Look carefully…

A red filter might have helped here with legibility. I’d like to say I don’t make a habit of photographing brick walls but that just wouldn’t be true. These days I’m a (little) more discerning though, there is usually a reason. Like the gateway to the fourth dimension.

I’ve been itching to get into the Thames Water plant in Beck Close (because it looks like a science fiction set), so I thought I’d do the right thing and ask permission to take photos (gasp!). The gates must have had at least 10 padlocks and 3 entry phones plus a tantalizing notice telling all visitors to report to the reception, which, naturally, was the other side of the padlocks. I got zero response pressing each button on the entry phone several times though I could see people looking out of the windows. Is there a secret, a shibboleth (and just how hard is that to spell!!!) I don’t know? Possibly coincidentally, Coldbath Street round the corner was sealed off by the police because of ‘a serious assault’* so perhaps they were worried they’d be next. With that kind of response they should be.

This pissed me off royally since the light was just right. Somehow there was a gap in a week of shite weather and we had a beautiful sunny day. The pipes were gleaming silver and looking hazily spectral and I had a loaded Rolleiflex. Crap.

So, it was down to the beach with Gizmo and I cheered myself up at the breakers yard.

I scanned these last night and I have to admit to a little frisson when I looked at these two shots of a discarded walkway.

There appears to be a phantom figure walking towards me. At 02:00 yesterday morning I was thinking about ghosts and the Marchioness disaster because this is the final resting place of the Marchioness. It came here to be broken up. So I jumped a bit when I saw this photo, though obviously it is a trick of the light. Cue the music….

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Turning the camera 180 degrees, the refinery is agreeably framed by a doorway going absolutely nowhere. This time there is a real life figure in front of me, Chief Tart Gizmo, if you look carefully, excavating ‘his’ tyre from the mud.

The sun cast beautiful rippling reflections on the side of one of the hulks

Photos don’t really do this justice. I could have stared for hours as the shadows and lights rippling across the rusty hulls.

There is always something to photograph here. I’m becoming increasingly interested in the abstractions caused by the light and shade, especially on a contrasty day like this.

Because of the likely contrast, I thought I’d break with my usual HP5+ dev (HC-110 1+68) and stand develop in Rodinal 1+100 for an hour. I’m always slightly worried about using Rodinal with HP5+ because of the potential wormy grain but I’m happy with these. Happy enough to do it again methinks, particularly since it is such a lazy way to develop. I minute of agitation followed by 59 minutes of… absolutely nothing. No agitation every 30 secs tyranny. Nice. No streaks or drag either. Maybe I was lucky this time.

* The ‘serious assault’ had taken place the night before according to the local plod standing guard. Coldbath St was sealed off while they were awaiting the crime scene investigators. This was 11.00 in the morning, so that is a reassuring response time, not.

I went back and re-photographed what had been so cruelly destroyed by light the day before. Is that sad? But I’m so glad I did.

The eponymous box of delights is in fact a suitcase and I wanted to snap it before it got kicked around even more or even disappeared.

Like I speculate on what my old cameras have may have seen/snapped in previous lives, there is something about an empty abandoned suitcase in a very unexpected place that makes me think what is the backstory? Well, briefly anyway. I did worry about the Q-Tips in there though…

The weather was pretty grimy and gray, it had been raining and it looked like it was about to rain again. This old tray caught my eye. I think it is a tray.

I was expecting the bokeh to be good with the Planar at f/5.6, and to my eye the sharpness and softness work really well. Better than I anticipated.

Likewise with this fence post jutting out of the concrete.

Nice post, looks like a cock says Kate. We’ve heard that one before somewhere.

Looks kind of medieval – middle-ages phallocentrism. Worrying

I keep going on about this but I wasn’t just worried that the suitcase would disappear. These too look like they are destined for destruction shortly.

It was a Sunday, but the demolition was going full steam so I’m assuming they will be gone soon.

I’m beginning to really love using this Rolleiflex 3.5F. Have I said that before? The results are very pleasing to me. Apart from the sheer joy of using the thing, there is an expectation that starts when you hang the negs up to dry. They look special. Though it is good for me that I have to wait for them to dry before scanning them. I need that imposed self-control. I always so want everything right now

Definitely had to meter for the shadows otherwise it would be a silhouette. The ‘corpse’ was being pushed about by the wind too hence its lack of sharpness (f/11 at 1/4 second). Works for me though.

Embedded trolleys, wheelbarrows and other crap litter the mud, sinking slowly.

Further back at the breakers yard the beach changes all of the time

I’ve often photographed this timeless gap and I’m never that happy with the results for some reason. This is getting there though.

Clambering round here my sense of scale is often warped. The whole side of a boat is just tossed aside. Yes there are cranes, but a couple of days ago I don’t recall seeing this hulk (just the anchor). However, it looks like it has been here for ever.

Closer…

Meanwhile Mr Incredible (aka Gizmo) spent a happy half hour ripping discarded tyres to pieces and relocating various pieces of junk and detritus over the beach. That dog has a lot of projects going on down here and as a by-product stops me being bothered when snapping.

High contrast, orange filter on the Rollei, kind of harsh. Looks like fish skin to the right of the bread tin. Biblical. When I was a kid we had one of these bread bins. Made of metal to keep the mice out. Ours had red writing on it. I’d forgotten all about it until I saw this one.

I just liked what was left of this wooden fence in front of the concrete fence. Redundancy rules.

SOS from Harold, so lonely… The Rolleinar renders monster bokeh.

Maybe Harold’s battery fell out. If it is a battery.

This mooring buoy looks so wrong beached, usually it is floating. Out of context.

I didn’t realise how massive they are

Underfoot was a bit treacherous and I recall stories of people sinking in the mud, especially a couple of girls rescued when they were up to their necks. Gothic stuff. Imagine sinking down, relief as your feet touch something solid – only to find you are standing on the head of somebody else…. Easy to see how it happens, though I was more concerned about slipping and bashing the Rollei.

Everything is relentlessly mud coloured, like watery eyes, lacking real definition. So many colours of mud.

I really do expect to find a body part around here. Tis fanciful, but it is February, and grey too.

Later on in the day we were walking Gizmo by the river in Deptford and the Thames was nearly lapping over the path it was so high. Extreme.

What I didn’t photograph was the spectacular double rainbow arching over the Old Royal Naval College and landing in Island Gardens. I whipped out the little digi only to find that I’d forgotten to replace the SD card FFS!

I was all ready with the I’m a photographer not a terrorist spiel but I’m guessing I shouldn’t have been on the line and so close to the train. Some sort of alarm did start but it may have been coincidental. We left unscathed, unchallenged and unflattened.

Different kind of tracks and not left by the boot.

Since we are so close to the full moon again, the tides are more extreme and revealing the parts of the Thames it is hard to reach normally.

Much to my delight, an ancient and battered chair was pinned down in the mud along with other debris.

The previous day we had walked north through the foot-tunnel and headed east towards Canary Wharf.

Call me transpontinist, but for me one of the only highlights of this section of the path are the views of Greenwich. The path is claustrophobic, hemmed in by the try-hard apartments which are not ageing with any grace and there are any number of gates that have to be walked through reminding us that this part of the Thames Path has been semi-appropriated by private development. It leads to the toytown that is Canary Wharf, somewhere that fails to inspire any affection in me. Worst of all, I have to look hard for photographic opportunities.

They are there if you look closely…

Luckily the sun was out otherwise it would have depressed me too much

The stadium would have been 5 years old already before the camera that took this photo was made, but this photo was snapped five years (+) after the stadium closed. Does that make sense?

Also this image is reversed… ho hum

Stadium 1932-2003 RIP, Rolleiflex 1937 and still going strong…

The lens is uncoated too, so I was expecting flare. After all it was being pointed directly at the sun. Something I like to do anyway, whatever the lens.

Wide-open – check, soft – check, low contrast – check, flare – check etc etc etc. All wrong. Who cares? I don’t.

I’ve always found the railway (railroad) pictures of Jim Shaughnessy hugely impactful and atmospheric but it is (a) quite hard to trespass on UK railways, (b) usually life-threatening and (c) most difficult of all in today’s climate of paranoia – avoiding the BTP collaring me as a terrorist, domestic or otherwise.

So I was pleased to come across this inviting gap in the fence at the end of the line which coincided with the sun being in the right place. An opportunity not to be missed.

The railway tracks really were this wobbly, it isn’t the lens.

The tracks meme had been started earlier when I photographed this bench, transforming this modern eyesore (IMHO).

The camera was a 1937 Rolleiflex Automat Model 1 Type 1, the film HP5+ EI 200, the chemistry HC-110 1+63 (Dil H) 8 minutes. Tis good to get back to using film, particularly medium format. The 35mm I developed last week seemed so small in comparison and long!

Too much digital recently. Too much colour

Gizmo walked across this bridge and left his footprints.