Another place of worship. I make quite a lot of photographs of churches and similar, despite rarely visiting them for their intended purposes. Despite this, I find them to be interesting locations, visually, cultually and historically, and they are often strikingly beautiful.
This chapel is in a village that I have driven past countless times in my life, but never before this occasion actually ventured within. The village (actually North AND South Wheatley as they’re pretty much joined together now) is skirted by the A620 Gainsborough Road, the route that I always take when visiting Mablethorpe on the east coast – a place I’ve been visiting since I was a young child. While it’s obvious that the village is there, it’s not a place that I, or my grandparents when they drove us as children, ever sought to stop off at.
While this was the first time I’ve ever visited the village, it was still a last minute decision while driving home from North Leverton windmill, and I didn’t really explore the place properly. There is a church, but I didn’t look there, instead taking a few photos down near the methodist chapel, which stands beside a small brook. Maybe I’ll visit again one day, or maybe this will have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I’ll simply go back to bypassing the place en-route to other destinations.
I mentioned my photos of North Leverton windmill a couple of days ago, so here are a few of them
The mill was built in 1813 by a collective of local farmers to grind their corn. It was also agreed that the mill would grind corn from other farmers and “industrious poor persons” for an agreed fee.
The windmill is completely without electrical power, relying on the wind to operate – although there are a set of engine stones for use when the wind is too low to turn the sails.
The windmill still sources locally grown grain to produce flour and animal feed, using traditional millstones to grind it.
I had a couple of cameras with me on the day – my Zeiss Mess-Ikonta 524/16 & my Canon Sure Shot Supreme (plus my phone). Because of the hedges and fences that surround the mill, it was sometimes difficult to frame shots with the fixed focal length lenses of both cameras. Ironically in the next shot, I could have used a longer lens perhaps.
The final shot is of the cottage beside the mill, which had a group of chickens roaming about the place – presumably the source of the eggs in the photo I posted the other day.
…Clearly the chicken, because I posted a picture of her yesterday! 😀
This self-service dresser full of fresh eggs was in the driveway of North Leverton Windmill, which I visited three weeks ago. Time really flies! – it only feels like last weekend that I made the trip!
There will be a bunch of photos of the windmill over the coming days and weeks as I made several photos on both my Zeiss and my Sure Shot Supreme.
This telephone box at Shireoaks is slowly being engulfed by ivy. Perhaps it wants to make a call?
It was slightly awkward to make the shot as, firstly the sun disappeared behind the largest cloud in the sky, and then a guy in a van pulled up behind our car and asked if we could move as we were blocking a gate (although there were no signs or markings stating that this wasn’t allowed – it wasn’t a gate that vehicles could pass through, and it could be easily entered be people). As a result I had to grab the shot pretty quickly as soon as the light re-appeared.
I’ve been meaning to visit the Emley Moor television tower for some time now so, while on a week’s leave from work recently, I decided to take the opportunity.
The transmitter is visible from miles around (although not from where I live, it being fully obscured by all the hills around Sheffield) and can easily be seen from the M1 or A1 roads whenever we’ve driven north. As well as it being an impressive sight, it also provides a pang of nostalgia for my childhood where, on days I was up early before television had started for the day, there would be a bombastic start-up broadcast announcing that “Yorkshire Television was broadcasting from the Emley Moor, Belmont and associated transmitters of the Independent Broadcasting Authority“, accompanied by a stirring orchestral piece that gave the impression that a bunch of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers were fighting off an attacking German force or something, so much like a WWII movie theme it sounded.
Although I’ve seen the tower on numerous occasions, this was my first close visit since one time I went to one of my friends’ relatives houses who lived close to it. That would have been the better part of forty years ago! My, how time flies!
It took a little over half-an-hour to drive there (most of the trip being on a fast route up the motorway) and there’s a small car-park beside the road near the transmitter. I’d planned some potential shots in advance from the comfort of my PC by using Google Street View. As the cameras on the Street View cars have super-wide-angle lenses though, it’s difficult to know exactly what your own shots might look like, and unless I moved away a considerable distance from the tower (it’s already quite a distance from the road as-is), it was impossible to fit it into the frame with the 80mm lens on my Yashica Mat 124G, so the first couple of pictures here show only the base of the tower. Well, towers actually – the thin metal mast is a temporary structure that was constructed in 2018 to maintain broadcasts while the main tower undergoes maintenance. The upper sections of the metal mast were lowered into place by helicopter apparently.
The concrete tower is 1,084′ tall and the metal mast 21′ shorter. The concrete tower is the tallest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom and was built in 1969 after the previous mast (the second one built on the site) collapsed due to an accumulation of ice. Although not open to the public, there is a lift that takes people to the equipment area that operates at the top of the tower. It apparently takes seven minutes to reach the top in the lift.
The official name of the structure is The Arquiva Tower, after the company that operates it, but it is commonly known as Emley Moor.
I had to drive further from the tower in order to get the full structure in the frame, and even here I’ve had to correct some very noticeable converging verticals. I like the way it towers over the farmhouse in this shot.
Another wide shot from even further away. I like the cyclist that has just entered the bottom left of the scene. Because of the angle of view, the temporary tower appears to be much taller than the main structure in this picture.
In all it was a nce trip. There isn’t an awful lot to do at the tower given it’s privately operated with no public access, but it’s very impresive to behold from close up.
Yashica Mat 124G & Ilford Delta 400 (@800asa). Ilfotec DD-X 1+4 8 mins @ 20°.
This small trophy and key-cutting shop was bathed in some nice light on the same evening I made the scarecrow photos I posted yesterday.
While I’m having more success scanning E6 film when using Vuescan instead of EpsonScan, I still find I have to tweak the colours somewhat. I think a purple / magenta cast is a factor of the film emulsion when shooting Provia and Velvia, but it still seems to be somewhat overbearing still in my scans, so I tweak the colours to try and get them as close to the original transparencies as I can. I’m mostly successful I think, but I’ve not quite nailed the reds yet.
A few weeks ago we drove through the village of Harthill (the same day I made the photos of the person magnet fishing, the house with the pointed roof, and Shireoaks station) and noticed a whole series of “scarecrows” dotted about the place. I call them scarecrows as it seems a reasonable term, although that wasn’t their purpose. They had been installed as part of the village carnival – held virtually for this year – in celebration of key workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I didn’t have any film left in the camera or on me when we encountered them, so I drove back out to the village later that afternoon to photograph some of them before they were removed.
Four photographs today that I made at Shireoaks railway station a few weeks ago. My wife popped into a nearby shop, so I decided to finish my roll of HP5+ at the nearby empty station.
It was a hot afternoon and the wrong time to be making photographs. The wrong time if you base everything you do on “rules” that is. It’s generally accepeted that midday is not the best time to make photos. This time of day, particularly in mid-summer, means the sun will be high overhead casting harsh illumination onto scenes. The light will be very bright, with harsh highlights and shadows. But is this always necessarily a bad thing?
It’s all very well seeking out golden hour, when the light can be undoubtedly beautiful, and I’m a great lover of low sunshine and the warm light and long shadows it provides, but sometimes it isn’t possible or desireable to catch these conditions. And what if you want a photograph to depict bright midday conditions?
While these photos are of a mundane scene – a small, modernised, rural railway station devoid of travellers – they record the time I was there perfectly. Maybe there will be better images to be had in different light or circumstances, but these provide a visual record of my memories of the time. and looking of them I can feel the heat of the platform, the smell of warm concrete, the whole sense of a hot day. I’m glad they were taken in the “wrong” light.
I scan all my medium format black & white and reversal images using an Epson V550 flatbed, while 35mm is scanned on a Plustek Opticfilm8100. Ive always left unsharp mask on when scanning 120 film as I thought the results were good. Untill a week or so ago when I was testing out Vuescan.
Vuescan allows image sharpening, but it has a simple on/off checkbox rather than the levels of control afforded by Epsonscan and (moreso) Silverfast so I decided to test a few things to see how the various scanning options on each piece of software compared – plus no sharpening of the scan at all with sharpening applied later in Lightroom.
At first it looked like the sharpened images from Epsonscan had better resolution of detail, but after a lot of scanning, re-scanning, and playing around with the sharpening control in Lightroom I decided otherwise. The sharpened images from Epsonscan were displaying a level of noise and “grit” that I decided I didn’t really like, whereas unsharpened scans from the same software processed in Lightroom were much more appealing, showing a much nicer rendition of detail and grain.
It’s striking how, after years of thinking you had something just how you wanted it, you can all of a sudden change your mind.
I think I’ll stick to Epsonscan for my 120 B&W scans. Vuescan is great, and does a much better job on reversal film, but it lacks the tweakable visial histogram that Epsonscan has, and that makes a big difference to my final results. At least until I find a better way… 🙂
Today’s shot was scanned on the V550 and sharpened in Lightroom. If you look at the full size image on Flickr you might find a black cat that was keeping an eye on me. At least I think it’s a cat. It could possibly be two spots of strategically located dust that look like eyes. Or something more sinister… Eek!
