Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Funny How Things Turn Out

 


Further experimentations to determine the cumulative influence of Photoshop filters, fine single malts, and having nothing better to do, resulted in this rather topical, post-apocalyptic view of Byram Street in Huddersfield. Funny how things turn out, isn't it!

Monday, February 21, 2022

I Must Return To Brid Again

 


This is unmistakably Bridlington: that harbour wall and those muddy moorings are seared into my DNA like deep fried haddock and chips. And, just as unmistakably, that is my mother and that is me, so the date must have been around 1950. As with so many old family seaside snaps, it is memory-rich. If Spring ever comes again, I must return to Brid.



Sunday, February 20, 2022

Market Stalls, Halifax 1981

 


This new image is based on a photograph I took forty years ago in Halifax. It was taken in the Piece Hall when that fine building was going through one of its early transitions from redundant wholesale marketplace to open-air retail market. It was busy and purposeful, but the location was of secondary importance: the open space was merely a suitable location for a few market stalls. Forty years on, and it is the location that takes pride of place, the building that is the star of the show. 



Saturday, February 19, 2022

A Sepia Saturday Contribution

 


Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a man with a car by a lake. My contribution to this weekly meme features a woman with a car by a garage. The women in question is my mother, Gladys Burnett, and I must have taken the photograph  somewhere around 1966.

When we started Sepia Saturday all those years ago, the name payed tribute to those old family photographs that have turned sepia with age. What I hadn't realised ate the time was that, given enough time, I would become sepia! Most of my old photographs are new scans from old negatives, and negatives may get scratched and stained, but they don't turn sepia. This photograph of my mother is a rare scan of the original print - and low and behold, it has turned sepia.


AS always, you can see other Sepia Saturday contributions by visiting the Sepia Saturday Blog and following the links.


Thursday, February 10, 2022

Walking The Streets Of Stoke


To the best of my recollection, it was fifty years ago when I took this photograph. It was the early 1970s, and I was at university at Keele in Staffordshire. Most weekends were spent either in London, where my soon to be wife was at university, or back in Halifax where we both came from. Sundays - and occasionally Monday mornings - would see the train back to Stoke and then the walk from Stoke railway station to Newcastle-Under-Lyme and then the free bus up to the Keele campus. Those walks through Stoke provided plenty of opportunities for photography, and I developed a great affection for the five towns. Come Spring or Summer, come the post-Covid world, I am determined to return to Stoke to walk those streets again.



Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Two Characters In Search Of A Story



This has to be one of the strangest photographs in my family collection. I have no idea who the couple are, but they undoubtedly fit somewhere on my family tree as I seem to have inherited two, quite different, photographs of the same couple from different sources. The second photograph - which came to me in the form of a glass negative - echoes the somewhat unconventional dress sense and appears to have been taken with a cowshed in the background.


In my quest to find a suitable place within the eccentric confines of the Burnett Family Tree, I am submitting both images to the International Society For The Identification Of Long Lost People - otherwise known as the Internet. I would love to be able to put names to these faces, and, even more, I would love to learn the story of their lives.

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

The Acme Of Perfection In Pierrotic Entertainment


I inherited this photograph from my Auntie Annie and Uncle Harry. During the late twenties and early thirties, Uncle Harry "trod the boards" as a member of a touring concert party - "The Silhouettes". Harry was the featured "pianist and tenor vocalist", and that is Harry, second from the right, with his wavy hair blowing in the smokey breeze. I also inherited a programme from The Silhouettes' show in Bognor in September 1931, and this provides a clue to the other "artistes" featured in the photograph.



Since I last featured this photograph on my blog several years ago, it has become possible to colourise old photographs with the help of Artificial Intelligence programmes. The results are quite striking, but somehow it is the faded sepia of the mill chimneys, that best suits the mood of the image.


Monochrome, sepia or vibrant colour; the Silhouettes remain the very acme of perfection in pierrotic entertainment.



Tuesday, February 01, 2022

From Alpine Pram Pushing To The Age Of Snaps

 

So here we are, a new month, and safely returned from a week in the Dolomites pushing a pram up a mountainside. Alpine pram-pushing is still a relatively new sport, and there was a possibility that we might have been chosen for the British team for the Winter Olympics, but a couple of unfortunate falls in Val Gardena meant that wasn't to be. We returned, however, with all limbs as intact as they were before we went and some precious memories of time spent with our grandchildren.


Let us start the new month by leaving all that snow behind and concentrating on a typical British seaside view from 100 years ago. By 1922, photography is getting interesting; it has come out of the studio and escaped the confines of the "professional". The Age of Snaps was just starting, and people were being captures as they really were rather than as they would like posterity to remember them.


The original photograph comes from my collection of Lost and Found Photographs and the coloured version come courtesy of Photoshop.

11 March 2024 : Paper Hanging

  Some people read the paper, some try and understand the meaning of life, George II and Elvis Presley both died there .... and photographer...