other things to do, there wasn’t a great deal. There was a single open room containing paintings of the fort from various times in its history, plus a couple of small empty turret areas, but the rest of the structure was out of bounds. At first I thought I must’ve missed something but, upon asking an attendant, I was informed that more of the structure was planned to be opened at some future date. Perhaps I’ll get to revisit it one day and see the rest.
Ricoh GRIII
Taken on 26 June 2026
