This Is Not A BLOG!

Date: 25/08/07

Not-Sure Shot

Yesterday afternoon was a bit of a disappointment.

I'd booked it off work on Thursday, because the forecast said it was going to be nice, and I'd planned to do something I don't have time to do in the normal run of events, namely to stroll around Wrexham taking photographs.

I wasn't too disturbed when I got up at 6:50 on Friday morning to find that it was pretty grey: the forecast was for it to brighten up by mid morning. So I packed my trusty BenQ and set off for work.

By the time I left work at 12:30, it was still overcast. Still, I'd made my plans and intended sticking to them. So off I strode into town, down into Brook Street, along St Giles Way, back up Mount Street and Temple Row, snapping away at anything which looked interesting, until I came to the Parish Church of St Giles. This was my intended main target, so I walked around the outside taking photographs of it at various angles, plus a couple of snaps of the grave of Elihu Yale (he whose donations - financed by colonialism, tax gouging and overall duplicity - helped expand the American university which has since borne his name).

(I didn't go inside. Although an atheist to the bone, I still feel that taking photographs inside churches is not quite done).

I took a few pictures of the town itself, but not many. I found that I was inhibited by a large degree of self-consciousness when trying to shoot street scenes. I felt I was drawing attention to myself (not a wise thing to do in a town with more than its fair share of chavs, slappers, smackheads and other Darwinian failures), which I found deeply uncomfortable. So, after about half an hour, I headed homewards.

When I uploaded the photographs to the PC, I found that for some reason very few of them had come out particularly well. I've long known that this camera doesn't seem to reproduce reduced-light conditions very well without fiddling a bit with the settings, and I don't think I had the light-meter settings right: everything looked too dark and the sky, rather than being greyish, looked as if it was about to dump a month's rainfall in sixty seconds.

I did some remedial work with the pictures in Paint Shop Pro, but they're still not really right. Nonetheless, some of them are likely to turn up in The Gallery shortly.

PS: They're there now.

File under: Me