Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
One last snapshot from our 16 July 1965 third form trip to Swaledale. Sorting through the old gang (‘gangue’ = waste) near Hurst, Swaledale are my two school friends Derek Stefaniw examining a chunk of mineral – perhaps fluorite or galena? – alongside cool dude Paul Copley.
Amongst my 1965 negatives, the shots that I took to start or finish off a film are often everyday scenes from home life that wouldn’t normally get recorded. This shot, which comes just before the Richmond Castle photographs, is my mum’s car, a Triumph Herald Coupé taken in our back yard.
We did once fit our family of five into mum’s coupé, even though there were no seats in the back. More comfortable was dad’s Standard Vanguard Estate, registration RHL 777, which he bought from our friend Jack Buckle’s garage.
On our Ossett Grammar School school trip in the summer of 1965 we visited Richmond Castle. This is the same film as the Reeth photographs that I posted yesterday and, as you can see (left), the negatives are equally badly scratched, spotted and, in places, solarised.
I think that this works well for the Norman arch (above) but as a change from the daguerreotype effect that I went for yesterday, I decided the clean up the remaining images using the spot healing brush in Photoshop.
I soon realised that using the mouse on my iMac was impractical so, after boosting the contrast in the desktop version of Photoshop, I transferred the photographs to the iPad.
Touching up the images using an Apple Pencil in the iPad version of Photoshop makes it so much easier.
I air-dropped the image back to the desktop version to colourise it, using the Photoshop Neural Filters.
My thanks to James Alderson and Farming Lass on Instagram for identifying yesterday’s lime lorry incident from summer 1965 as being on the Hurst road at the Reeth end of Swaledale. I’m guessing that the cottages and lead smelting chimney are at Hurst or nearby.
I’ve gone with the daguerreotype vibe for this gallery of colourised photographs from our walk, which include my friend Stef making friends with a Dales pony.
In addition to the scratches and blobs my inept film development has also resulted in some solarisation. The shot of our party negotiating an area of mining spoil (possibly above Langthwaite?) would have made a good cover for an Alan Garner novel.
Summer 1965 and there’s been a delay in a delivery of lime in Swaledale. Perhaps you recognise the delivery man or the guys he’s talking to – the local farmer perhaps?
This colourised image is from one of my badly developed black and white negatives from 1965. There are dozens from a school trip of Richmond Castle, which Iooks pretty much the same today, so it’s the few which feature vehicles that particularly interest me.
My favourite view from Wakefield’s Riding Centre multistorey?
Since the Hannah Starkey show at the Hepworth, the view that I always park facing is the one of the flats on Kirkgate.
In Starkey’s thoughtfully stage-managed take on this scene, she gives Wakefield an aura of Indie movie sophistication (which it has, especially on a morning like today’s). One of her characters leans on the parapet, like a split-hair-dyed Rapunzel, looking out over the cloud-capped towers of Wakefield.
The flower border in June: buttercup seed-head, cornflower, lady’s mantle, marigold, lavender, salvia, annual meadow-grass, seed-pod (lupin?), white clover and red clover.
These are taken on my newly-repaired Olympus OM-D E-M10 II using the 60mm macro lens. Good to have it back. I could have taken very similar photographs on my iPhone but the digital SLR camera gives me more control.
One evening in 1964 or 65, we drove out to Holme Moss on the watershed of the Pennines, on the border of what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire with Cheshire.
Apart from some disappointing contact prints, I’ve never been able to look at these badly developed photographs so I’m surprised to see that the sign ‘UNFENCED ROAD BEWARE ANIMALS’ is just about readable.
That’s my sister on the West Riding sign.
On another evening outing my dad drove us all to Temple Newsam, Leeds. This time that isn’t me on the plinth.
It’s my brother’s turn to be in the spotlight in today’s dip into my 1964/65 negatives. In this one I’ve cloned him in a double exposure – evidently with a brother like Bill, one of him wasn’t enough. But it hasn’t worked out and the two sides of his persona are threatening each other with knives.
That’s my thumb print, yet another example of my inept film developing skills. My Ilford Sprite 127 plastic camera had no tripod bush so I rested it on a wooden stepladder.
More special effects as Bill hurtles down our driveway.
We called our homemade go-carts trolleys. I remember that this one included the comfort of an old spongy rubber doormat on the running board. The baton by the back wheel might be a makeshift break.
With a bit of help from the Adobe Illustrator this is me in January 1965 with my leg in a cast after breaking my leg hurrying home on an icy Boxing Day evening to watch Fred Hoyle’s Universe.
My mum had added a long zip to my trousers to fit over the cast. I rather liked the new ash-wood walking stick which Pinderfields Hospital had loaned me so I was not pleased when some of my classmates used it for an improvised game of golf, scratching the handle 😮
I’d like to say that the grainy quality of the photograph was deliberate but it was probably caused by thermal shock to the film in my early attempts at developing it in a Paterson’s developing tank.
The Broken Leg, my comic strip diary from that time