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.

A 1907 Poke

 

A "Facebook Poke" is defined as "a digital nudge or virtual greeting used to get a friend's attention." The equivalent 120 years ago was a postcard - sent, as it happens, to my great-uncle Fowler Beanland - with the slightly ambiguous message, "What Ho." The advantage of the 1907 poke is that we can compare Wigton Church then and now, and wonder what happened to all the carts!

The Swinging Sixties

The summers of my youth, when the most avant-garde experience might have been listening to a trad-jazz combo in the park. And if the sun was shining, they might even hang their jackets up and perform in their shirt sleeves. Ah, the swinging sixties.

 

Albert

It's Fathers' day here in the UK, so today's picture is in honour of my father. Taken over 90 years ago, the photograph shows a man who is both a stranger and also familiar - an older man I knew well, dressed in a younger man's clothes. I look at him and see some of my brother and bits of my son. I remember him, and I hope I see bits of myself

Bridge Art

 

There should be a special category of art for the work displayed on the metal panels that line endless railway bridges and other lumps of transport infrastructure in this country. Some of it is organised, some of it is feral, and much of it is boring and unimaginative - but some of it would earn a place in any posh gallery. My example comes from the railway bridge next to Brighouse Station and was produced, it seems, by students at Calderdale College. Well done, them.

Shibden Gate

There is always a temptation to submit images that don't pass the pinpoint definition test - or that fail short of the standard for clarity and contrast - to some AI controlled filter that promises "crystal clear pictures that look like they were taken yesterday!" I didn't take this photo of the Shibden valley near Halifax yesterday, and it's grainy uncertainty matches my memory just fine. AI, keep your hands off it.

 

Tired Pinks And Sooty Greens

 

The view looking back up the Calder Valley from the top of Long Wall, Elland provides all the sensuous curves demanded by even the most obsessive nineteenth century French Impressionist. And that palette of tired pinks and sooty greens perfectly suits this land we call home. The image is a result of my favourite occupation: just messing about.

78 RPM

 

I wake up today to discover that I have become 78. How nice that would be if it meant I could spin around faster than ever, or that the revolutionary fervour of my youth was stronger and more passionate than ever. Alas, it merely means that I've lost what clarity I ever had, I often repeat myself endlessly and have become increasingly out of date.

Stone Slates And Chimney Pots

 

This was the previous generation: the generation of stone slates and chimney pots, when harsh grey smoke drifted up to merge with a wet grey sky. It was bad for us - there can be no doubt about that. However, it will be a hard task to take a visually interesting photograph of some solar panels.

Looking Down

 

The photograph is one of dozens I've taken of Halifax from the top of Beacon Hill over the years. This particular one dates from the early 1970s. Sometimes, however, I'd been blessed with the ability to draw so I could have captured the view's magical detail. Fear not: artificial intelligence enables dreams to come true (and a fair number of nightmares as well, but that’s another story).

Rainy Days

 

You expect rain in Manchester. When I was there last week it rained from the moment I got off the train until the moment I stepped back on the train again, four hours later. The rain washed out the colours, but left the shapes. Who needs colours when you have shapes like these?

Liverpool!

 

This is a wonderful photograph - so much more eloquent than the usual smiling-face mugshot. That's my mother pointing, my brother Roger digging in the sand, and me looking attentively at what she's indicating. I suspect that could be Liverpool as the background suggest the photo was taken in New Brighton. Even the sloping horizon contributes to what is a fabulous composition.

Fishy Shapes

 

Like a cross between Halloween-costumed children and monsters auditioning for Doctor Who, these smokestacks dominated the skyline at Grimsby Fish Docks 40 or 50 years ago. I visited the docks whenever I could and took photographs of what was clearly a way of life living on borrowed time.

Never, Never, So

 

.. And speaking of fakes! No doubt people will recall the time Vincent van Gogh spent in Halifax in the early 1870s, and his fondness of the view from Greetland overlooking the Calder Valley towards Wainhouse Tower. This painting of his dates from that time. I know what you skeptics are going to say: "the tower wasn't completed until 1875". Van Gogh had such an imagination, however.