Rievaulx Three

Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire, UK. The impressive ruins of one of England’s most powerful Cistercian monasteries. Photographed in  mid September 2016

On the Phone

On the phone  – Market place, Helmsley – North Yorkshire, UK

Waiting for the bus

With everything that’s going on at the moment (see the last blog post), it’s nice to be able to get brief escape from it all even if it is only for a couple of hours.

The fact that there will be no Scotland trip this year also weighs heavy.

This image was taken in the nearby market town of Helmsley in North Yorkshire. The town is small but gets a huge amount of visitors each year, though i would say that the people in the photo are most probably locals.

It looks like i’d been spotted by the woman sat third from right.

A Stone’s Throw

Scrap trailer in a farm yard

The last four weeks or so have seen a small photography project come together. Using the tintype setting on the Hipstamatic app, the project started as a couple of test images and grew larger, with aspect becoming clear after a revelatory walk through a location barely a mile from where i live. It was a wood, with a public footpath, that I’d never seen before.

We rarely explore around where we live. We become so complacent about our surroundings choosing to explore areas further afield. Many undiscovered ‘lands’ remain within a stone’s throw of our front door and yet we often choose to remain comfortable with the familiar. We can visit another day is often the excuse and that ‘another day’ rarely, if ever, arrives.

The Hipstamatic tintype setting was something I’d wanted to have a go with for ages. When it first came out it used to crash the app every time, however,  no problems now. The tintype has its own quirks with highlights and exposures in very bright light proving to be especially challenging. Several shots didn’t come out well due to the light intensity and a small number of shots needed tidying up in Photoshop – bright highlighted areas produced multi-coloured pixelated areas. The narrow focus area of the photos also takes some getting used to, but gradually you start compensating for it when composing images. I did rather enjoy the fact that you never did quite know how the image would turn out.

Around thirty images from the ‘A Stone’s Throw ‘project can be found in the gallery at :-

http://www.richardflintphoto.com/portfolio/a-stones-throw/

A few extra shots are included in the ‘A Stone’s Throw’ Flickr album HERE

The Strong Man Lamp

If there was ever an addiction for the British public, it would be the car boot sale. People go mad for them, search them out, hunt for them. Buyers and sellers.

Maybe that’s the appeal; the car boot offers a modern day thrill of the hunt. Are you looking for a strong man lamp… then it’s your lucky day! Among the junk there is treasure.

It’s true too. I managed at one sale to pick up Don McCullin’s 1979 book ‘Homecoming’ for a pound. Bargain!

The Walled City… Revisited

Last Sunday afternoon i had a bit of fun. I had a brief stroll around York’s city walls to avoid the bands battling it out in the city centre. Drummers seemed to be everywhere. While on the wall i started taking a few photos and an idea started to come together.

Now those of you who have followed my photo adventures for a while may remember that i did a photo project about York’s Medieval walls called Walled City. Walled City was an important project. It was the first photography book i completed (for the sadly defunct Solo Photo Book Month Project) and I gained a lot of knowledge about the book making process. That first small project led me onto discovering Blurb and world of self publishing.

After my walk around on the walls, I realised that It was four years, to the month, since I’d shot those images and created that book. How time flies. It then dawned on me that a rather fun idea would be to do it again… BUT shoot using an iPhone, with the images, this time  instantly uploaded and added to Instagram or WordPress. A live photo feed over two or three hours.

I did think about doing it later this year but then decided that it would be better to leave it until June 2014. It could, in its own little way, mark the fifth anniversary of the Walled City project. A little homage to a small but important project. It may, if the 2014 project images are strong enough, eventually become a book itself.

The Fictional Man

Imperial Stormtrooper portrait taken outside of Waterstone’s book store in York