Category: Photography

Fred and Constance Bell, 1926

wedding photo
original photo
The original.

I’m fascinated to see this photograph of my Uncle Fred’s 1920s wedding.

My thanks to my cousin Kathleen for looking out this record of the 1926 marriage of her parents Fred and Constance Bell, which I’ve restored and colourised in Adobe Photoshop.

Fred and Constance

The cheeky eight-year in the foreground is my dad, Robert Douglas Bell. I don’t have many – if any – photographs of him as a child, so I’m pleased that this one has turned up.

Robert Douglas Bell

Fred was the oldest, my dad the youngest and in between was my Aunt Norah.

Norah

The guests aren’t arranged in strict family order and Constance’s mum didn’t hold with new-fangled inventions like photography, so she doesn’t appear at all, so the guests, as identified by my cousin Kathleen are:

Back row: Robert Bell (my grandad); Lena, his sister; the best man, a friend of Fred’s; Fred Bell; Constance; Edwin, her brother; Jack, husband of May on the front row; Nellie Ogden; Tilly Ogden.

Front row: May, married to Jack; Norah Bell; Robert Douglas Bell; Helen, sister of Constance (died 1942, aged 47); Jane Bell (nee Bagshaw) my grandma – did she end up seated here, diagonally opposite her husband Robert when Constance’s mum refused to be on the photograph?

Pigeons at Dawn

Latest trail cam shots from our back garden: pheasants, blackbird, a pair of robins and – what are you doing there?! – Butch (yes, he really is called Butch), next door’s Labrador but my favourite shot is the wood pigeon at dawn, looking hopefully up at the feeders.

Junction 32

As part of my attempt to get to know my way around my digital camera I’m making a point of taking it with me whenever I can, even on a trip to Junction 32 shopping centre at Castleford this morning. This is the view from our table at Bakers and Baristas.

bastion

Just to get started I took a photograph of the gabion wall by the car park.

bastion edging

If I can get relaxed about using my camera in public I’ll move on to including people in my photographs.

Street Photography

Ossett market

My final module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course is street photography, so I’ve set the Art Filter my Olympus OM E-10 DSLR to ‘Grainy Film’ and headed to Ossett Market.

market

Sitting on a bench looking down at the flip-up screen, I can snap away without being spotted. So apologies if you’ve ended up on one of my photos.

bookstall

I like the low viewpoint that I get from a bench but to get the feel of a market I tried browsing the bookstall while ‘shooting from the hip’. But I’ve been spotted… .

“Are you capturing the moment?” asks the man on the mobile phone accessories stall.

Jehovah's witnesses

How can I do street photography without including a pair of street preachers?

Ruth Nettleton

As we head home we meet Ruth Nettleton. As she’s the local historian who wrote a centennial history of Ossett Town Hall, I photograph her with the current restoration work behind her.

Still Life

sketchbook

For the still life module from my photography course I’ve taken my sketchbook as the ‘hero’ object with pen and watercolour box as secondary props.

wallet

My wallet was the first thing that I had to hand, so I set up my desktop ‘studio’ – a curved sheet of watercolour for ‘infinity curve’ background.

Dinky toy

Also making an appearance, centre stage, my 1950 Bedford delivery van Dinky Toy.

St Bernards

St Bernard

Yes, I know that the portrait module was Tuesday, but how could I resist Winnie and Pepper – a 2-year-old St Bernard and his aunt – when I spotted them in the courtyard at Nostell?

St Bernards

But before I could get the shot I was after the two of them came to life, checking out the camera so closely that I might as well have switched to macro.

Luckily they soon settled down and I got my shot.

Movement

Coxley Beck

Today’s module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course explores movement, so he suggests techniques to freeze or alternatively blur the action of speeding vehicles or to capture traffic trails at night but I’ve headed for Coxley Beck to try some long exposures of flowing water.

Coxley Beck

For these one- to two-second exposures a tripod was essential and, as with the macro flower shots yesterday, using an app on my iPhone to trigger the camera and set the focus point made things a lot easier than squinting through the viewfinder. It also cut out any chance of camera shake.

log in the beck

Nature

grass

After the portrait module I’m back on home turf with ‘Nature’ today in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course.

He suggests getting up at dawn for a dew-fresh close-up of grass blades but yesterday, as the late afternoon sun backlit a patch of our front lawn, I went for his alternative suggestion of adding the ‘dew’ with a fine-rose watering can.

florist's daisy

My usual approach to flower photography is to snap away and hope for the best, so it was interesting to try his more considered approach, using a tripod and setting up the shot with a bit of extra care.

Remote Control

Olympus remote control on the iPad

This is where the ability to remote control my Olympus DSLR with an iPad proved useful (you can also use a smart phone). It enables you to control aperture, shutter speed, ISO ‘film speed’ and focus without crouching down to look at the subject via the camera’s viewfinder or flip-up screen.

Leaf Veins

leaf veins

The final challenge was to photograph a backlit leaf. My Huion light pad wasn’t bright enough so I sprayed the leaf with water and stuck it to the studio window.

leaf on window

The whole beginner’s course is designed for a digital camera with an general purpose ‘kit lens’. Mine zooms from 14-42mm, which in traditional 35mm cameras that would be 28-84mm: ranging from a wide-angle (28mm) that doesn’t distort perspective too much to a short telephoto (84mm) that is useful for portraits.

When I bought the camera it also came with a dedicated macro lens and a modest telephoto zoom (80mm to 300mm in traditional 35mm terms) so I’m impressed at how well the everyday kit lens has performed as a macro lens on the leaf.

Portraits

hands

I’m out with my Olympus DSLR again and today it’s the portrait module from Ben Hawkins’ book, The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course. That includes a portrait of hands, so I set up a mirror and photographed my ‘all-fingers-and-thumbs’ method of holding the camera.

For older gnarly hands like mine Ben suggests going for black and white and adding a bit of grain.

Pet Portraits

Bertie the terrier

Our next challenge was pet portraits, although challenge is hardly the right word as it would be impossible to take a bad photo of Bertie.

“Does he mind having his photograph taken?” I asked the woman at the next table in the Little Owl cafe, RSPB St Aidans.

“He loves it!” she replied showing me her phone with Bertie filling the home screen.

In the book Ben Hawkins suggests setting the shutter of your camera to silent when photographing pets and you can see that Bertie was getting a tad suspicious by the time I took this, the second photograph.

Add Context

sewing room

We’re asked for a portrait with the figure in context so as we sat in the Rivers Meet Cafe in Methley, I couldn’t help thinking that the busy sewing room, with the Monday morning class hard at work, would be a brilliant setting. I got what I was after straight away, or I thought I had when I checked the photo on the camera’s flip-up screen. It was only when I got it on the big screen back home that I realised that I’d caught my model mid blink. Moral: always take several shots.