For this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, Ritva has chosen to focus on portraits. Difficult. Because it IS difficult, and many of the few I do take are of family, whom I don’t usually feature on my blog. There are the images I secretly take whilst out and about, but few of those quite measure up as portraits so much as someone-doing-something-or-just-walking.
Then I remembered York Viking Festival, which I recently featured on one of my posts. So back we go, to a day when photography was not only permitted, but encouraged.
Tips on how to bump off your enemy, Viking style.
Tips on throwing a clay pot, Viking style.
Tips on working in wood, Viking style.
This last set is for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, because she invites us to take one photo, and crop it three different ways. So – two solo portraits, one two-handed portrait, all for the price of one shot of a Viking and his slave industriously working together.
Even though over the last few days the weather has reverted to winter chill with a vengeance, I think it’s definitely the week that Spring has Sprung. The daffodils have suddenly burst forth into golden glory. The grass is lusher. Dandelion and daisies crowd the verges. Spring announces itself in an explosion of colour, in contast to the muted browns and greys of winter with its dull skies and overabundance of mud.
So is there even any point in ‘doing’ spring in monochrome? I thought I’d find out, and chose four images where it’s not just spring flowers telling the story, because they’re complementing the buildings they grow near.
Perhaps these aren’t part of the story, because snowdrops show their faces from early January. But they’re white, so may not suffer so much in monochrome.
Primulas on a traffic island near York Minster.
Tulips overlooking Knaresborough Viaduct.
Part of my own difficulty is that I don’t enjoy tinkering with photos. What comes out of the camera either works, or it doesn’t, and then I’ll junk it. At most I’ll level the picture up, maybe lightly crop it, even – slightly – fiddle with brightness. So my translations into monochrome are crude at best. If I want monochrome – and I’m increasingly choosing it over colour – I’ll shoot in black and white. And perhaps follow up with a further version in colour. I admire those photographers who use editing tools with discretion, so what we see is the original shot – just enhanced in subtle ways. I’m less keen on dramatic editing. But in a diary that is already over-full, I guess I don’t feel like giving this particular skill the time it needs to learn to do it well.
I’ll finish with Fountains Abbey as it is now, its grounds carpeted in daffodils. Black and white as my featured photo, and – my much preferred version here – in the above-mentioned Glorious Technicolor.
Leeds is a Victorian industrial city that has vigorously embraced the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll explore a tiny part of the central area, as we did with the London branch of the family at half term.
We’ll start in a modern shopping centre..,
… and wander through the late Victorian covered market, stopping at one of the fish stalls.
The Corn Exchange was built at much the same time as the market, to trade corn. These days it’s the home of independent vendors selling to those looking to while away a pleasant hour or two finding something out of the mainstream.
We’ll wander down some older streets …
… then onto the newly developed banks of the River Aire. Industrial grot has been replaced by both student and up-market flats, and the featured photo shows the view of Leeds old and new. The Royal Armouries Museum was supposed to be our destination, but at half-term it was way too busy, so we didn’t stay long . Here’s a taster, showing that even horses and elephants can get togged up for war, and that swords never seem out of fashion.
Tired now. We’ll wander back along the Aire, spotting a couple of cormorants on the way. That means there must be fish to be had these days. It was a filthy river in the bad old days.
We’ll be back another day. I hardly recognise the city I called home until about twenty five years ago.
This week, Patti has invited us to explore colour photography, as against black and white for her Lens-Artists Challenge. She’d like us to present the same image both in colour and in monochrome. Because I do very little post-processing, I’ve used the fairly limited options offered by Google Photos.
What to choose? I decided to pick images that I thought were sure to work best in colour, and see what happened if I imposed a monochrome palette on them. I was quite surprised.
First of all I looked at my images of Vitré, the charming French commune I shared with you a couple of weeks ago. Surely it’s all about the colour of the gaily painted houses there?
The Old Town, Vitré
I surprised myself. I liked both – perhaps because there’s a bit of an expectation that half-timbered houses, in England at least, tend to be in black and white. What gives the coloured image the edge in my eyes though, is the lucky chance of that figure in bright red strolling down the street. It just lends an extra focus to the shot lacking in the monochrome image.
Then I went to familiar stamping grounds. Brimham Rocks.
Brimham Rocks, North Yorkshire
I’m pretty happy with both. Those puffy cumulus clouds help to lighten the sky in the black and white image. It might otherwise have been a little uniformly grey. I’ve just popped another image in as the header photo. The rocks as seen through a conveniently sited picture frame. Trust me. The colour image is barely any different. It was a very overcast day.
The last image is of the simply appalling ferry we took from Rome to Barcelona the other year. Those rusting chimneys have their visual appeal, but the rest of the ship was like that too! Would they work in black and white? Let’s see.
Our Grimaldi lines ship. Avoid.
Hmm. I think it’s OK. The rusty pipes have sufficient contrast to work even without colour. In my opinion.
So there we have it. Are you a fan of colour, monochrome, or both? And do you have any strong feelings about what works, or doesn’t, here?
I decided to include this post in Leanne’s Monochrome Madness challenge. She can close her eyes to the colour versions.
This last month, I’ve seen a lot of the sea. Travelling under it, to get to France; living beside it in Premià de Mar; and sailing over it to return to England. I’ve seen it in all its moods, and I’ll show a selection here for Sarah’s The Sea Challenge for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.
There’s the sea when it isn’t there, because the tide’s out…
Heysham, Lancashire.Dumfries and Galloway
And when it’s placid, even in the middle of the North Sea …
The North Sea
When it’s a little bit frisky, whether in Saltburn or Spain…
SaltburnSpain
Or limbering up for a storm, in Staithes or Saint-Malo….
StaithesSaint-Malo
Or just making a statement, as it is here in Igidae …
I haven’t got a truly stormy picture of a truly stormy sea. These pictures taken at Sandsend near Whitby, and at Igidae on a very windy day will have to do. They were bad enough for an unwilling matelot.
Here in the UK, we know a lot about clouds. And at this time of year, we know a lot about grey clouds. Looking out of the window just now yields an unending vista of smoky grey, darkening over Mickley way to gunmetal and slate. No cotton-wool puffs of cumulus for us.
So let me whisk you to a day in June, when the plane transporting me from Barcelona to Leeds offered me a constantly changing cloudscape below me, with tantalising glimpses of beaches, landscapes and the Pyrenees, the Atlantic coast, and then crowded old England. The featured photo shows us just leaving Barcelona – hardly a cloud in the sky. And then …
Mist rather than cloud, to start with.The foothills of the PyreneesWell, who can tell?Cresting the Pyrennean peaksOver the French coast now…Here too.Still FranceNearly homeEven more nearly home.
Although generally a big fan of monochrome, on a grey day like this, I’m not sure I like these clouds and vistas in black and white. My memory of that summer day was of clear bright and optimistic colours. But needs must. This is for Monochrome Madness, and hosted this week by Brian, of Bushboy’s World.
So said Mick Maslen, Yorkshire artist and teacher. And perhaps none is more energetic than the Leading Line: the one that draws you insistently into an image to discover what lies at the other end. And which may leave you wondering, because you often never reach it.
My header image is from Cádiz, and is a bit of a text book classic. Pavement, road, seawall, cars, kerb-side buildings – even to a lesser extent the wispy clouds- all lead you on and drop you outside the city’s cathedral.
In other examples, it’s the journey along the lines, rather than the destination that commands our notice. Here’s one from Chalons-en-Champagne: the wall paintings rather than the chap at the end, are the story. Just as the couple in the underpass in Premià de Mar attract less attention than the graffiti they’ve just walked past.
Other leading lines have no destination that we can see. The Chirk Aqueduct, with viaduct behind is going somewhere. We just don’t know where. The same with the Rolling English Road in the Yorkshire Dales, and the track in another part of the Dales whose path has been enveloped by fog.
Chirk Aqueduct: from Shropshire to Wales.
Just one more image today. The astonishing Millau Viaduct in France, some two and a half km. long, sweeps majestically about 35 metres above the River Tarn and the landscape and communities beneath- sometimes (and oh how I’d love to see it then!) even above the clouds.
Hallowe’en turns me into a Grumpy Old Woman. Not the event and its history. I like the fact that here, its roots lie deep in the Celtic festival of Samhain. As harvest ended and winter began, the veil between the living and the dead grew thinner, making it easier for spirits to return.
By the Middle Ages, the church had appropriated the days for its own ends, and made All Saints Eve (‘Hallowe’en’) a day for honouring the dead. And over the years, various merry-making traditions grew up round it: Trick or Treat; dressing up as witches, ghouls and ghosts; carving Jack-o’-Lanterns (from swedes in my day. Can you imagine the hard work involved?); and games such as apple-bobbing. Yes, all that I liked: community-based home-spun entertainment just right for this miserable time of year when clock-change plunges us all into night from about 4 o’clock onwards.
What I don’t like is that, these days, from September onwards, shops are crammed with Hallowe’en souvenirs of every kind – all plastic and ultra-transient, and cheap and tacky costumes, not even slightly bio-degradable, to be worn – for one night only – by marauding hordes of children descending on the neighbourhood demanding sweets without number from about four o’clock onwards. I can still remember the night we gave out more than 200 treats before firmly shutting up shop and closing the front door against all comers (We had an American base nearby – they taught our children well).
So the images I offer for this week’s Monochrome Madness: Spooky, as suggested by Dawn are perhaps eerie rather than spooky, and come from the natural world, or at least a world-gone-by. Apart from my header photo. This is a puppet from the Puppet Museum (Museo del Titere) in Cádiz and spooky enough to terrify anybody. And two bits of street-fun: one from Brick Lane, the other from Newcastle.
Any UK readers will have had plenty of occasions to recite a favourite childhood ditty this week.
Rain, rain, Go to Spain, Never show your face again.
James Howell, an Anglo-Welsh historian added this verse to the traditional English rhyme ‘Rain, rain go away/Come again another day’, as a reminder of the failed invasion of the powerful Spanish Armada in 1588. They had intended to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and restore Catholic rule over England.
Like now, for instance. But we’re all safely indoors, so let’s peer out at a few rainy shots. I hope you have an umbrella.
Count the brollies in these two shots, and they’ll add up to seven.
Umbrellas waiting for the monsoon in IndiaNot England. San Sebastian. In Spain. The ditty worked …
Let’s start with a Roman Bridge, in Córdoba. It’s called the Roman bridge, because it was first built during the Roman colonisation of southern Spain. But it was overhauled in the 10th century. Then in the Middle Ages. Then in the 16th and the 17th centuries, when a statue of St Raphael was added. Lights were added in the 19th century, and it was pedestrianised in 2006. It’s a wonder it can still be called the Roman Bridge. But it can. The 14th and 15 arches are still the original ones.
El Puente Romano de Córdoba.
We’ll leap forward to the Renaissance, but stay in Spain, in Valencia, and visit the Puente del Mar. Flooding in the River Túria swept away an old wooden bridge, so in 1591, it was replaced with this:
Puente del Mar, Valencia.
Stone, brick, wood: all these were the traditional bridge -building materials of choice down the centuries. Until the Industrial Revolution here in England, whose original epicentre was in Coalbrookdale, thanks to its wealth of natural resources all conveniently in the same area. The world’s first iron bridge was built here in 1779.
The Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale, Shropshire.
This bridge is the grandparent of almost all bridges built – in the UK at least – since then and into the 20th century. Here are three: Vauxhall Bridge, completed in 1906; the Tees Transporter Bridge, completed in 1911, and the Tyne Bridge, completed in 1928.
Let’s leap briefly into the 21st century, and look at one of the bridges in Valencia’s assertively future-facing Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, created between 1998 and 2009.
Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias, Valencia.
And finally, the Millau Viaduct, sweeping more than 300 metres above the Tarn in southern France, designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2004. Like Valencia’s Science Park, it’s a destination in its own right.
Millau Viaduct, Occitanie, France.
But we can’t leave without mentioning the featured photo: London’s iconic Tower Bridge, open to traffic since 1894: both road traffic, and when regularly lifted, to river traffic beneath. The photo demonstrates why the extra height is necessary: that’s HMS Belfast in the foreground.
And to finish off, let’s stop at something that’s even older than bridges as a way of allowing travellers to cross water. Stepping stones. These are at Redmire Force, and are still a popular way of crossing the River Ure.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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