Sheffield’s botanical gardens was opened in 1836, attracting over twelve-thousand visitors. One of the main features of the nineteen acre site are the three glass pavilions (or conservatories) which house a range of international flora not otherwise found in the local area. The three domed pavilions are connected by ridge-and-furrow sections which also contain a variety of plants, shrubs, and trees.
They make for an attractive location and are very photogenic, I think.
There were a few groups of people milling around the area when I went to take this picture. While it was impossible to avoid getting anyone in the shot at all (at least during the time I was willing to wait), I quite like the couple walking away from the shot in this case. They’re unobtrusive and nicely framed between the layers of the fountain.
I’ve seen a few branches of this burger chain when on my travels but have never had the opportunity to visit one. The Sheffield branch has now closed down, so I don’t think my chances of doing so are on the increase…
I was planning on developing a roll of Tri-X today but hit a roadblock when I couldn’t get the film leader out of the cassette. I have an extractor tool, but it’s a bit hit-and-miss, and the alternative method of using a damp piece of film to pull it out failed me as well. I’ve resorted to buying a (hopefully) better extractor.
I wish my Nikon F80 had an option to keep the leader out on rewind.
I went to the cinema to see Avatar:Fire and Ash today. The film was entertaining in the same wat the other two have been, although I could do without the bladder-straining three-hour-plus running time, and the 4k high-framerate visuals in the screening I attended at times made it look like a videogame cutscene.
The cinema I visited was The Arc in Rotherham. After the film ended I went for a short walk around the area to try and finish a partly used roll of film I had in my Olympus Trip. The light was lovely and I hopefully got some nice pictures (although it’s an expired roll of slide film, so we’ll have to wait and see…).
However, one thing I wasn’t expecting to see was an altercation between a rat and a crow!
I fully understand that there are rats lurking in busy town centres – us messy humans give them a ready supply of food and shelter – but it’s quite unusual to witness them on the pavement, especially on a bright afternoon. What is even more unusual is to see them in some sort of life-and-death struggle with a crow! As I approached the scene, I saw the rat being harrassed by the bird, which kept grabbing its tail in its beak and pulling it backwards towards the road. When a passerby approached the crow would hop or fly out of the vicinity until it felt safe to return and resume it’s actions.
The rat was alive, but was moving slowly with a limp, perhaps due to the crow’s attacks, or maybe some previous injury, and there was no place for it to flee apart from beneath a car parked on the pavement, but I’m pretty certain the crow would have gotten under there without trouble. I felt bad for the rat and wondered if I should attempt a rescue, but I had nothing to grab it with and didn’t fancy getting bitten and contracting some nasty disease, so I decided against it.
Crows are intelligent creatures and I had a distinct sense that it was attempting to pull the injured rat to the road where it would be run over and thus provide a tasty meal. Or maybe it thought the rat’s tail was a juicy worm?
It was a fascinating, yet horrible thing to witness.
The picture below is of Rotherham railway station which is across the road from where it all occurred.
I wasn’t sure what to post about for my first post of the year (and the beginning of my eighth year of consecutive daily posting!). I don’t have anything that really screams “new year”, so instead I’ll continue to post pictures from the roll of Ilford Type-517 that I shot while testing the Minolta X-300 that I got in the batch of faulty SLRs I bought from eBay last year.
The Minolta performed well, giving nicely exposed pictures, and there’s usually little to fault with a 50mm lens from this period when it was the defacto kit-lens from most manufacturers.
Today’s trio of pictures show Bailey House in Rotherham. It’s currently occupied by the local council, but once-upon-a-time it was home to Grattan, purveyor of mail-order catalogue shopping since 1912. The Rotherham location wasn’t the head office, I don’t believe – I think those were (are?) in Bradford. The building is unassuming in many ways, but the protruding modernist windows add a touch of sci-fi.
I took our Christmas decorations down today – always a depressing activity, I find. Normally I would insist we keep them up until New Year’s Day has passed (although not usually until the traditional 12th Night), but compromised this year as my wife hates having them up once Christmas has passed. It doesn’t make me sad as much as it used to, but I would prefer to try and eke out that cosy Christmas feeling a bit longer.
Steel City Snapper photography 