Photoshoots and Procrastination

13.06.17 — Leeds

Just last week I thought I’d head back to Burnley for a couple of days (once again) to take some photos for my portfolio and update some of the outdated ones on my website and social media. I’ve had one of me sitting in my room for ages, and now two years later I can reveal that I have managed to stand up – as you can see in the new photo below. That’s progress for you.

I also tried out a new style where the only light comes from an array of green LEDs – I’m actually quite happy with the result but it does seem to come across as a little bit too mysterious…

Whilst at home I ended up being whisked off for a day out with my mum and dad where we managed to visit IKEA and make a stop off in the lovely town of Hebden Bridge for a cheeky glass of wine in the evening sun.

Got myself an IKEA hat and now I am cooler than you

Once back in Leeds it’s been hectic preparations for our Degree Show – if you’d like to come along then you can find all the details here! This Thursday I’ll be attending the launch and I’ll report back with a few pictures no doubt.

To procrastinate during all this preparations I decided to do some baking again for the first time in a while, and after shoving every sweet and sickly flavour and ingredient into the mix I present to you all – the double chocolate cake with choco buttercream, dulce de leche, and salted caramel icing.

Luisa simply could not wait to eat this cake.

Anyway, it’s back to the daily grind for now, but I’ll be sure to update when I have a few more tidbits to share this weekend! Until then, I leave you with this video of Mireille Mathieu singing Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien – I am somewhat obsessed with it for some reason…

Summer Hits Hyde Park

02.06.17 — Leeds

As I mentioned in my blog post centred around my time in Burnley, we have also been enjoying the sun back over in Leeds too, and so one day I got a bit stir crazy and decided to head out with my cameras through the student area of Hyde Park. I took with me my digital Canon and old manual Praktica film camera, and I had the film developed quite quickly thereafter, and so for once I can bring you both the digital and the film scans at the same time.

The film camera once again yielded some lovely shots, including the one above where the sun has created a lovely halo on the film. For more photos from the camera you’ll see them throughout this post but also some shots from Portugal and Germany which I have uploaded in the past.

Pretty much the entirety of the student population had crawled out of their Hyde Park houses and flooded onto the moor to enjoy the sun, and I wandered through pretty aimlessly to soak up some of the heat.

I then re-entered the gloriously messy student housing area and took a couple of photos on the old camera which compliment the redbrick aesthetic of Hyde Park, including the only gaslit cinema still in existence in the UK – Hyde Park Picture House.

I hope you enjoyed having a snoop through the student area as much as I have living there and taking the opportunity to stave off my cabin fever – it was lovely to actually leave the house after some busy deadlines!

Bouncing Back to Burnley

01.06.17 — Burnley

Over the past few weeks England has been mysteriously graced with some lovely sunny and warm spells, and throughout this time I’ve been having to nip back home to Burnley every now and then for one reason or another. At one point Kevin came to visit, and besides taking him to see the huge Tesco Extra and Home Bargains, we went for a lovely wander over the rolling hills of Hurstwood.

Is this the mythical entrance to Wonderland?

During our walk we encountered the World War II era bunker which has sat alongside Gorple Road and fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Once we’d confirmed that there weren’t any sheep taking residence inside, we had a snoop around inside.

I left quite intrigued as I’d never done any research about the purpose of this bunker, so that evening I did a bit of online reading and it turns out that it was built as part of the Starfish site programme during World War II. These were large-scale decoys which used fires to simulate cities, with the hope that German planes would drop bombs on these rural sites rather than on the cities themselves. The bunkers were built as observation/control centres for the operation. Pretty cool to discover that a bite of history like this has been sitting on my doorstep for all these years!

Outside of this I had a lovely stroll with my friend Amber, and was drafted in to make some tapas-style food for the rest of my family as my sister was visiting from university to do a bit of revision in the sun. I eventually made some chorizo in red wine, stuffed courgettes, patatas bravas and a chorizo selection – all of which went down a treat with some homemade lemonade!

Now I’m back in Burnley again, but this time for less interesting activities – I have to take some headshots for my portfolio and clear out my room ready to combine the contents of 4 years of living in two different places. Quite the challenge!

Película de Portugal

31.05.17 — Lagos

As I was clearing out my room just the other day I stumbled upon the developed film that I got from Portugal, which has been sat in a box for ages but I never got round to scanning! The photos document both the holiday in general and the exploration of the abandoned hotel, and I now present them here only two years late.

The roll of film begins by documenting a wander along the coast, exploring as grutas, the famous grotto formations dotted along the water’s edge. The old Praktica 35mm used to take these photos comes from the 1980s and yields images with a vignette blur but a gorgeously retro feel.

The photos have only been edited very subtly, just to correct fading and colour balance, but they remain largely untouched. This process of taking photos without knowing what you’ve taken is a tonne of fun yet wildly risky, but I find that it’s all worth it when I develop some film which has been sat in my camera for over a year, and in doing so discover photos which I had forgotten that I had taken.

The proceeding photo has to be one of my favourites from the grottos, be sure to click on it to expand and have a nosey. The 35mm film, the old boats and the garish parasols all place the photo in the 70s or 80s, not in August 2015 when it was actually taken.

From there the photos then move to the abandoned hotel, where I feel the old film compliments the eerie subject matter. Tread where you dare.

And for my favourite film snap from my exploration of the hotel, a look over the pool area, where the film medium and the bright sun paint a rather bleak picture of the scene.

For anybody interested, these photos were taken on a partly broken 1980 Pentacon Praktica TL1000 with Kodak ColorPlus 35mm ISO200 film. I say partly broken as the autofocus and ambient light sensors no longer work as it will not accept a battery – so it’s fully manual. If you’ve got any comments or feedback be sure to get in touch – this is still a new world for me!

Abandoned Portugal

30.05.17 — Lagos

So, and probably way too long ago for anybody to remember, I wrote a blog post about a holiday to the southern coast of Portugal with my family. Within said post I mentioned how I’d been exploring at an abandoned hotel as part of my trip, promising to post them in a follow-up blog entry – then in the whirlwind which was my year working in Madrid I completely forgot to write any such blog post! I’ve done all the scanning now though, and present them here only two years late…

Down in Lagos, which is a town near Faro on the southern coast of Portugal, there’s a huge hotel which has laid abandoned for over 15 years. One afternoon me and my dad headed out to see how far we could get inside before things got too dangerous or difficult…

We approached from behind the “Hotel Golfinho”, skirting around the old swimming pool structure and vaulting over a few walls to enter the grassy area surrounding another abandoned building at the rear, seen in the photo above with the sloping roof.

After finding some strange objects scattered around the place, including the above painting, a pile of animal bones, the carcasses of some fish, and the remnants of campfires, we headed further into the complex and were confronted by a barbed wire fence.

Not to be fazed, I did a bit of snooping around and eventually found a break in the fence, through which I hesitantly clambered in order to avoid putting any weight on a very fragile-looking roof which lay beyond. I soon found myself in the outdoor swimming pool area of the hotel, where the years of neglect have not been kind to the structure.

I wanted to push ahead and try to enter the main labyrinth of the huge structure itself, but the fragile plastic roof of the buildings at the rear which I’d have had to climb over seems a little too risky given we weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Not finding any entrance points to the front of the building, we decided to call it a day, but not before I managed to sneak a few more snaps in as we retreated.

It was interesting to witness first hand the downfall of something which would have at once seemed so huge and immovable as a seven-storey hotel, and eerie to think that the scene of so much fun and relaxation has now wound up so dangerous and dirty. For more information be sure to search for Hotel Golfinho Lagos online – others have managed to get into the corridors and rooms of the place!

That’s all for this post, but I should also tease that I did actually take my old Praktica TL1000 35mm film camera with me to Lagos too, the developed images of which I’ve just unearthed once again. I’ll be sure to get those scanned in and posted here as soon as possible – hey, maybe even sooner than two years late… Oops.