Minnis Bay

A walk along the prom near Margate

Gravesend Pubs

Gravesend is a town of many pubs. There is even a book on the history of Gravesend pubs called 'A Pub On Every Corner'

In recent years the town pubs have had a hard time and many are now closed and reused for other purposes.

I have been photographing these buildings as they change. Many have changed their names and most now are being repurposed.

One bar called the HQ Bar closed down last year and has been up for sale. Before It was HQ Bar it was the R Bar.

When I went past it yesterday I saw that the builders had been in and the front of the building was out.

What was interesting was the Borough Shades sign was visible. 

Also at either sides there were the advertising signs for the old pub.

No doubt when I next go to town a new shopfront will be in and a new tenant will be trading.

Trabant

I have known that there is an old Trabant car parked up behind a garden wall of a house that I pass on my way to the station.

It must have been there for at least a dozen years perhaps longer.

Until a few weeks it had been concealed by a door and walls. Then a tree came down and demolished the walls. Since then it has been in view but almost concealed under ivy.

It was one of the things on my mental list of things to photograph, today I had a camera and the time. so I got a picture or two.

Winchester Cathedral

Some images from Winchester Cathedral

Alloway Old Kirk

Some Infra Red images from Tam O'Shanters Church At Alloway, Ayrshire.

Infra Red

Years ago I had a Nikon D70 converted to be sensitive to Infra Red light. I bought a conversion kit from  Lifepixel and had Myles Whitehead, who is the camera technician who looks after my cameras, do the conversion.

The camera has not had the focus system adjusted to correct the point of focus for IR light, but with careful technique that is not a problem.

The results are very different to a colour camera and I go through spells of using the camera mixed in with long gaps when it sits in my camera case.

Over the last week I got the camera out and started to enjoy using it again.

The view from my attic window.

This is the view I have from my attic/studio window.

The light striking the Sikh temple can be spectacular at times.

Boats and Ropes

This weekend was a time for friends to visit. Weather was very cold but dry so we ended up at Chatham Dockyard and then the Cutty Sark at Greenwich. All boats and ropes.

Submarine HMS Ocelot

Submarine HMS Ocelot

Submarine HMS Ocelot

Rope making

Cutty Sark

Cutty Sark

Little Know Fact

It is a little know fact that I am a paid writer!

Surprised?

Well if your not, I am!

It goes back 20 years to when I wrote an article for a monthly magazine called 'Prepress World"

As you can guess this was a specialist magazine aimed at the prepress industry. In the mid 90's the industry was in the middle of the change from analog to digital. All the old skills and processes were dying and digital was the new kid in town, and I could see photography was going go through the same seismic changes in the near future, and the magazine wanted a working photographers view of the state of the photography industry and the changes that digital was starting to bring.

To put things in context. In 1995 the Apple QuickTake camera was launched as the first camera to be able to connect to a computer.  Kodak had the DCS460 a 6 megapixel camera based on a Nikon body costing then £25,250 which is about £34,000 today.
We were still 4 years away from the Nikon D1 which was my first digital camera and the first affordable pro spec digital camera.

Photoshop had been released in 1988 and by 1995 had reached version 3 and had been able to run on Windows for 3 years.

The article I wrote was very much on the limitations of the current digital cameras as they existed at the time but I did look forward to the future at the end of the article, and here I am pleased to see I managed to get a few predictions correct, or nearly correct.

First I predicted that the new technology  in photography would have little of the destructive effect on jobs and skills as was being seen by prepress.
Part right, but not in the way I thought and also very wrong in other ways.

The technology has put the ability to create professional images in the hands of almost anyone and there are many more people claiming to be photographers today, but, and its a big but, images are now treated as a commodity and any industry that has over supply has a price crash for stock images.

I  also predicted that there would not be a reduction in the number of photographers in the industry as the capturing of the image was only the very last step in the creative process, and everything up to that point would remain the same.  Wrong in that that there are many more photographers but right in that the number of full time professional photographers has not gone down greatly.

Second that I would no longer need to carry lots of equipment around.

Spot on!
If I was setting up my business now I would be buying very different equipment to what I bought in 1988. The cost would be the same but it would be different. lighter and more compact.

My final paragraph was :-

"The near future is going to be based on traditional technology, with digital cameras slowly becoming used where applicable, and into the mixture for the futures the tendency to keep alive , rediscover, and adapt processes from the past.  Silver halide has a life for years to come."

Well I got my first digital camera in 2001 just over 5 years after I wrote this article. The last roll of film I shot commercially was in 2004 9 years after the article. So that covered the near future.

As for the rediscovery of old processes, there has been a renaissance in old and almost forgotten processes. Only in the last week a first for wet plate collodion. The only process that seems to have died with no hope of resurrection is Kodachrome.

Silver halide is still around and the decline appears to have bottomed out. Lots of choice has been lost as have some of the big names. Prices have gone up, and the choice of places to process have greatly reduced, but for the moment we still have film in an increasingly digital world.

1970's snow and fog

At the moment I am going through my collection of B&W film negs and getting them digitised. This is all being done by camera, so the files while large are not as good as scans. The big advantage is that it is much faster. I am able to copy 5 or 6 rolls per hour.


Lots of the images are not very interesting but occasionally I find something worth working on in photoshop.

One roll I found was of a snowy and foggy day down by the river near home. It must have been about 1976 or 7 but as I never noted any info on these rolls that is just a bit of a guess.

Reflections

I got out for a short time with my camera and went down to the old fish ponds. It is still very wintery but as the water level is high I found some nice refections to photograph.