Messing About On Water Lane

If there is one thing I love doing, it is messing about with old images. Give me a half-decent computer, a reasonably warm desk to work on, and the occasional cup of tea, and I can occupy myself for a decade or two. There is no rational plan, no great scheme, no fixed objective: it is messing about in its truest sense.

Take, for example, Water Street, in Halifax back in 1939. This particular MAP (Messing About Project) started life as a rather poor quality newspaper image from the Halifax Courier and Guardian of Saturday 22nd April 1939. It was there simply as an image of Halifax at the time, and was captioned “Caddy Field From Water Lane Looking Towards Southowram” It is a still recognisable scene to anyone who has wandered along the streets of Halifax in more recent times.

To find and copy the image would be fun, but it is the messing about which provides me with real enjoyment. I won’t bore you with a list of the various filters and dodges used to create the finished image – if truth be told I can’t remember most of what I did. I like the result, however: I like creating pictures from the past.