HERITAGE PHOTOGRAPHY Journal of the Archaeology & Heritage Group SPRING 2018
Chairman’s Letter ARCHAEOLOGY & HERITAGE GROUP COMMITTEE Chairman Chelín Miller ARPS 49 Stephens Road Tunbridge Wells Kent TN4 9JD heritageweb@rps.org Secretary Dr Mike Sasse Flat 4 8 Boyne Park Tunbridge Wells Kent TN4 8ET mike.sasse@btinternet.com Treasurer Garry Bisshopp ARPS 6 Belgrave Crescent Seaford Sussex BN25 3AX gb.photo@btinternet.com Committee Members Ken Keen FRPS Rodney Thring LRPS Jim Tonks ARPS Eric Houlder LRPS Walter Brooks Gwil Owen ARPS Published by the Archaeology and Heritage Group of the Royal Photographic Society May 2018 ISSN 0-904495-00-0 Copyright in all text and photographs is held by the credited authors, or as otherwise stated. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form without prior written permission of the Publisher. Editorial Board Chelin Miller & Eric Houlder Cover photo “Hauling in the Bronze Age” by Gavin McGuire
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n this issue of Heritage Photography we have a varied range of articles relating to topics that are of interest to our members. Past Group Chairman, Keith Evans FRPS, writes about the pilot scheme for ART UK’s forthcoming Sculpture Project (for which The Society is now seeking volunteers), the project’s aims and practicalities, and how you can take part. Archaeologist Gavin McGuire is involved in a long-term photographic project to record the daily human interaction with the ancient past at a 4,000 year old settlement. David Wood tells us about one of the most overlooked items in Architecture: the brick. David Balaam shares some photos taken during a group outing to Bodiam Castle last year; and Julia Thorne writes about how photography helped her as therapy for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. As a photojournalist and tutor, I often remind myself and my students of the importance of understanding the Power of Photography. It doesn’t matter what type of photos we take, the camera is a powerful tool to represent people. The choices that we make as photographers will affect the way we depict situations where we encounter difference or ‘otherness’ (foreign lands, monuments, class, economic deprivation and gender). All these depictions present ethical questions when it comes to responsible photographic representation or “gaze”. In the April issue of National Geographic, the US magazine acknowledged that its “appalling” past coverage of different cultures was racist and reinforced stereotypes
about ethnic minorities. Many of us grew up admiring this imagery and even aspiring to one day travel to exotic lands and take photos like those in National Geographic. The true social and cultural influence that photography can have is not simply to move or impress its viewers, but also to shape the representation of situations, historical moments and especially people. This power is implicated in a complex set of ethical and political questions. A photographer’s outlook on life and political views will always manifest themselves in the aesthetic choices we make. How we frame the image, what we exclude, whether our chosen viewpoint is high or low, how we capture body language and facial expressions; although we may think these choices are arbitrary, intuitive or aesthetic, each has important implications for how our subject is represented. The choices we make say something intentional or not, about how we ‘see’ our subject. The power of the Camera and of Photography, is so great precisely because that point of view is then passed on as it is captured and seen again and again. The Camera gives us great power, and as the saying goes, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. So, use your camera wisely and responsibly. This is my last Letter as Chairman, although I will continue to help with this Journal and website from South America. It has been an utter pleasure and honour to serve this Group and I wish the new Chairman and the rest of the Committee all the best.
Heritage Photography Heritage Photography is published by the RPS Archaeology & Heritage Group twice a year: Spring and Autumn (contribution deadlines are 1st March and 1st September, respectively). All contributions should be submitted to the Editor. Items covering any aspect of archaeology and heritage photography are welcome, including inspirational stories, technique, reviews of equipment, exhibitions, books, etc. Copy should be sent as .txt or .doc files by email. Digital images (portrait or landscape orientation) should be supplied by email or through a file sharing platform (such as Dropbox, wetransfer or similar) or CD rom. Please rename your photos: YournameSurname_PHOTONAME, CMYK or sRGB colour mode, high resolution (300dpi) jpgs or tifs, file size approx 6MB. For more information, please contact the Editor at heritageweb@rps.org.
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Photographing Ancient Egyptian Artefacts By Julia Thorne
ince late 2016, I have been working with the Garstang Museum of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool photographing ancient Egyptian artefacts. The photography started as a personal project as therapy for my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but has since turned into a set of ongoing projects. In November 2016, I took a few photos of objects on display in the museum using a macro lens. When I showed them to the curator, a friend from my days as a student there, she asked me to do some photography for their summer 2017 exhibition on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The purpose of the photography was twofold: to photograph some of the papyri in the collection that were too fragmentary or fragile to put on display, and to pick out details such as common motifs and the weirdand-wonderful underworld deities from pages of papyri. The images would then be printed out large scale to sit alongside the artefacts to help create a tomblike feel to the exhibition Once we had settled upon the details, work started in earnest. I spent many hours in the department’s imaging suite in the basement in semi-darkness, photographing ancient papyri. Most of the papyri are contained between sheets of glass, so my main challenge was dealing with reflections. Even though the walls and ceiling of the imaging suite are painted black, I had problems with the exceptionally shiny glass surface; even the light fittings in the ceiling were causing reflections. I worked out that the best setup was to use a single LED panel light to illuminate the papyrus, placed low and to the side. This way, the light was shining across the glass, not down on it, and thus minimising reflections. I also had
the lighting at a low luminosity to reduce the amount of light bouncing around; I then used longer shutter speeds to compensate. An added benefit of having the light shining across was that it highlighted the texture of the papyrus itself. Placing the light at the corner of the papyrus created texture in both the horizontal and vertical fibres (papyrus was made by beating the stalks of the plant flat and then laying them out in a criss-cross shape to create rectangular sheets). Some of the images were relatively simple to then process; little more than contrast and composition adjustment. Others, however, took significantly more work. I made some of the details from the very fragmentary pages usable by repairing them in Photoshop. To do this, I took a couple of photos of the same detail, but from slightly different positions (giving myself some wiggle room on either side). Then, I loaded the images into Photoshop as layers and created masks of the different sections. I could then move them around and put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. For the exhibition, my images were printed out on foam board; some of them were a couple of feet tall. I’d never seen my photos printed at that size, and I was overjoyed with how they looked. The exhibition opened in May 2017 as part of Liverpool Light Night; a night when the city comes alive with culture. The museum had its busiest opening to date and everyone loved the exhibition. In September 2017 the exhibition closed and moved across to its sister museum, the Victoria Gallery and Museum, where it’s on until October 2018. In the weeks between the exhibition closing at the Garstang and opening at the VGM, we took the opportunity to photograph more of the
My set up in the imaging suite. The LED panel light is on the left of the photo, shining light across the papyrus.
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A wooden coffin lid.
My images alongside the ancient artefacts in the exhibition in the Garstang.
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Two deities from the underworld; one with the head of a hare, the other the head of a serpent. The serpent has a feather of Maat (truth, justice, cosmic order) on its head.
artefacts. This time, it was less papyrus and more amulets and coffins. I photographed most of the pieces, again, with a macro lens. This time, my issue wasn’t reflections, but depth-of-field. Because of the close-up nature of the work and the more 3D shape of the amulets, my depthof-field was reduced and I had to do some focus-stacking. Focus stacking is a technique whereby you photograph the subject several times, adjusting the plane of focus a little each time. I then put all the images into the focusstacking software Helicon Focus, which takes the sharpest part of each photo and creates a composite to give you a photo with the whole object in focus. (You can do focus stacking in Photoshop, but it’s hit-and-miss, and it takes Photoshop two hours to do what Helicon Focus can do in ten minutes.) The exhibition moving to the VGM wasn’t the end of things for my photography. In December 2017, the Garstang, in conjunction with the academic department (Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology), had a week at the Tate Liverpool as one of their Exchange Workshops. The Workshop was timed to coincide with an exhibition showing at the Tate – Surrealism in Egypt: Art et Liberté 1938–1948 – and it didn’t include any artefacts. Rather, it focused on the surreal nature of the Egyptian underworld, and my images were one of the focal points of the exhibition. We curated a new selection of images for the week; some
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Broken Isis Knot - The two halves of a badly damaged Isis knot amulet. As it was inside glass, without a professional conservator to work with, I used Photoshop to repair the piece.
were of the papyri from the exhibition, and some were of the amulets and coffin I’d recently photographed. As part of the Exchange, I delivered a workshop to visitors talking about my photography as well as teaching some low-light techniques for taking your own photos when visiting museum galleries. It was an exciting week and I’m so proud to be able to say that I’ve been exhibited at the Tate Liverpool! As I said, my photography is now ongoing at the museum. The Garstang has a large collection of Egyptian and Nubian artefacts, largely unphotographed (the museum is named after John Garstang, who created the Egyptology department at the university. He excavated in Egypt and Sudan extensively during the early twentieth century). I’m currently photographing Pre-dynastic objects for next year’s exhibition, Before Egypt (the Pre-dynastic Period was the time before the pharaohs, roughly 50003000 BC). I’m also starting a personal project, Tiny Egypt, photographing more of the amulets in the collection using my macro lens. Amulets are easy to overlook in a display case because they’re so small. My intention is to bring these beautiful, and often expertly crafted, pieces to life by creating images that can then be printed out at large sizes, like we did with the exhibition, or to create a collection for a coffee-table photo book.
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Horus Amulet - It may not look particularly spectacular, but this amulet of the god Horus is only 4.2 cm tall. Using my macro lens I can hone in on details you just can’t see with the naked eye.
A limestone scarab amulet. Its actual size is 6 cm.
The Exchange Workshop space at the Tate Liverpool.
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Spring 2018
Sculptures Project - Art UK by Keith Evans FRPS
As the first RPS Member to participate in the pilot scheme for ART UK’s forthcoming Sculpture Project, for which The Society is now seeking volunteers, A & H Group member Keith Evans explains the project’s aims and practicalities, and how you can take part.
For a one-dimensional subject, such as this 30ft long frieze, a single image may suffice.
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any members of the A & H Group will remember taking part in the Millennium Project of 200105, photographing the nation’s buildings and artefacts ‘listed’ by English Heritage, as it was then known. Now, as you will have read in Michael Pritchard’s e-mail in early March, The Society is seeking volunteer photographers to take part in a new venture – Art UK Sculpture – organised by Art UK and the Public Monuments and Sculptures Association to record all of Britain’s more than 160,000 sculptures and monuments in the public domain. Most of the sculptures are held in museums, galleries, universities and the like; the volunteer programme is to photograph around 16,500 public outdoor sculptures, and the first volunteer training Workshop is to be held in early June. The RPS was first approached by Art UK seeking its assistance with a pilot scheme to investigate the project’s practicality. Recognising the expertise and likely interest of members, the Society readily agreed: Fenton House and its facilities were made available for a training day,
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and I was one of two photographers invited to participate. Together with Nikki Hazelton, a photographer/lecturer at the Colchester Institute in Essex, we were instructed first in the scope of what was to be recorded – publicly-held sculptures and monuments dating from the Stuart period onwards, i.e. from about 1603 to the present day. They include statues; commemorative war memorials, clock towers and fountains; reliefs, artefacts and architectural features. Professional photographer Colin White, former Head of Photography at London’s National Gallery, who was acting as photography consultant in developing the Sculpture Project, then explained to us the precise photographic and recording techniques required. For example, any free-standing structure such as a statue is to be shown in seven separate images – front and rear, 45° front left and right, side view left and right, and a general view showing the subject in its surroundings. Additional photographs should record any important details such as plaques and inscriptions. Lighting is important – ideally, hazy sunshine that will reveal texture and ensure a threedimensional effect.
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As described in the text, representing a three-dimensional sculpture calls for seven different viewpoints, this one showing the front view.
Theory into practice Following this introduction, we were each asked to photograph specific monuments in Bath city centre, including a Victorian statue and water fountain, a modernistic bronze male head, and a 30ft long stone frieze high up on the wall of a listed building. We filled in relevant details of each on recording sheets supplied by Art UK. Finally, we returned to Fenton House to download our images for inspection by Colin White. The importance of careful photographic technique became evident: each picture was taken as both raw and jpeg, and the acceptable images were then stored and file-named with their location (county, town, postcode) and unique identifying number. Rollout nationwide So much for the initial trials. Subsequently, Nikki and I were each given a list of sculptures – hers in Essex, mine
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in Kent – which PMSA had selected for recording and submitting to Art UK using the procedure to be adopted by volunteer photographers over the next three-four years. Some of my resulting pictures accompany this article – all have been judged acceptable by the Art UK advisors. About 25 project teams are being established throughout Britain. A Public Sculpture Manager and Photography Manager will be responsible for briefing volunteer photographers, and acting as intermediary to whom the image files and written records are to be returned for checking and forwarding to Art UK. As mentioned above, Art UK is organising a training workshop in June, and meanwhile all RPS members interested in taking part can find fuller details on the Society website. I share Michael Pritchard’s enthusiasm for the Society’s involvement in this important venture, and I’m sure you will find taking part both interesting and enjoyable.
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This viewpoint depicts the subject in its surroundings.
Recording this Victorian water-fountain requires in addition a closeup of its interior detail, just visible above the plinth, including the all-important inscription “Take the Water of Life Freely”.
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Imaging every moment in Time By Gavin McGuire
Gavin McGuire is a New Zealand archaeologist and resident photographer with the Belgian School Athens - UniversitĂŠ catholique de Louvain, working at a major Minoan excavation in Sissi, Crete. He has been involved in a long-term (2009-2022) photographic project to image the daily human interaction with the ancient past at the 4,000 year old settlement.
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he Sissi Archaeological Project on the Kephali represents one of the most important excavations of the Bronze Age period during the last decade in Crete, due to the size of the Minoan coastal settlement (c. 3 hectares), occupancy (2600-1200 BC), the type of buildings uncovered so far and a cemetery that included house-like tombs. Built on a hill, with a beach on either side – providing a significant anchorage for trading vessels from throughout the Aegean - the Kephali also controlled a strategic access
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from central to eastern Crete, through the nearby Selinari Gorge. As well, it evolved from one of many small coastal villages in the area to became the second most important settlement after Malia Palace, four kilometres down the road. Indeed the Kephali may have gained independence after 1450 BC, thus giving rise to hopes that the site may have the makings of something really special, perhaps a palace. Needless to say further evidence, with what has been found so far, is needed.
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Between a Hard Rock and a Hard Scan.
Jan Driessen, Director of excavations at the Kephali, Sissi, being interviewed by National Geographic.
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Skeletal remains of Minoan female in Zone 1, the Kephali, Sissi.
Excavation conservator preserving white plaster in Zone 6, the Kephali, Sissi.
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Spring 2018
Let There Be More Light
With the Caravanserai
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Directed by Professor Jan Driessen, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, the excavations are providing a better understanding of Minoan and later MinoanMycenaean inhabitation at the Kephali until the flickering flame of the Bronze Age was snuffed out by a storm of widespread destruction and upheaval in the Aegean in the 12th century. Yet the Sissi Archaeological Project is also at the centre of a long term photographic study (20092016), now into its second phase. Putting aside the photographic documentation of structural and artefactual aspects of the site, especially imaging an ever changing landscape, as layer-after-layer of ancient inhabitation is removed for ever, during the excavation process, there is a programme, ‘focussing’ on the daily human interaction with the ancient Bronze Age past, through discrete, up close and personal, portraitures of colleagues that reflect a sense of place. Everyday there is unpredictability, anticipation, improvisation, being at the right place at the right time to snap that fleeting opportunity, shooting less and rapidly thinking more about composition. It is what the photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, referred to as ‘Images à la Sauvette’ - the decisive moment or images on the sly. I shun choreography. As the resident project photographer, the over-arching influence has been my mentor, Harry Burton, who with his large format camera, had a critical impact on the use of photography within the archaeological environment, in recording the excavation of Tutankhamun – making both
the Egyptian pharaoh, and Egyptologist, Howard Carter, global media celebrities during the 1920’s. Photographing at the Kephali, as it was for Burton in the Valley of the Kings nearly 90 years ago, is a first choice genre in archaeology – black-and-white images with their timeless, aesthetic, realistic qualities. The excavation season runs from late June-August and with about 100 archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, conservationists and local diggers taking part, there were regular off-the-cuff photographic opportunities and none more so than in the cemetery which after-all is as close to the ancient past as you get it – right down to the DNA. When it comes to imaging death, photographers can’t help themselves. If the excavation process is at the centre of the photographic project then another highlight has been the work of the conservationists treating finds especially at risk from irreversible destruction, once exposed to the environment, such as 4,000 year old plaster from walls or flooring. They offered a variety of excellent imaging possibilities, at the dig and at the apothiki (workshop). The second phase is now underway and with that another round of photography at the Kephali, recording the kind of work archaeologists do and where they do it and in the surroundings they excavate. Every picture tells a story.
The first seven years of the Sissi Archaeological Project: Minoan Extractions – A Photographic Journey has been published by Archaeopress, Oxford, 2017 and is available in print and eBook versions. Paperback ISBN 9781784916367. eBook ISBN 9781784916374
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The bricks that made Swansea’s copper industry By David Wood
Selection of JB Hammill bricks showing different clay mixtures.
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his article looks at the most overlooked commodity found in architecture – bricks. When we look at a building we may look at its beauty and/or design. There may be an intricate pattern in the brickwork or the use of different coloured bricks. Most people think of bricks as being red and uniform in shape and size. Bricks have been around for thousands of years, they are one of the oldest building materials, with the mud brick going as far back as 10,000 BC. Bricks used in constructing factories and warehouses at first glance seem boring, but many have detailed archways for windows and doors. Bricks used in the Swansea Copper Industry were built to provide strong safe structures where people made things, worked in offices, smelted metals and had conversations. However, once a building becomes derelict and starts to crumble due to time and weather, you will eventually be left with a pile of bricks. White Rock Copperworks, like many other industrial buildings of the time, became derelict, and after some 90 years, all that’s left in places are a pile of bricks. One day these bricks too will crumble into dust.
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Those with an inquisitive mind will, perhaps, walk over a former industrial site and kick over a brick and find a manufacturers name on one side. Those who are really inquisitive may make a mental note of the name and search to find out about the manufacturer, when and where they operated. There are brick catalogues online, www.penmorfa.com/bricks/index.html is one such site. That’s how my interest in bricks started and where the reader too can continue. There is still much research into local bricks to be done in Swansea, such as where did Swansea’s 19th century local brick makers operate from? The aim of this article is to provide an introduction to some of the bricks used in making Swansea’s Copper industry at the Hafod and White Rock sites. The former White Rock Copperworks site is now an overgrown ruin covered in birch, brambles and long grass. There are very few structures remaining, the main feature is the Great Workhouse constructed in the 1730’s as a vast complex of smelting furnaces that belched toxic fumes which helped contaminate the surrounding area for over a
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century. Alongside this is the cut-and-cover section of the Smith canal where horse drawn barges would deliver coal from the coal pits in Llansamlet to the Great Workhouse via 14 tunnel entrances built in the tunnel. However, the brickwork around the sides and ceiling are in remarkably good condition since this section was probably built circa 1780-83. The cut-and-cover tunnel at White Rock is the only example in the United Kingdom from this period. The only other surviving area is a raised section alongside the incline that took waste slag up to Kilvey Hill by waggons using a pulley system. Beneath the incline is an open hearth used as a flue to take away the smoke from the furnaces. The main problem was to find a way to determine when this part of the site was used and what it was used for. The only ‘artefacts’ available were the bricks scattered on the floor. I noticed that a number of these bricks had a maker’s name on one side. To this end I was able to carry out an internet search to find out where they came from, who made them and when. Of the dozens of different manufacturers was the name JB Hammill. This bricks made by JB Hammill of Bridgwater came from their Chilton Trinity site, despite its limited geographical spread. Bridgwater was used as a good supply of bricks because it was cheaper to sail a boat load of bricks across the Bristol Channel than the longer rail route from Bridgwater around Bristol and Cardiff. In addition, the boat would bring the bricks up the river Tawe directly to the White Rock site. Bridgwater also employed around 1,300 workers in the industry by the 1840’s, though many, around half, were laid off during the winter months.
Tunnel side entrance 18C brickwork.
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JB Hammill, previously known as R Ford, operated from their Chilton Trinity works along the river Parrett at Bridgwater, despite the clay there being better suited to tile making. J B Hammill was known as the Saltlands Brick & Tile Works. Many of the bricks found at the site were refractory brick, i.e. fire bricks used to construct the furnaces. These bricks had a fairly short life and were often replaced. JB Hammill bricks found on site had the consistency of a fire brick, they were scorched, and when you look at a cross section, they had that digestive biscuit look. However, JB Hammill worked the clay pits of Chilton Trinity along the river Parrett. Chilton Trinity was prime clay for tile making, not for fire bricks. I also found there were JB Hammill bricks made from different clays, as you can see from the photographs below. I can only conclude therefore, that ‘JB Hammill’ was buying in refractory bricks with his name stamped on them. This was new information not only to me but also the museum in Bridgwater I was in contact with. The other problem was after that the Territorial Army demolished the site in the 1960’s they ‘reconstructed’ some of the remains using bricks lying around. You can find JB Hammill fire bricks cemented in reconstructed walls alongside other bricks from different periods. Fire bricks have an Aluminium oxide content that can be as high as 50-80% (with correspondingly less silica). Several hundred tons of fireclay was shipped into Swansea in 1876, for example, in order to make fire bricks locally. Fire bricks are normally yellow but bricks used in chimneys are usually common red clay bricks. So, how do you tell a house brick from a firebrick? In the photo at the top of page 6, the house bricks are those in the left-hand photo, and you can see that the clays on the inside of these bricks is much smoother and consists of
White Rocks incline and 19C hearth.
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pure clay with tiny amounts of stone found in the clay. If larger stone are found in the clay, the brick will probably crack when it’s being fired in the kiln. To the right of the photo, the clays are mixed with aluminium oxide and are much coarser. Since JB Hammill stopped brick making in the 1850’s, and the fact that I found the remnants of an early RSJ beam, (RSJ’s or ‘I’ beams as they are known, were first patented in 1850 in France), I concluded that the area was used from around 1850 and close to where the bricks were
found some form of copper smelting had taken place. Once the bracken and weeds were removed a stone floor was discovered where the outlines of internal/external walls were found. To conclude, archaeology is like a detective solving a crime. You have to look at what is in front of you and go where the evidence takes you, as with this case where all that remained on the site was a pile of bricks. A Second World War saying was; “walls have ears”, bricks also speak to you if you have a mind to look at them.
JB Hammill brick cemented into a 19C Wall.
Mid section of a fire brick used in furnace.
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The Skipwith Ragnarok By Eric Houlder LRPS
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hen my first book, Recording the Past: a Handbook of Photography for the Historian was published in 1988, the publishers gave a copy to Emeritus Professor Hoskins, who was kind enough to say that it would be invaluable to a group whose members were not noted for their skills with a camera. In fact his actual words were somewhat pithier than that, but as they were communicated by word of mouth, my memory of them is perhaps selective. Certainly, it is my experience that most historians favour the written word over the image, and that they tend to undervalue the latter. So it turns out that anyone who has skill with the camera – and the related processing software - will be asked to record those discoveries and events which the historian feels are perhaps beyond his/ her skills. Worse, the photographer may be called in after the historian has tried and failed. The worst case scenario is to be given a set of jpeg files to rescue images from, or perhaps a file of negatives. Far better to be called in at the beginning to do the job properly to start with.
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Since the foundation of my own local archaeological society, PontArc, in 1957, it was written into the aims and objectives that local history would be recorded to the same standards as archaeology. The forming of a dedicated local history society in 1965 did not substantially alter these objectives, for to a man or woman they fitted Bill Hoskins’ description! My presentation to our recent Members’ Showcase used many examples of my own primary records of local history subjects. However, in this paper I want to cover one particular subject, which raised considerable interest when the image was shown. Members who attend the annual showcase event, under whatever name is in use at the time, will perhaps smile ruefully when I mention my predilection for big flashguns. In some of the situations in which I find myself, a powerful light like a big flashgun is invaluable or even essential, but this particular anecdote is based around my first-bought electronic flash following the demise of the home-made one I described some time ago.
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The flash in question was a Sunpak 7S, a portable unit using four AA cells. By modern standards this was quite heavy, but I carried it in my gadget bag together with my first SLR, an Aires Penta and my Weston Master V meter. An essential accessory was a ten foot extension lead. I carried a lightweight tripod in a shoulder-slung case. In those days of the late sixties, a dedicated group of us from PontArc went walking most Sundays with an older and wiser colleague. Fred was an HGV driver by profession, but a man self-educated to a high standard, as many were in his generation. His philosophy was shaped to some extent by his wartime experiences in the ill-fated Norwegian campaign, but he made an excellent walk leader, taking us to ancient churches, derelict castles, deserted villages and even the odd moated site. On this particular occasion, Fred told us that he would impart a secret. All he would reveal was that it was in a church, so we were all intrigued. We caught a service bus to Selby, and walked the rest of the way to Skipwith church. Inside he led us into the vestry where a large cupboard, like a wardrobe, held vestments. Two of us were then instructed to drag the cupboard away from the wall, revealing a graffito cut into the stonework. This was long before tiny torches in mobile phones, so we inspected it with lit matches. (I now carry a tiny but powerful LED torch in my gadget bag for such occasions). It was clearly pre-Conquest, and equally clearly, Viking.
As I remember, it was about a metre square, at groundlevel, and appeared to depict a scene from the chaos at the end of the world: Ragnarok, in which the pagan gods fought each other. Fred went outside to enjoy a cigarette whilst I began to prepare to photograph the carving. I erected the tripod so that the head was halfway up the graffito and exactly central. I attached the extension lead to the camera and the flash, and also put my cable release on the camera, which having a between-lens shutter could be set to a speed that eliminated ambient light. The intention was to hold the flashgun to light the subject from its top left, very obliquely. Again, long before TTL or even auto flash, so sums had to be done, helped by the calculator on the back of the flashgun. I could spare just one frame of Agfa CT18 slide film, so the calculation was critical. One of my companions would operate the cable-release at my command. I switched it on, and after the orange readylight had been on for a few seconds, nodded. The flash left us all blinking in the dim vestry, after which we replaced the cupboard and retraced our journey. The film, when processed, revealed a perfect exposure, but a slight focusing error. Hopefully, my attempts to correct this within Affinity Photo have met some success.
Group Outings - Announcements Newhaven Fort - 14 June Join us on this A&H Field Trip to Newhaven Fort in East Sussex. The defences and surrounding area have a fascinating history dating back to the Iron Age but the present fort is the result of a succession of updating over the last 150 or so years. More details on the website. Getty Images, Hulton Archive - end May / beg June Join us for an exclusive opportunity to visit one of the most important examples in photographic heritage. In a small group you will experience Getty’s working analogue archive with an introduction by Matthew Butson FRPS (Vice President, Getty Images, Hulton Archive) and Melanie Hough (Hulton Archive Curator) At this outing you will: see historically important items from the archive, hear about the history and challenges the archive faces, as well as its value today and in the future; meet other members interested in Heritage photography. Places are limited. Final details are being arranged at the time of going to print. More information on the website.
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