Take to the hills

The Antrim hills, to be precise.  Also known as the Glens of Antrim and a pretty fantastic place to find yourself in at any time of the year.

They still cut turf up on the hills - not exactly 'politically correct' these days but families have their own sections of bog and continue to do what their fathers and grandfathers did before them.  I don't have too much of a problem with turf-cutting by hand for personal use, which is what is practiced around these parts.  I have more of an issue when they do it commercially, with large mechanical diggers which rip the thousand+ year old bogs to shreds in no time at all.

But we'll forgive this little old tractor and its bags of turf, which was resting somewhere up Glen Dun.

A turf tractor up on the Glens of Antrim, 2015

A lovely red colour it was, although the colour doesn't come out too well on HP5.  Ah well - you can't win 'em all.

This last snap was a wee bit of fun.  Taken on the Franka with its standard 80mm lens, the tractor is not in focus (yes, someone screwed up) so I thought I'd try to get a 'pinhole' effect in the darkroom by burning in around the edges of the print.  It kind-of worked, after a fashion...

For comparison, this is what it looked like on 35mm German rangefinder, with a slightly wider angle 35mm lens:

All a bit dull and dark, this last one, innit?  And me contrast isn't quite there either.  If I wasn't fed up looking at tractors I would re-do it and mess about with things a bit.  All printed on Kentmere VC paper, if you're interested, which I'm not quite getting the hang of yet.