Ghost Town

With the lockdown the town is a bit of a wasteland. No people about when I had may days exercise.

Also going through a deed box from Mum's I found a book of petrol coupons issued during the oil crisis of the 70's but never used. May come in useful.

New Lanark

The weather forecast for going north was not promising, so a rethink of travels was called for. decided to head south a bit a revisit New Lanark.

After some debate we knew that we I had visited sometime in the past but could not get near any consensus on when. also the only proof we had visited was a flattened penny of my daughters from New Lanark.

The attic window view.

We had an attic conversion done on our house aver 20 years ago. At that time I was still taking pictures on a film camera. when I cam back from a job I would almost always have a few frame left on a 35mm roll of film. Normally I put a 35mm lens on and fired off a few frames of the view out of the window with the spire of the local Babtist church in the centre of the frame.

Over the next few years I collected lots of these views covering the full year.

When I moved to digital I stopped doing this with any great regularity. But today thought I would do a quick shot out of the window.

The weather was a bit overcast but I didn't think the scene had changed much.

Until I scanned some old slides 

It always surprises me how much a view you see everyday changes, without ever really changing.

Llangrannog

I guess anyone who has a collection of old family photographs has some photographs that they can't associate with any of their relatives.

In my case I have a collection of prints of pictures taken all over Great Britain. Some I can recognise but most are of unknown locations. 

A very few of the pictures have a location written on the back but most don't. 

The composition of the pictures are all of good quality, far more than casual snaps. Very few have people in them. Infact more have horse and carts than people.

The main set of images that are annotated are from the small port of Llangrannog, located on the Welsh coast of Cardigan Bay near Newport.

It is hard to date these images. I would have a guess that they date from the turn off the 19/20th Century.

Dartford Bridge images 22 years apart.

Another warm evening today and I decided to go out to see what I could find to photograph.

At this time of year the sun sets directly behind the Dartford Bridge as viewed from Greenhithe. It is a return to the scene of one of my most used image. Twenty two years ago, just before the Dartford bridge joined in the middle, I got a picture of the sun setting right in the gap of the unfinished bridge.

Shot on film, Ektachrome or whatever 100 ISO film I was shooting at the time. The camera would have been an Olympus OM1 or OM2sp lens most likely a 50mm or 35mm.

Luck played a great part in the image. The bridge had been under construction for some time but was completed very quickly from this point, as the risk of wind damage to the bridge increases as the two sides get closer together, due to vortices created by the wind interacting with the edge of the deck. The weather that spring had been very poor with few clear evenings only a grey overcast when I was free to shoot. One evening the sun came out and I was free, so I went out with my camera. I knew roughly where I needed to be to get the image as I had tracked the sun on an OS map, but I could only get the exact location by being on the ground. This was long before the internet and smart phones with apps that can work out all that information. Also I had to accept the tide as it was on that night.

The results were worth the effort. I shot several rolls of film and a couple of the images have been used on several occasions. This image was used as a magazine cover and won me the prize of Transport photographer of the year in 1991.

Tonights images are slightly different.