A couple more late festive photos from York. There are a lot of baubles decorating this jewellery shop!
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Festive shops and carol singers
Tag: home developed
Mulled wine and music reviews
It feels a little odd to be posting Christmas photos when we’re fast approaching the end of January (already! How did that happen?!), but such is the delay with my working my way through my pictures. There might be a couple more to come yet too.
So far I’m keeping up with my plan to listen to unheard (by me) albums. My list of selections has swollen to a laughably unmanageable collection of over eight hundred titles meaning, if I stick to one per week, it’ll take me over fifteen years to get through them all (not accounting for me adding more!). We’ll see how it goes, eh? However I get on, I’ve started blogging my thoughts on each selection. Should you be interested, you can find those here on a new and imaginatively titled blog I started ;).
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
The looming face
Of the photographs I made during our visit to York in December, the one posted here today is probably the one I like most. Technically it’s good, being sharp, well exposed and, thankfully, not showing any real sign of the low contrast that affected many of the other pictures on the two rolls I shot.
But really I just like the picture. The western side of York Minster looks enormous, looming above the streets. There’s a power to the scale of the building and it’s really quite amazing to consider the architecture, engineering, craftsmanship, and sheer art that went into the construction of these buildings.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Hot roasted chestnuts
This shot (and several others on the rolls I shot in York) showed notable loss of contrast due to the haze in my Yashicamat’s lens (hence the reason I’ve been seeking a replacement). Some work in Lightroom has done a relatively good job of bringing back a bit of punch to the image.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Man’s best friend
Another of those square shots that I had to crop due to people being in frame at either side.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Henry and his piano
I took a few pictures of this guy busking beside York Minster. To quote his bio that can be seen in the photo:
“Hello 🙂
My name is Henry. Me and my piano have been travelling around the U.K. for the past few years in my van and busking.
This piano was going to be taken as rubbish before I rescued it and gave it a new life!
I aim to create quiet moments for people to reflect and connect during these strange times.
Hope you enjoy my original compositions.
Thanks for listening ❤”
He seems to get around a bit and has pages on Facebook, Instagram, and Bandcamp.
I have no affiliation with Henry, but I did chuck a couple of quid in his case before I took these photos. 🙂
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Sparkle
A selection of jewellery glitters beneath the lights of a window display while a lady looks at potential purchases from the opposite window.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Bowler hats and ghosts
My wife and I visited York in December to see the Christmas markets. As always tends to be the case at these things, the wares on offer were not cheap! That didn’t put us off buying some treats, and we came away with selections of cheeses and biscuits and other bits and pieces. It also seems set in law that there must be a stall selling bratwurst cooked over a charcoal fire at all these markets. I had a concoction of bratwurst, chips, and various toppings for my lunch, but there was some sort of jam stuff on there too which wasn’t really to my taste and I wish I’d just had a sausage in a bun instead.
Wandering round York city centre I took some pictures where I could with my Yashicamat 124G (and a few with my Olympus XA-3 which was tucked in my jacket pocket). It was pretty busy and trying to get pictures without someone walking into frame while I set up the shot or (more annoyingly) just as I pressed the shutter, was difficult.
The two shots here were taken at The Shambles, York’s famous medieval shopping street. This quaint street with it’s hundreds-of-year-old buildings is busy at the best of times as a tourist trap, but is made even busier by the fact of having a Harry Potter shop at one end, and The York Ghost Merchants at the other.
It’s the latter shop from which the two bowler-hatted gentlemen featured in today’s pictures were from. There was a queue of at least fifty people waiting to go into the shop to acquire their very own unique ghost (including a lot of overseas tourists. These spooky figurines are clearly popular!), so these people (of which there were at least four) were acting as crowd-control in the very narrow and very busy street.
The first shot was taken from close to minimum focus distance with me backed right up against the window of a baker’s shop. The second doesn’t look too busy, but you’ll notice that it’s cropped from the Yashica’s usual square format. This is because I has perhaps a quarter of a second to photograph the guy outside the shop before the crowds closed in again. There are people entering and exiting frame at the left and right of the full frame version.
Yashicamat 124G & Ilford HP5+ @800asa. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 10mins @ 20°
Taken on 16 December 2023
Giant micro-organisms and metal trees
Just a couple of pictures of unusual stuff today. The first is a shot of a giant micro-organism – an e-coli bacteria to be specific – that was lurking within Sheffield’s Winter Gardens. This larger-than-life model is 90 feet long, apparently making it five million times larger than it’s actual size. At this scale you’d have no problem spotting if your food was contaminated, I guess, although I tremble at the thought of the chicken that it might have inhabited!
You can find more information about the sculpture here: https://www.lukejerram.com/e-coli/
The second picture is of another sculpture, a steel willow tree commemorating the victims of Covid-19 and the unsung workers of the pandemic. It was unveiled in March 2023 and stands in Balm Green Gardens, close to Barker’s Pool in Sheffield.
Olympus OM-1N, G-Zuiko AUTO-W 28mm f/3.5 & Ilford FP4+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 @ 20° 10mins.
Taken 21 October 2023.
Uncommunicative
This defaced and damaged phone box made for an interesting subject. I guess the neighbourhood watch wasn’t watching.
Olympus OM-1N, G-Zuiko AUTO-W 28mm f/3.5 & Ilford FP4+. Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 @ 20° 10mins.
Taken 21 October 2023.
Steel City Snapper photography 