Stonefaced

January 2, 2021January 3, 2021 fishyfisharcade5 Comments

Christmas is over
The decorations are down
For another year

My haiku’s have made it to day two! I’m not sure exactly what topics I’ll cover with each – maybe an alignment with the rest of the day’s post but, more likely I suspect, as a kind of poetic journal refelecting something that has happened in my life or the world each day.

As you may guess from today’s, we took down our Christmas decorations this morning. This used to be a pretty depressing activity for me in the past as I would feel pretty down about the holiday period being officially over. In recent years though it seems to be affecting me less. I wonder if it’s because, as my children grow older, Christmas has changed. The magic of Father Christmas delivering presents is a thing of the past (at least until such a point as we become grandparents I suppose), and it doesn’t feel the same as when the boys were little. Plus, the way that time seems to fly by as a get older, it will be Christmas again in about five minutes …

Today’s photo is another made on the moors above Lady Canning’s Plantation next to a small cluster of rock outcrops known as The Ox Stones. I’m not sure where the name comes from, but there used to be an Inn known as Oxdale Lodge nearby, so perhaps livestock were grazed, or moved through the land by drovers?

From this angle, the stone has a face. A rock-face. 🙂

https://flic.kr/p/2kod5xD

Fujica GW690 & Fomapan 400. Ilfotec DD-X 1+9 12mins @ 20°.

Taken on 23 December 2020

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Murky moorland days

November 29, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

This photo was taken on the edge of a small abandoned quarry, up on the moors near Over Owler Tor. It’s likely that gritstone was quarried here for the manufacture of grinding wheels and the like. You can’t see the quarry in the shot – the large boulder is atop the opposite side – but there was a significant drop just in front of my tripod.

The weather was gloomy, misty and damp on the day. Not what you’d usually get excited about, but I’d booked a day off for the trip out a few weeks in advance and had little foreknowledge of the conditions (although, it being November in the UK, I should have had a good idea). I did consider just staying at home, watching TV and reading books, but pushed myself to go out – I’d only have regretted it otherwise – and was glad I did. The conditions were still far from ideal, but the murk and low cloud are atmospheric in themselves and much better than the blanket of featureless flat grey that I’d seen when I got up that morning.

Bronica ETRSi, Zenzanon 75mm f/2.8 & Ilford Delta 400.

Taken on 22 November 2019

Film photography · Medium Format · Photography

Mother Cap

November 28, 2019December 21, 2019 fishyfisharcadeLeave a comment

A couple of photos today that I took while walking on the moors around Over Owler Tor / Higger Tor / Carl Wark last weekend. I actually shot a couple of rolls – one Delta 400, and one Shangha GP3 – but I’ve only scanned the Delta so far.

I made a concerted effort to remember to use the mirror lock-up on the Bronica this time – a roll of Velvia I shot recently had resulted in a number of shots that were less sharp than I’d hoped, which I’d put down to camera shake caused by mirror slap. All the shots this time were nice and sharp – even those shot at slow shutter speeds (half-a-second and the like). The only downside was my lack of experience in shooting the camera with the mirror locked up. The process is:

compose the shot
lock up the mirror
fire the shutter
unlock the mirror
wind on to the next frame

If you forget stage 4 and wind the film on, the mirror remains in the locked up position until you take another shot. As a result of this I had a few double frames where I had to take a second, identical photograph (although I altered the aperture in some cases just for the hell of it) as it’s imposible to recompose while the mirror is up.

Anyyway… here are a couple of images of Mother Cap, a gritstone outcrop just below Over Owler Tor in the Peak District national park above Grindleford. It doesn’t look too big in the first image, but it’s a decent size when you’re up close – being maybe 20-25 feet high. The guy at the left of the frame was taking his own photos of the rocks when I caught him up, and was interested to see the view through the Bronica’s waist-level finder.