Life Observed

Stoney Royd cemetery. This is the dead centre of town and they are dying to get in here.  No, but seriously, the Victorians have to be applauded for building a cemetery on a steep hill. I've not seen anything quite like this before... I won't dwell on the gaudy fake flowers everywhere or the stone teddy bears and plastic windmills in the children's section. I gave it the monochrome treatment to spare your eyes, dear reader.. Still, you do get a Tomb with a View.

Curious, I never noticed before. Is this stylised Angel thumbing a lift to Heaven? Actually Angels must be scary. Usually, the first thing they say when they appear are the words "Fear Not..." And this is your average stone angels environment. The Victorian Graveyard. Both of these images from film were processed using an ethereal Orton Sandwich effect I created in Photoshop...

Here we are at the end of the line. The Saxon church in the village is over a thousand years old, and the graveyard is still in use, and about three feet higher than the surrounding land. In the two years I've worked there, at least three new residents have arrived. May they Rest in Peace. Gives you pause for thought, eh...

Here's a sombre image.This is a Victorian Cemetary in Halifax and it was, until a year ago, the victim of decades of neglect. The graves were half hidden in brambles. Full sized trees had grown and the whole place had become a kind of mad allegory about life and death. Gone but not forgotten? Down in the town things are a little better. Here is a gravestone next to the town centre church. Here, the graveyard has been largely cleared, and the gravestones used to pave the courtyard near the church. It still feels a little disrespectful to be walking on the memorial stones. I was pleased to find this autumn leaf adding colour to the soot blackened sandstone. In fact, the whole church remains in its black un-cleaned state, while all around it has been reinvented as fresh sandstone, as mentioned in an earlier post . As a result of this strategy the church now stands out as black amongst gold...

Out for my constitutional walk yesterday lunchtime, I came across a veritable carpet of snowdrops in the churchyard. This is the time of year that they burst forth to lighten our dull winter lives. A local country house has vast areas of them, and it opens to the public for snowdrop addicts in February. This begs the question: How to make an interesting picture of snowdops? What you need is a different and arresting angle. So: Here we have a ground level shot with narrow depth of field using my trusty 70-300mm lens. Here is a slightly better shot in my optinion, because it includes some context to place the subject. Context is usually a good thing in a picture.