LAST POST The recent demolition of the old Post Office in Ardhasaig has prompted me to look back at some of the other Post Offices I’ve photographed in Harris and Lewis. Anyone heading up or down the main A859 road just north of Tarbert will be familiar with this classic corrugated tin building. It’s been rusting for decades, taking on the colours of the landscape as it slowly deteriorated. There are still plenty of people on the island who remember […]
Part 4 of a nostalgic look back at a collection of photographs I took with my Olympus Trip camera while touring America in 1979 and 1980. Looking through the 200 or so photos I took during while touring America, a fair portion of them feature cars. I’d been a fan of 1950s American cars for a while. Shortly before our first US tour, I purchased a couple of books that covered vehicles from this era. I spent hours studying the […]
American Graffiti Before heading further afield in the USA, I’ll sign off from New York with the story of how I inadvertently photographed an early example of Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s artwork. Trash & Vaudeville During our time in New York in September 1979, several people recommended a trip to Trash and Vaudeville – New York’s ‘go-to’ rock and roll boutique. Walking down St. Mark’s Place, I spotted the famous neon Trash sign in a basement shop window on the other side […]
40 year old photographs get new lease of life [Main photo: Pretzel seller, E 26th St and Lexington Ave] I was nineteen in 1979. I was about to spend three weeks travelling across America with Buzzcocks – our first US tour. Talk about excitement! None of us had been to America before. I needed a camera! At this stage of my photographic career, I didn’t know the difference between an f-stop and a lens cap, so my first camera had […]
An abandoned house is set to become a home again. First, some background info about Matilda’s new house… In 2013 I exhibited a collection of prints with fellow photographer Ian Paterson. The exhibition was entitled ‘Leaving Home‘. All of our photographs shared a common theme – abandoned Hebridean houses. One of my personal favourites was taken in 2013, in the house that’s the subject of this post. While setting up my camera, I noticed the skeleton of a small bird […]
A short photo tour of Leverburgh – with a vintage camera and one roll of film. I recently purchased a 1980’s Bronica medium format film camera. Back in the day Bronica was the affordable alternative to Hasselblad for thousands of wedding and studio photographers . The ETRS is a fully manual camera. No ‘Auto’ setting. No LCD preview. Shutter speed and aperture settings are determined by the user, not the camera. I loaded a roll of Ektar 100 (good for […]