On The Seventh Day
And on the seventh day, somebody said, don’t write anything, just give us a photo.
Category Archives: Picture Post
With A Little Help From A Friend
This is the outcome of yet another late-night, malt-whisky induced, Photoshop adventure. The starting point was a rather tattered little print from an old photograph album. The album contained thirty or forty prints of entirely unknown origin, which I bought off eBay for less than the price of a cup of tea in a coffee shop. The only clue as to the provenance is a short inscription in the front of the album which states “Winter 1946-7 and Summer 1947. 431 ED“. If the prints were in better condition, I would be loath to mess with them, but they are scratched and faded, bent and blurred, and openly invite me and my pal Photoshop to do our worst with them.
Of this particular effort, all the can be said is that the original blurred photograph was the work of our unknown photographer, the somewhat surreal colouring was the work of Photoshop, and the final decision that it was a face that I would be happy to spend the day looking at across my desk was my own …. with a little help from a glass of Bunnahabhain.
Boot-Caking, Door-Clogging, Welly-Wetting Snow
In my mind’s eye there was always snow in winter when I was younger. That same mind’s eye observed week after week of uninterrupted sunshine during each summer. It is, of course, all nonsense: if your mind has an eye at all it is equipped with about as much memory as a Sinclair ZX80 computer. You don’t need a mind’s eye, however, if you had a camera and a decent archive of your old negatives – you can scan through winter after winter of snow and remind yourself just how tough life used to be when central heating meant a paraffin stove in the middle of a room and a foreign holiday meant a day trip to Blackpool (I have been reading too many Facebook nostalgia group posts over Christmas and I am beginning to be infected by their sickly sentimentality). The calendar photograph on my desk today features a photograph I took in the mid 1980s, when we were living in Sheffield. I think it was taken from the bottom of Blake Street in Upperthorpe, but I can’t be certain about that as my mind’s eye was never equipped with a geo-tagging facility. Now that was snow: boot-caking, door-clogging, welly-wetting snow of the finest variety. For a proper, nostalgia-fest approach, I would like to say that snow was like that in the good old days before we started flirting with Europe, but I will refrain in case I attract the attention of fact-checking services.
We were supposed to go out for a walk yesterday, but a single snow flake was spotted drifting over the field at the bottom of the road, so we played safe and stayed inside instead. It gave me an opportunity to scan some photographs of the good old days.
Wet
A wet day in Brighouse, fifty-four years ago. Full of memories – donkey jackets, mini cars and Timothy Whites chemist. More resonant in these difficult times, memories of crowded pavements and social interaction.
Travel
On a day that we seem to be more isolated from the rest of the world than ever before, a reminder of the times when travel was easier. A reminder also of summer, and one of the beautiful capitals of Northern Europe. This was the city of Tallinn in Estonia during a visit in 2016.
Shape
Sometime, all you need is a shape. Detail is superfluous when outlines tell a story. This is my mother, Gladys, fifty-five years ago. I probably mis-judged the back-lighting, but I like to think that I was concerned only with capturing a shape.
Blue
What a pity the placenamers of old didn’t have access to Photoshop filters. Black Brook in West Vale could have been Gauguin Blue Brook and North Dean Mills could have been renamed Munchian Orange Mills. The world would have been a more colourful place.
Match
Take a cut flower on its last legs (and before you say it, of course flowers have legs); match it with a bit of colour left over from spray painting a railway viaduct; shake it all about, and you come up with the first of our exclusive 2021 range of wallpapers. What else is there to do on a winters’ night when you are waiting for Match of the Day to start?
Wall
A stone wall somewhere in Yorkshire – it was 40 years ago and I can’t remember exactly where. It probably was somewhere around Halifax, where there is stone enough to spare. There is something appealing about the slight curve: whether subsidence or intent, it gives it a sinuous feeling.
