Blyth

OM2, 135mm f3.5 Zuiko, Delta 400, DD-X

I mentioned in the last post that we'd had a wee break in Northumberland and the temptation was strong to visit Seahouses, Lindisfarne and the other tourist spots along the North Sea coast that act like magnets for photographers - even those with plastic cameras.

But I'm made of stronger stuff than the glory hunters and manfully turned my back on the siren call of the beauty spots and headed instead for some good, old Northern grime.

The coast just north of Newcastle was once very industrial with the region's coal mines playing a major role in the nation's economy. That's largely ancient history now, but it's not too hard to dig beneath the surface of 21st century Tyneside for a flavour of the past.

I made for a wee place called Blyth. In the 1930s, the port exported more coal than any other in Europe. A railway line took coal wagons straight to the quayside, facilitating the loading of around six million tons a year at its peak. It was also a major shipbuilding town producing vessels for the Royal Navy throughout the 20th century, including the famous Ark Royal aircraft carrier.

The 1960s and '70s weren't kind to Blyth and it's been the recent beneficiary of regeneration funding which seems to have made a difference to its fortunes. I only had a few hours to spend there having dropped Cath and my cousin, Dawn, in Morpeth with the promise that I'd return to pick them up at some point. Yes, I know, I could have broken that promise and let them get the bus back to our holiday home but we all know that would have ended badly for someone - and it wouldn't have been Cath and Dawn.

Visiting an unknown area is difficult for me where photography is concerned as it's seldom obvious where to start. I drove around a bit and found myself at a caravan park, attracted by the cemetery right in front of it. I'm not sure exactly what the caravanning demographic is but at least some of them are bound to be floating out of their holiday homes and into a more permanent berth in the not too distant future.

Strange, then, that they'd be happy spending time there on holiday when there's a chance, in the not too distant future, an eternity in the place awaits them. So I thought I'd try to suggest the connection in a pic. It didn't really come off, though. A photograph from a higher vantage point looking onto and across the two facilities would have been better but that wasn't possible. Looking at it now, I should probably have walked forward to the wall and shot the headstones with nothing in front of them and the caravans behind. Not sure why that didn't occur to me at the time. Maybe it would have been too obvious?

There's a church in the cemetery and I wondered if I could perhaps photograph some sort of slightly incongruous connection between it, the graveyard and the caravan park from a different angle. I traipsed over to the far side and took the pic below. I was standing looking through the viewfinder of the OM2 thinking I could do with a figure in the shot and, from stage right, a man appeared with his dog. The photograph is nothing special either but at least I'm trying!

This side of the church led to a links-type golf course flanked by some rough, unkempt dunes and the North Sea. Unlike the links courses I'm used to near my home in St Andrews - or most links courses I suppose - this one wasn't a particularly nice-looking affair. At one end, a caravan park, at the other a disused colliery and a power plant and, sandwiched in between, a row of houses with a lovely pylon, wind turbine and chimney hinterland. The course itself was similarly uninspiring.

I stuck a 300mm lens on the Olympus for the compression effect, stacking the golfers, houses and industrial landscape much closer together than they are in real life. The next shot was up the coast looking towards the power station - same 300mm Tamron SP lens for the same effect.

My car was parked near the cemetery so I ended up at that side of the caravan park again. A woman was throwing a ball for her dog while her husband stared off into the distance. It was a funny wee scene with two elderly couples sitting on benches and the inevitable hideous wind turbine in the background. I caught the dog jumping in the air as intended but it looks as if it's standing on the picnic bench - weird! That's the pic at the top of the post.

This reflection shot was the last one at this particular location. It's the church we've been talking about reflected in what I think was a local history museum. I wish I'd caught the right-hand of the two walkers on the left before she crossed the bench in the background where she got a little lost. Wee things like that can make a difference.

Conscious of the time, I jumped back into the car and nipped along the coast to the old dockyard at Blyth but I'll save those photos for the next post. The photos here are all scans from the Delta 400 film I was using in the OM2. I'm finding it quite difficult to get a decent scan of a 35mm neg from my old Epson 3200. Medium format and print scans are OK but the small format efforts are pretty woeful.