We awoke this morning to find it had snowed overnight, with about a couple of inches covering the ground. This would have been a great time to go out and take pictures but, alas, as is so often the case when interesting conditions land in may lap, my time was spoken for – in today’s case to visit my dad and set up a new DVD recorder I ordered for him (he has a lot of old discs that he had no way to watch as is old machine no longer works), and then to visit my aunt and uncle to take up some gifts and cards for Christmas.
So photographing today’s snowy, misty conditions was largely out of the question. I did have chance to go out this afternoon but, after doing my visits in the morning and not getting back home until after one PM, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do so. So now I have this vague sense of a lost opportunity having passed me by. Hopefully there will be more days like this (the conditions, not the sense of loss!). Even more hopefully, my time will not be spoken for and I’ll be able to take advantage of them.
As ever with these sort of “diary” posts, the pictures bear absolutely no connection to the words I’ve written. Both images were made in Leeds back in October on a a day where I did get the chance to make the most of the light.
A short post for a Friday evening. It’s been a stressful week at work (and next week isn’t looking much better) due to a task that I don’t really know how to approach just yet, and I can’t think of anything profound to write. I’m just going to try and kick back and play videogames and watch some TV.
A couple of pictures taken on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. These are very close to the canal’s eastern end where it joins the River Aire in Leeds city centre just below the railway station.
The canal was originally conceived in the 18th century, with construction beginning in 1770 and being completed forty-six years later (although it was subsequently extended in 1822). It runs for 127 miles and has 91 locks on it’s main line.
The second photo shows westbound rail tracks crossing the canal just after they leave Leeds railway station.
Two views of Bridgewater Place, a residential and office building in Leeds, UK.
It stands beside the River Aire, alongside which I was walking on the day of my visit. The 32-story building was completed in 2007 and within a month of its opening had been nicknamed “The Dalek” after the race of fascistic aliens made famous by the Doctor Who TV show (because of the building’s shape, not because it contains fascists).
While crossing the road in front of the building I noticed some strange metal structures by it’s side. I didn’t pay these any heed, thinking they were perhaps some sort of architectural flourish. It was later that I discovered that they are actually wind baffles. You see, it was found that when the building was completed it was causing a significant wind microclimate with gusts being recorded comparable to hurricane speeds when the wind was blowing from the west.
These gusts resulted in a number of injuries and accidents, including a woman suffering a torn liver when being thrown into a wall, a pushchair containing a child being blown into the road, someone being lifted off their feet and deposited across the street, and most seriously, a man being killed when the wind caused a lorry to overturn on him.
As a result, a wind mitigation scheme was put in place, with various structural changes being implemented, as well as a re-routing of high-sided traffic on occasions when the wind speed was high. Although the architects were found not liable for the death of the pedestrian, they were made to pay over a million pounds to the council to cover the cost of the traffic measures that had to be put in place.
One of the wind baffles is just visible in the bottom right of the first image and there are warning signs next to the building telling of danger from gusts of wind.
St. Pancras is the station I use when travelling to and from London, with an occasional switch across to King’s Cross which sits literally next door if the timetables dictate.
It’s a grand old structure dating to Victorian times and consists of the railway station itself as well as a large hotel. The station was thoroughly modernised in the 1990s and now also serves as the international terminus for Eurostar trains to Europe via the Channel Tunnel, giving the place a feel not dissimilar to an airport in some ways. I’ve never travelled on Eurostar, so am not sure if the international terminal has duty free shops and similar as that part of the station is not accessible to regular travellers.
I remember travelling to St. Pancras before it was upgraded and it was a much more utilitarian affair. Where now you can buy designer clothes or expensive pastries, was once a somewhat dark and grimy feeling terminus, the air awash with the fumes from the diesel locomotives. Now you can have a glass of champagne while awaiting your departure.
It’s been a nice day today. Blue skies with hints of high altitude clouds and slowly spreading contrails from passing aircraft. It was cold, with a frost that required clearing the ice from the car before I could drive.
While I’d hoped to do some photography, I hadn’t planned on going out especially early, but I woke just before seven AM and after procrastinating within the warmth of the bed, decided that it might be worth getting up and making the most of the morning light.
I’ve been wanting to get out with the large format camera again after the disappointment of the last outing, and the day would have been ideal as, in addition to the good light, there was also little wind, something that can be a hindrance when shooting large format cameras. However, I also had two partially shot rolls of film in other cameras.
I sometimes find that partially shot rolls are a distraction. It”s perhaps just the weird neurodivergent way that my brain works, but I like to finish a roll before starting another one, so having two rolls with un-shot frames waiting to be used was pulling some strings in my head. One was a roll of Portra 160 that I’d half shot a couple of weeks ago with the Bronica ETRSi (on the day of the large format disappointment, in fact) which had about half the fifteen frames left. The other a 35mm roll of Kodak Gold that’s been in my Canon Sure Shot Z135 for a while (since the end of October, maybe) which still had about a third of the roll still to be used. While it’s not always possible, I much prefer to finish a complete roll of film than to have some left over. At the same time I don’t want to waste film on “nothing shots” just to use it up. Rock, meet hard place…
So this morning I decided to forgo the large format stuff and instead finish at least one of these partially consumed rolls of film. I had no real plan on where I would go (sometimes this is a problem all of it’s own that leads to me going nowhere due to not being able to make my mind up) but I remembered a scene that I’d passed a few weeks previously but been unable to take advantage of – some blocks of high-rise flats lit by the early sunshine. Not far from this is another location that I felt might be promising at this time of the day too, and from there I could drive out into the countryside and just see what might catch my eye. Not the most structured plan I’ve ever had, but certainly better than complete indecision.
In the end the morning turned out quite nicely and I managed to finish the roll of Portra, although about half-a-dozen frames remain on the Kodak Gold, so that one will keep nagging at me for a while longer, especially as I’ll hold out on getting the first roll developed as it’s more cost effective to send multiple rolls of film to the lab than to post them individually.
Sadly I can’t show you any of these photos today for the aforementioned reason, but they’ll appear at some point (although the way my backlog is, it might be sometime in 2024!). So, instead, here’s another picture from London. It’s a curiously old-fashioned looking picture showing the rear of the Apollo Theatre that (apart from the 20mph sign and the double-yellow lines on the road) probably wouldn’t have looked much different had it been taken in the 1950s.
These two pictures don’t really impart just how hot it was in Trafalgar Square when these were taken.
The mid-30s Celsius is probably nothing to make a fuss about in some parts of the world, but here in the UK that’s hot!
Paddling isn’t allowed in the fountains, but dipping your feet in is apparently fine, and so many people were taking advantage of the cool water in this way.
The second shot shows the Fourth Plinth, which I wrote about in a previous post.
There wasn’t anything to panic about really, but the blog title suits the slightly disturbing and frenetic imagery that resulted from these two attempts to track a Tube train with my camera as it pulled into the station. Tube Panic is also, incidentally, the name of an arcade videogame from Nichibutsu that I remember enjoying back in the 80s.
While I don’t think these attempts at capturing motion were fully successful (or even partially successful for that matter) I still like them. There’s enough detail to realise what you’re looking at, but it’s distorted enough to make them nice an abstract.
Maybe next time in London I might try burning through a full roll of film taking similar shots to see how successful I am. Maybe I could make a contact sheet and circle the best ones with a grease pen. 🙂
When visiting the Evelyn Hofer exhibition at The Photographers Gallery I glanced out the wndow and saw this scene below me. The thing that caught my eye initially was the woman in the window above the air-con units. It’s not an actual woman, it’s a print or painting visible through the glass, but it stood aut in the scene.
The rest of the surrounding have a pleasing isometric quality to them though and I think I would have taken a picture even had I not seen the woman in the window.
The brighter area at lower centre-right is a reflection of the gallery floor. A polariser might have helped had I had one with me.
Steel City Snapper photography 