Good Or Bad?

This is a photo of a boating lake in Blackpool, taken by my Uncle Frank 80+ years ago. I can never tell with Uncle Frank's photos whether they were spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. I submitted it to an AI bot and asked "is this a good photograph?" The answer was: "Yes, it is an exceptionally compelling and well-composed photograph. From both a technical and artistic standpoint, it achieves several elements that make a classic photograph successful". Well, there you go!

 

I Was Nearly Kilt Last Night

 

"We got away for a few days. The weather is lovely. I was nearly kilt last night climbing hills. This is just at the top where we live". A brief explanation of the message on this old postcard may be necessary. The word "kilt" is a northern expression meaning "killed". The hill in question is Salterhebble Hill, and those who know it will appreciate how you might be nearly kilt climbing it.

The Art Of Football

 

I created this on my iPad last night while watching the England vs. DR Congo football match. My excuse is that you had to do something rather than just suffer in silence. It's not a particularly good piece of artwork, but it's better than much of England's performance.

The Beauty Of Shape

 

What better way to start the second half of the year than with this photograph I took over half a century ago? I'm not sure what went through my mind when I took it, but it has turned out to be one of my favourite photos - part exercise in scale, part composition in grey, and part homage to the beauty of shape.

Happy, Sunny Days

 

What a difference a century makes. Warm weather at the end of June 1926 meant that kids at Holy Trinity School in Halifax had their lessons outdoors, “under ideal conditions.” A hundred years later, similar warm weather brings a very different response. Before we start bemoaning the delicate snowflakes of the modern era, it should be pointed out that June 1926 temperatures were a good 10°C lower than this month’s, and we have also learned a lot more about the dangers of too much sun.

A Grainy Memory

 

It was the 1980s. It was somewhere in the Lake District, I think. It wasn't raining - rare for the Lake District - and the light of day was beginning to merge into the shadows of a summer evening. It's nothing more than a memory: a grainy, black-and-white memory.

Leave The Faces Well Alone

 

All lovers of old photos are faced with endless decisions about artificial intelligence: when to use it, how much to use it, and whether to use it al all. Don't ask me for answers - you have to make up your own mind. I do have one rule myself: I tell whichever AI bot I'm using to "leave the faces alone". Otherwise, you not only get significant facial changes, but also faces that look as though the were cast just yesterday. AI has coloured this old photo of my mother, but left her face alone!

Another Wall

Another photograph of another Yorkshire stone wall. This one is far more recent, however. It is also in a very different part of Yorkshire. This was taken in the north of the county, where fields contain flocks of sheep, not factories.

In Halifax

I'm pretty certain that this photograph - taken well over 50 years ago - was taken somewhere in Halifax. It has all the necessary ingredients: an overgrown, stone-cobbled lane rising up a steep hillside to meet a soot-blackened wall of monumental proportions. It's probably so obviously Halifax that, at no time over the last half century, have I ever got around to reminding myself exactly where I was on that day. Let's just say I was in Halifax.

A 1916 Girl

 

On the back of this sepia portrait of an unknown girl is a studio stamp that states: "W Buckley, Portrait Specialist, 28 August 1916, Regent Square, Blackpool." There is something quite beautiful about the portrait - William Rawlinson Buckley was a celebrated Blackpool photographer - and something that is so resonant of the time. This, after all, is 1916: the girl may have been employed in one of the numerous munitions factories, and the men in her life will have been in the trenches.

A Heated Basin

We are living through record heatwaves here in the UK at the moment, experiencing temperatures that make you want to find a cool stretch of water and take the plunge. I took today's photograph in Brighouse Canal Basin well over half a century ago, when it was surrounded by gasworks and endless, rundown factories. You would have been risking your life by going for a swim in the canal back in those days, and even now you'd be better advised to put up with the heat rather than risk taking to the water.