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.
While sat on a bus at some traffic lights, I was surprised to see this guy walk into the middle of the road and start playing his trombone at the traffic. I managed to get a quick photo – maybe not the best picture ever, but at least I caught the moment for posterity. 🙂
Nikon F80, Nikkor 28-80mm f.3.5-5.6 AF-D & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro
I’ve been busy with stuff today and have left it quite late to post to the blog (it’s one of those days where the daily posting feels like a grind, unfortunately). As such, I’m taking the easy route and posting a digital picture, one shot in the early evening sun one day during our trip to Malaga in August.
Anyway, whatever the plural (and I expect there isn’t a collective noun), here are three photographs of underpasses. They’re all fairly close to one another – in fact, the latter two photos are in the same structure.
They felt like a good trio of pictures to publish together.
This whole roll of film had a sense of suspense about it. I took my Canon Sure Shot Supreme on an outing a couple of months back and decided to carry it in its case using the built-in belt strap. This was very convenient right up to the point where the strap came unglued and the camera fell onto a concrete floor (still inside the case, thankfully). The camera’s plastic shell became slightly misaligned and had to be popped back into shape, an a few little chips of plastic broke of around the shutter button. I was concerned about light leaks (so I filled the chip holes with a bit of black silicone), and also some sort of major damage to the mechanism or electronics. However, when I finished shooting to roll a few weeks later and got the negatives back they were all perfectly fine. So I still have a working Supreme, albeit now with a few battle scars.
Canon Sure Shot Supreme & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This was one of those brief moments where a shot briefly appears before your eyes. The shape of the buildings, the people resting by the fountain, and the man in the bright yellow shirt striding across the campo. Seconds later other groups of people had wandered into the frame, cluttering the scene, and removing the sense of space and heat that this picture says to me.
Quite often I miss those chances, those decisive moments, as Henri Cartier Bresson famously said. I think I got a nice picture here though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This point of view almost suggests that the bridge will carry pedestrians right across the Thames and directly into St. Paul’s Cathedral.
SPOILER: It doesn’t.
Apologies for another short post. I’m still feeling ill – although maybe a little improved over yesterday. Hopefully I’ll feel better still by tomorrow.
Steel City Snapper photography 