Pulled duty on the 6:32 train to Manchester for the first time in a while, making this the earliest true morning shot since January 2017. Maybe I wasn’t the first one up in the whole town but there weren’t many of us. A long week of work comes to an end. Is it Christmas yet?
The second monochrome shot in a row but it was a way of bringing some added interest to this view. I worked at home all day and did not leave the house. I know it’s a pretty distinctive view, in relative terms. But it is also everyday, for us at least.
This is one of those junk shops that has grandiose self-image and calls itself an “Antiques Centre” but we’ll let it off. I believe this object is an old typesetting tray, the kind of thing useful when typefaces came as hundreds of small carved pieces of metal. What practical use to anyone it is nowadays, I cannot imagine, but on the other hand it is a pretty cool lump of wood if you ask me. Not that I decided to lug it home or anything.
The idea for this shot came to me as I was listening to the last keynote speaker at the conference, and for me the last event of it, as I headed for Oulu airport straight after it had finished. It was a bugger to get all things in focus though, and when I managed it, he wasn’t quite doing the interesting things with his hands that he was on other shots: so they look a bit like a big lump here. Still, this is basically the shot that I was trying to capture.
We are getting longer platforms! And lifts to and from them, from the subway! It’s a miracle…. or will be, if we ever get the train service to match.
Felt obliged to put in an appearance in the big city for the first time (photographically) since signing off for my holiday on 3rd August. The weather brought melancholy in the morning, a feeling of autumn, though it did brighten up. The monochrome adds to the mood though really I only changed it to address a blob of anomalous colour (on the traffic sign in the background: near invisible here, a bright blue splodge in the original).
Even after seven years, I do try not to repeat myself on here, and so a steady drip-feed of new places has become the means by which this is facilitated. Brighouse lies south of Halifax, not far away from my home but until today, undepicted on here. I was just passing through today however, and this factory caught my eye — it now functions, I believe, as an indoor climbing gym, perhaps for obvious reasons.
First weekend of my summer break. I have no idea who this is, the picture is chosen for no other reason than I just think it makes him look good. Which is as much as we can ask from a portrait I think.
My home town would definitely be a worse place without the Hebden Bridge Picture House which has miraculously remained alive throughout the last few decades and thus neither become a Wetherspoons nor a faceless corporate Vue-style operation with no leg room and supplying shit hot-dogs that cost a fiver. Long may it reign. Although it is nevertheless true that the movie we went to see tonight was pretty cruddy (Hereditary – not as good as reputed….).
One can expect many of the small seaside towns of Britain to look fairly desolate on, say, a wet Tuesday in February. But Rhyl, North Wales, where I happened to find myself this evening, manages to look like this in mid-July at the end of the sunniest period in a couple of decades. It’s quite an achievement.
Being 42 