Pasted on the windows of a betting shop in Cleethorpes are a bunch of posters for the circus that was scheduled to come to town a week or so after I visited. The light was great, so it gets to be today’s picture.
I’ve had a couple of days off work this weekend, giving me four days instead of the usual two. My outstanding luck meant that this was as a sequence of winter storms hit the country and I was stuck indoors for most of the time.
Today however, despite it still being quite windy, the weather was bright so I took myself out for a few hours to get some photography done. I visited the picturesque village of Wentworth which is about half an hour’s drive. I’ve not shot my GW690 for a while, so decided to let it see some light and ran three rolls through it during the trip. It’ll be a week or two before they start appearing here as I’m currently back in the back in terms of a backlog of other new photos to post.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
The light on the day I visited Cleethorpes was lovely, creating opportunities for pictures pretty much every way I turned. Including this shoe-repair / key cutting shop tucked away on a side street. It’s another of those pictures that appeals to me – just an everyday scene but with lots of little details to draw the eye.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
I’ve already posted a picture of this place a couple of days ago, but that was just the section seen at the left side of this wider view, I’m not sure when this building was constructed. It has an art deco look about but I suspect it to be a much more recent addition.
The bold reds and bright whites of the paint stand out in lovely contrast agains the blue skies. It’s on days like this where I most enjoy shooting colour film.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
A fairly straightforward street photo for today. It works, I think, because the arcade is closed and the blue shutters are down. Had it been opened then the figure would have been lost amongst the background. Lots of blues and a nice burst of colour from the sign look quite nice.
We’ve been hit by storm Eunice here in the UK today, and the southern counties received two red weather alerts, the most serious we get in this country, and not something that happens very often. Wind speeds of over 100mph were recorded in parts of the country. Being a couple of hundred miles north of the worst of it, all we’ve had here is a quite blustery and rainy afternoon. Some of the trees I can see from the house were swaying quite wildly but I’ve not noticed any damage from the limited vantage points I have from looking out of the windows.
A large part of the population seems to have been fixated on this YouTube channel, which has been showing planes landing (or attempting to land in some cases) in the high winds at London Heathrow airport. It had 185,000 viewers when I took a look earlier!
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
I use the Grain2Pixel Photoshop plug-in to convert colour negatives. I’ve found it can be a bit finicky on certain film stocks – Portra for instance – but it always seems to do a great job with Kodk Colorplus, producing lovely saturated colours. I’m not sure how accurate these are to the film’s profile (and who really knows when scanning?) but I like the results very much. In scenes like this the reds leap off the picture.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
On my trip to Cleethorpes I made a number of pictures around the railway station. While I’m not a railway enthusiast in the sense of being interested in trains especially, I do find that the locomotives, carriages, rolling stock and the infrastructure that surrounds them makes for evocative photographs.
I like how this picture came out. It reminds me of something that might turn up in a set of old mounted slides or something, despite being a contemporary scene and being shot on colour negative film. It wouldn’t have worked anywhere near as nicely without the great light though
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
At the end of January I took myself off for a day at the seaside town of Cleethorpes. It was a nice day with vivid blue skies and plenty of bright winter sunshine. There wasn’t much in the way of warmth however, not helped by the fact that we still had the tail-end of Storm Malik creating blustery conditions. However, this being the UK in wintertime, I was glad enough for the bright day and wore enough clothes to keep the chill at bay.
I didn’t have any particular plans for the day other than to take a bunch of photographs at an off-season seaside town. I knew that most of the attractions would be shuttered up for the winter, but that was kinda the point – to see it in the times when it isn’t full of holidaymakers and day-trippers.
I’d parked up right on the promenade. Unsurprisingly there were plenty of spaces to choose from – almost all of them in fact, and after buying a ticket I decided to head north to the end of the promenade where the beach heads on up to Grimsby. The wind was bitingly cold, but my jacket kept me warm, and I kept on my gloves unless I wanted to make a picture. Despite the fact that most things were shuttered, the big amusement arcade was open and I went in for a bit of warmth and a quick game on an old Galaga machine that I found lurking in a corner.
I had three cameras with me, which might sound like overkill, but two of them (the Olympus XA3 with which today’s photos were shot, and my digital Ricoh) are both tiny and easily pocketable. Only the OM-2n required a bag to carry it and a couple of extra lenses.
The photos in todays blog are of the small funfair on the beach. It’s not much of a funfair – just three rides – but I think it’s pretty much all that is left in terms of these sorts of things at the resort. There used to be a small theme park to the south of the town with some actual thrill rides, but that closed years ago. There were also larger rides including dodgems and a waltzer inside one of the buildings on the promenade, but I believe that it’s now an indoor market. This small cluster of beach attractions consists of a big-wheel (sans carriages at this time of year), a helter-skelter (all locked up), and a kiddies rollercoaster (missing its train, again because no children are around to ride on it in January). Despite their inactivity, they still made for colourful pictures in the bright sunshine though.
The old expired roll of Colorplus (which came with the XA3 when I bought it early last summer) has come out a treat.
Olympus XA3 and Kodak Colorplus (expired 2012 and shot at 100asa)
This signpost sits beside an old wrought-iron footbridge over the River Don in Sheffield. The destinations are mostly areas of the city, but with a few places further afield. The sign pointing to Wales refers to the village of Wales to the east of the city, rather than the nation to the west of England. Interestingly, a variety of measurement types are used on the signs.
Someone on Flickr asked me what a “rod” was, so I looked it up. Today’s bit of trivia (and something I didn’t know before) is that a rod is equivalent to sixteen and a half feet. There are four rods in a chain, forty rods in a furlong, and three-hundred-and-twenty rods in a mile.
Postboxes are another of those subjects to which I seem to be drawn quite often. Usually it’s when I’m shooting colour film as I think that the bright red paintwork lends itself best to that format, but I have more than a few pictures in black and white too, as with today’s photo.
Colour would have worked well too, although the box was in shad so might not have “popped” in the same way as when illuminated, but this particular example has the added interest of a bunch of stickers pasted to its side – a mixture of random art and political messaging of varying persuasions. I made the picture with the lens wide open af f/2.8 as I wanted to remove the background clutter, but perhaps a little narrower might have better benefited the ability to read the stickers.
I’d planned to come up with a longer piece for today’s blog but then my eldest son and his girlfriend came to visit for a few hours, so I’ve not got the time now. Maybe I’ll farebetter tomorrow.
This picture was taken pretty much adjacent to the one that featured yesterday, this time looking up the path beside the river rather than down into the water.
