Friday 30th December 2011

While travelling between our hotel in Schlitters and the resort at Kaltenbach on the train, we noticed that every town had a church of very similar design. Up close, they were more individual, this one (in Schlitters) sporting a full height mural. This web page gives some more information, saying it's "the parish church of Schlitters, dedicated to St. Martinus. Constructed in 1740 AD in Baroque style, the interior primarily strikes due to wall and ceiling paintings by Josef Anton Mayr". I like this photo because of the angles, and because I got all the settings and composition as I wanted it first go, just the one snap. Which is a good thing too, as it was snowing on the lens!

18mm, 30s, f/13, ISO 200

Our reason for being in the town was to enjoy some local fireworks. Apparently Austrians quite often celebrate the New Year locally on the 30th before their big celebration on the 31st, and the fireworks were pretty spectacular.

18mm, 10s, f/22, ISO 100

Thursday 15th December 2011

1980s wallpaper and 1890s flooring, in the derelict Oakhurst House, Ambergate.

18mm, 1/40s, f/4.5, ISO 400

Sunday 11th December 2011

Stained glass in Penkhull.

119mm, 1/4s, f/5.6, ISO 400

Sunday 4th December 2011

Saggy roof tiles housing the workshops and steam engine at the Etruria Canal Museum.

85mm, 1/13s, f/8, ISO 400

Friday 18th November 2011

The impressive Falcon Manor hotel in Settle, Yorkshire Dales.

20mm, 13s, f/8, ISO 200

Wednesday 16th November 2011

This is Saint Werburgh's Parish Church on High Lane, Burslem. It was built in 1953 to replace a smaller church in Hamil Road as the congregation was growing larger. I've been meaning to try this photo for a while. I noticed the statue of Jesus but it's fairly hidden away to the side and under a tree. I had an idea that if I took a photo of the church at night and illuminated the statue more than the natural light illuminated the church, it would create a nicely balanced scene. I think it mostly worked.

18mm, 25s, f/11, ISO 200

Thursday 10th November 2011

I made it back up to the colliery tonight (see yesterday), but with a friend so that I wouldn't get scared off by any hissing noises (there was still much hissing, but I realised it was probably owls). This photo represents various things I've been working on, one being the colliery (see previous photos here and here), and one being a silhouette of a person (which I keep trying down a cave, and failing on). This is one shot, no HDR, just with a bit of 'dodging' in photoshop. I think it looks a little un-real, which I really like about it.

20mm, 30s, f/10, ISO 400

Wednesday 9th November 2011

Tonight I thought I'd try a photo I've been want to take for a while, and walk up to the colliery. Trouble is I got spooked by some hissing noises before I got to my photo spot, and retreated. Instead I went for a different photo that was long overdue - Burslem town hall. This is a very impressive building built between 1854 and 1857. It was superseded as town hall in 1911 by a different building behind it. The novelist Arnold Bennett often mentioned it and referred to the gold angel on top.

18mm, 15s, f/10, ISO 200

Sunday 30th October 2011

A slightly more atmospheric photo of the Nissen huts at Cultybraggan camp, see yesterday.

18mm, 1/200s, f/8, ISO 400

Saturday 29th October 2011

This is one of the Nissen huts at Cultybraggan camp. This weekend a friend and I headed up to Scotland to take part in the OMM (Original Mountain Marathon). The accommodation for the first night was in Cultybraggan camp, which I knew nothing about before arriving, and was fascinated to find it's a POW camp from the second world war. It was a called Camp No. 21 and was designed to hold category A or 'black' prisoners, the toughest and most fanatical Nazis POWs. When you walk into the huts, lit by electric lamps strung up on cables along the corrugated ceilings, with decaying curtains and no other real decor, you feel like you're walking straight back to the time it was built, especially when arriving in the dark, and it left a slightly ominous feeling over the event in which we were about to participate! The camp has been owned by the Comrie Development Trust, a group set up by local villagers, since 2007.

30mm, 1/6s, f/5, ISO 400

Tuesday 25th October 2011

This is the town I work in, Tunstall, taken from the town I first lived in when I moved to Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem. This is a view that I theoretically see pretty often but while passing down this street your eye can see so much more and usually focusses on the road. When driving today I noticed how many of the nice buildings I could see in the distance so pulled over to see if my 270mm lens could get close enough in. It did, and the parts I wanted to capture pleasingly filled the whole frame, giving a different perspective to the one I usually see. Instead of trying to get round the street lights and the foreground houses, they actually made a more rounded image.

169mm, 1/100s, f/8, ISO 100

Friday 21st October 2011

I was determined to find something to photograph in the caving hut this evening after all these weren't many other options with the sky overcast and me keen to get to bed. I actually quite like this simple image of some old furniture complete with old magazines.

65mm, 1/60s, f/5.6, ISO 400

Thursday 20th October 2011

The composition isn't right on this photo, but it was a lovely building and the picture I had in mind didn't work, so this is what I was left with.

46mm, 1/80s, f/8, ISO 200

Tuesday 11th October 2011

This is The Crescent in Buxton, originally a Georgian spa developed in the 18th Century by the Duke of Devonshire using his mining profits and modelled on ones in Bath. It has been empty several years but is being restored with the help of lottery funding.

18mm, 15s, f/11, ISO 400

Monday 3rd October 2011

Book spines.

4.6mm, 1/8s, f/2.8. (auto)

Wednesday 21st September 2011

The batteries have died on the SLR I have been borrowing, so I'm down to a digital compact (Ixus 850) until the insurance company sort my claim out. This limits the range of things I can successfully photograph, and I'm rather at the mercy of the weather as this camera doesn't perform well in low light indoors. Still, I shall battle on. This is the next in my series of Stoke-on-Trent sub-stations! This one is at the top of Greenbank Road and looks like a rather ornate old barn. I included the fencing as I think it reflects the style and the slight decay.

6.1mm, 1/60s, f/3.2. (auto)

Monday 19th September 2011

Reading town hall. I MUST have walked past this when I lived locally but now I walk around with a photographer's eyes, I notice many things that I never did before. It was quite striking, and although I got a couple of shots of the whole building, I prefer this one of the windows.

19mm, 1/200s, f/11, ISO 800

Thursday 15th September 2011

This would usually be an example of what-not-to-do in photoshop, but sometimes wrong can be right. It was created by massively inverting the curves curve so instead of creating a gentle s or gentle inverted-s, I created an intense inverted-s, where each peak reached the top of bottom. This means that a higher colour becomes darker than one that was originally darker. This should usually be avoided, but I flipped the mouse by accident while I was moving the marker and I thought the result was interesting so I left it like that. There are aspects of it that I don't like, but the sky I really love. So I'm throwing it out there. Is it marmite? Do you love it or hate it?

20mm, 1/400s, f/10, ISO 250

I've included a more normal photo too, for Ian that I met at the colliery who was telling me some of its interesting history.

Wednesday 14th September 2011

This was interesting - trying to take get the white balance right on a pink building lit by orange lights at night. In some ways a success and some ways a failure. The colours absorbe (or reflected?) the light meaning the pink lost its pinkness - so this is accurate to how the building looked at night, but not at all the colour it looks in the day.

I've passed this building countless times in the 5 years I've lived in Stoke, and have always been curious about it. It's pink - both pale and darker - which seems modern but the paint is decaying and it looks like it's been that way forever. The tablet at the top says 'Bethel Chapel 1824', so I looked it up. It was built as a methodist chapel to seat 1000 worshippers, one of 7 (plus 2 churches) in Burslem. Burslem only had a population of 12,000 but they were enthusiastically religious. The wings contained school rooms and the preacher's house, the facade was originally brick but was later stuccoed, and left and right wings were added in 1875. It's now used as warehouse storage.

18mm, 4s, f/8, ISO 250

For the chap that stopped in his car to have a chat, I said I'd put the photo of you up and here it is! For a better example of my photography see the photos page.

Friday 9th September 2011

A decaying, yet colourful building (opposite a brand new community fire station).

18mm, 1/40s, f/8, ISO 400