The things people do

People use the beach for all sorts of reasons.

Some park their car too near the sea, and then this happens:

Not very sensible, I agree.


Others bring their horsey down and gallop up and down, like this:

That looks like fun, I must say.  Although I am not a horsey person.  Missy was on horses once upon a time.  But then she fell off and that, as they say, was the end of that.

More old negs

So last week saw the end of The Uncle's trip to Hungary in 1938.  What we also have in The Archives is a bunch of negatives which were, we're pretty sure, also taken in Hungary.  Unfortunately The Uncle is no longer with us to ask whether or not these were taken on the same trip.  We know his friend Balazs was a University Professor in Budapest and I suspect he was in the field of Education, much the same as The Uncle was in Belfast.  Perhaps that's how they met, through some sort of Exchange Programme.

The collection of negatives is quite interesting - it consists of a series of shots of school children, mostly taken outdoors in a park, although some are inside a school.  They are all either 6x6 or 6x9 negatives.  I'm not an expert in Central European dress styles through the ages, but they look as if they could have been taken in the late 1930s.  If that is the case, I can't help but wonder what happened to these children through the war years - Hungary suffered particularly badly during that time, as we know.

Anyway, I printed a few of the group shots out...

The staging of this shot is great.  Apart from the obvious enjoyment of the girls, I like the fact that some are leading with one foot and some with the other.  Also the girl in the background looking at the troupe as they stride towards the photographer.  Nice!  I'd bet most of those dresses were sewn at home, too...

This one above I really like - books open on the grass, very relaxed and informal.  And an interesting background and sky as well.

A difficult one to print, this last one, being half in shadow and half in sun.  The subjects are clear enough though, which is the important thing.

All printed on Ilford RC Warmtone, for a change.  More to come next Friday.

Himself

My mate, Dr C.  Here he comes, striding down The Prom ready for our little meeting.  He's got himself a FitBit watch thingy, so he's walking a lot more these days.

This is the posh end of Portstewart Prom.  Short for Promenade, y'know, where people can stroll up and down eating ice cream (or more often, sit in their car and eat ice cream).  The new apartments you see there stand where the old Windsor Hotel used to be, just for the record.  Mostly these will be holiday homes, for them'uns from the Big Smoke (Belfast).

...or here

Same road, just a bit further along:

When we was young, The Brother and I, we used to walk this road regularly.  The clump of trees you see there in the distance is Kiltinney More:

'More' is an Anglicisation of Mór, meaning 'Big' in Irish.  Where there's a Mór there's usually a corresponding Beg (small).  Kiltinney Beg lies at the other end of the road, but there's no signpost. Many of the old townland names are disappearing, only present in older maps, which is a great shame...not only are they a direct link to our heritage but they make the landscape a whole lot more interesting, in my eyes anyway.

So the farmer here at Kiltinney kept pheasants, all different sorts including golden ones, hence the reason for our walk.  Nowadays the farm is derelict, the buildings stripped of their slates and falling apart.  The Brother kept pheasants too for a while.  And we had guinea pigs and cats and hens.  That's the sort of thing we did when we was young and growing up in The Liberties.

We went through a hen phase a few years ago and I have to admit their eggs were lovely.  Very territorial birds though - they killed one of the newcomers we introduced to the flock, which was very upsetting for Missy.  We got rid of them - not because of that, but in the winter they attracted rats, which we just couldn't get rid of.  When we started seeing the rats running about in daylight enough was enough and the hens were dispatched.  No, not like that - how could you even think that?!  No, we took them back from whence they came.

Not much here...

If you go down our road a bit and then turn left up Kiltinney, walk past the chicken houses (holding your nose more often than not) and you get to here.

I know it's not much - and it's a bit dark.  Nice all the same though, in its own way.

A Winter's Tale

It's definitely Winter.  I can tell since the sun is just rising as I get up on a school morning.  I say the sun is rising, but that has to be taken with a pinch of salt in The Liberties.  Usually it means the general murkiness gets a little clearer.

However, the other morning, as is my norm, I found myself on the beach in Portstewart and it was looking a little dramatic, what with the morning sun pitched against some dark clouds and all.  So much so, in fact, that I pointed me camera at it (that would have been the rangefinder thingmy loaded with HP5+) and pressed the shutter release.

And on Saturday morning I escaped into the darkroom for about an hour...and this is the result, on Kentmere VC:

That is pretty close to how I remember the scene.  Of course it didn't just come out of the fixer looking as fabulous as that - no siree.

Here's the story - pictorally.

Apart from the big bit of dust on the negative (which looks like the moon), the first print (above left) was way too dark.  So I blower-brushed the dust off and adjusted the exposure and got my second print there on the right.  Still not great - I liked the sky OK, but the whole thing looked too dark for my liking.

My third effort (above left) was a crude attempt at dodging where the sand dunes are on the left in an attempt to bring out some detail there. Rubbish, really.  For my fourth effort I cut out a bigger bit of card and dodged a bit more.  Still rubbish - and my attempts to straighten the horizon were getting worse, not better.

At this point in time I was becoming disillusioned with my abilities in the darkroom if not life itself.  Patience, I told myself.  A different course of action was required.  I did two things.  First thing I did was draw some horizontal lines on the back of an old print which I put on the easel in an attempt to sort out the horizon.  You have to remember to take the old print out of the easel though otherwise you run the risk of putting the unexposed sheet of paper under the print with the lines drawn on it.  Not that I would ever do that, of course...  Secondly I decided to dodge the whole of the lower half of the print to lighten the foreground and provide some balance to the sky.

I think I got there, or close to where I wanted to go.  Here's the final version again:

When it dried I wondered if the foreground was now a little too light...and maybe the sky is too much.  But...I think I'm inclined to leave it alone.  There's a reasonable range of tones I think.

All in all a good way to waste a couple of hours on a wet Saturday morning in February.

Hiking in Hungary

A couple of shots of The Lads with their walking gear on:

Definitely still a touch of the old Scouting Movement about their attire - perhaps they were staying in hostels that required some sort of affiliation.

Most of them had invested in the latest backpacking gear - apart from the dude on the right, who looks more equipped for a business meeting rather than a hike across the Hungarian Great Plain.

Here's one of them sporting my old School Blazer again.  Nice high-waisted trews, as well.  And that's an impressive roof structure on that building - a hint of Asian architecture there perhaps.

That brings to an end the main part of the trip that The Uncle and his mates undertook in 1938.  But it's not quite the end of the story...