Chicken Silos

 Yes, quite.  Chicken silos, or hoppers, or whatever they're called.  Whatever it is, these ones belong to pretty much our nearest neighbour, just up the road.  Concentration camps for hens, my mother called them.  The good news is, as far as I am aware, the huts no longer contain thousands of little feathered things and the whole operation is being wound down.  A right turn from the end of our drive and a short walk and this is what I saw on a gloomy February afternoon just as the sun was going down:

Chicken Silos, 2021.  HP5+, on MG Classic fibre paper.

They were snapped up on a Yashica T4 point 'n' shoot.  Lovely little thing it is too - Zeiss lens an' all.  From what I can see of the negative there's a better print in it than this, but my time in the darkroom Sunday morning was cut short.  It's me eyes, y'see...they're not where I want them to be at the minute.  Well, they're in the usual place but for the past few days they've not been themselves and I know not why.  So yesterday my wife dragged me kicking and screaming out of the darkroom to head to our local A&E and get them looked at.  In COVID times that's not an easy thing to arrange, I can tell you, but eyes are eyes and you've only the two and they need looking after so eventually we got to see a qualified doctory-type person and he put the staining drops in and then looked inside them. He decided that while he couldn't see anything going on it would be sensible to go see an ophthalmologist and get them properly checked which is what we are doing about now if you are reading this shortly after it's been posted. This time it’s a 40-minute scoot up the road to a bigger hospital with an eye clinic.  Normally on a trip to Derry I’d take a camera and stop off somewhere on the way back but I’ll likely be getting more drops in my eyes so I doubt I’ll be in a position to photograph anything.