Cumberland Basin and Scouring

By shendyNo Comments
Note for those unfamiliar with Bristol: Cumberland Basin is the bit of the Bristol harbour system that sits between the Floating Harbour (where the historical docks are/were) and the tidal River Avon that heads out under Clifton Suspension Bridge and into the Severn Estuary at Avonmouth (where the modern docks are). This is not the same Avon as Stratford-upon-Avon - that joins the Severn at Tewkesbury. Cumberland Basin normally looks like this. A few weeks ago someone at work mentioned that Cumberland Basin was empty, which sounded unusual so I quickly googled to see what was going on - and apparently it's something that happens quite regularly, with a schedule published on the harbourmaster's website.It's all part of the process to stop the Floating Harbour from getting silted up - they let the Cumberland Basin empty with the tide and then open sluice gates to allow water from the Floating Harbour out, which takes silt with it. The process is called "scouring". Given...
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Concorde

By shendyNo Comments
Given that this is the 50th anniversary of the first Concorde flight, I thought it would be appropriate to share some photos from its last landing in Bristol, in November 2011. A work colleague lived backing on to Filton airfield, and they were all given free tickets to see the landing from the airfield itself - he very kindly offered me one on the ground that I took photos. Before it came in to land, it did a flypast of the airfield, and the shot below is all I have of that - I took that one photo and the camera battery ran out. Now remember that this was back in the days of film, when camera batteries lasted for at least a year, so it was quite an unexpected event. Panic hit - have I taken a day off work, used a friend's ticket and ended up with just 1 photo, and that not even of the landing? Fortunately I can be...
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Bristol 2018

By shendyNo Comments
My most obvious subject! Working right in the centre of the city and very close to the Harbourside, I do take a lot of photos of Bristol. HarboursideGetting out of the office for a bit of fresh air naturally takes me to the Harbourside, so I've taken a lot of photos of this area this year. I've also found that it's possible to walk right round the harbour, up to Cumberland Basin and back to Prince Street Bridge, in my lunch hour. I've only done it with the phone so far but must try it with something a bit more serious at some point.So we have some shadows, a bit of the remaining industrial side of the harbourside - the steam crane is an absolute favourite of mine and I must get out and shoot it with the large format camera - and a shoot late in the year around the refurbished Metro Bus bridge and nearby. SS Great BritainI'm occasionally involved...
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Going Back to Film, part 2

By shendy Comment Closed
A bit of a follow-up on the previous post, with some more on my adventures back into film photography. In February I upgraded the TLR, buying an MPP Microcord. Unfortunately it turned out that mine was faulty so it went back to the supplier. The first images on it were taken during the heavy snow we had - I wish I could claim that I was trying to emulate the soft look of some of the early photographers, but no - the shutter was slow and it also had issues with winding on. It did take some slightly sharper shots on a visit to Aust for the spring tides, and at the SS great Britain, but it wasn't good enough so back it went.   This left me with the dilemma about what to try next. In the end I went for a substantial upgrade and succumbed to a Hasselblad, having lusted after them for many years. I found one on Ebay at a...
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Going Back to Film

By shendyNo Comments
Long and a bit image heavy... I was about to post something about getting back into taking and developing my own black and white film when I realised that I haven't actually posted anything at all about starting off with large format photography, which was where the whole film thing started - so this is going to be a long post with quite a few photos. This dates back to late 2014 when I heard about a Kickstarter project that was launching an affordable 5x4 large format camera, the Intrepid Camera Company. That's something I've thought about a few times over the last 20 years, but it's always been way out of my league - far too expensive. But suddenly this made it affordable, so I signed up. It took them quite a while to get production sorted and I didn't get my camera until mid-2016, and it's been a slow process getting used to it. I started with some cheap film,...
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