Return to Prince Street, Hull

click photo to enlarge
Like many photographers, when I find a subject that appeals to me I try to secure the best photograph of it that I possibly can. However, if you have only a single occasion on which to get your shot, then you have to put up with the light, weather, season and other circumstances that prevail at the time. Consequently the end result can be disappointing because you don't achieve the possibilities that you can see in the subject.

But, where the subject is one that you can photograph with reasonable frequency the opportunity exists to improve on your earlier efforts. If you look through this blog you will find several photographs where this has been my motivation. The Humber Bridge is one such example in this blog - see here for the deep rich colours of winter, here for a dull, damp winter view, and here for a contre jour shot with people for scale. Today's post is another example of a trying to get a better shot of a subject.

I first photographed Prince Street in Hull in the 1970s and 1980s. The view from the Market Place through the archway to the curving line of three-storey, multicoloured, terraced houses of the 1770s is quite appealing. I'd more recently tried again with the subject at the end of November 2012. On that last occasion the flat lighting and the line of rubbish bins waiting to be emptied detracted from the shot. The weather on our recent visit was much more promising, and as we walked through this part of the Old Town I tried again and produced a shot that I like much better. The contrast between the deep shadows of the arch and trees with the bright, sunlit buildings works very nicely, and the silhouette of the wall-mounted street light adds a welcome detail.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 28mm (56mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f5.6 Shutter Speed: 1/2000 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Saxon architecture

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There are 238 churches in England with traces or substantial parts that are of Anglo-Saxon, that is to say pre-Conquest, origin. The Saxons were fine sculptors and illustrators who gave primacy to the line above all else. They were a people who built mainly in wood and for this reason none of their houses have survived. Many of their churches were made of wood too, and of these only one example remains, at Greensted, near Ongar, in Essex. However, they did build churches in stone. Some, such as that at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, is as it was first built. Most of the others have been enlarged during the Norman or the Gothic periods.

The church at Barton upon Humber, Lincolnshire, was originally a small Saxon building of the late 900s. It consisted of three parts: a western porticus/baptistery, a 22 feet by 22feet (exterior measurements) tower that served as a nave, and a chancel 15 feet long. This was extended in the mid-eleventh century and the twelfth century, but this later work was taken down when a larger extension was built in the thirteenth, mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. What is surprising, but not unique, is the fact that the original Saxon work was allowed to remain. Perhaps it was because the tower continued to serve its purpose and the cost and difficulty of replacing it couldn't be countenanced.

A visitor to the church today is struck by the bright, airy space of the Gothic nave, aisles and chancel compared with the diminutive, badly lit spaces of the Saxon structure. The quality of workmanship and the contrast between the amount and style of decoration is also marked: the Saxon looks positively crude next to the Gothic. And yet, this crudity has an elemental sturdiness that is quite appealing. Capitals are not elaborately carved and decorated with faces and leaves as in the Gothic nave, rather they are simple, heavy blocks. The arches - above we see the one linking the tower with the porticus/baptistery - are narrow due to the semi-circular head and the understandable caution the Saxon builders exercised when spanning spaces in this way. But decoration of a sort there is. Those outer strips that frame the arch using alternating long and short strips of stone (often called, appropriately enough, "long and short work") are decorative with no structural purpose. It has been conjectured that these strips (they are visible on the outside of the tower too) hark back to the Saxons' wooden constructions.

This building is now in the care of English Heritage and it is their lighting that drew me into taking the photograph. Its brightness is necessary to allow visitors to safely negotiate the dimly lit spaces. However, it is sufficiently subdued that it both gives something of the effect there must have been when the Saxon church was lit by candles or tallow lamps, and also offers the photographer an attractive, contrasty, atmospheric composition.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.5mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/30
ISO: 800
Exposure Compensation:  0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Arches and stairs

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The outline of most arches was constructed using a straight edge and a pair of compasses. It's quite easy to see how a round-headed arch might be drawn using these tools, but pointed arches were drawn in this way too.

The simplest pointed arch - the "pointed" or "two-centred arch" was drawn using two arcs that met at the apex of the arch, with the compass point located outside, to the left and right, of the vertical lines that form the jambs. This is easier to show using an explanatory drawing than it is to describe in words.

I mention this because when I came to look at my photograph of an arched doorway through which a spiral staircase can be seen, I couldn't decide what kind of arch it was. The photograph was taken in Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire, a tall, brick structure built in 1434, a time when castle building was on the wane. The arch is of the Tudor/four-centred variety. Some authorities class these arch shapes as one and the same, though others maintain that the Tudor arch is more depressed than its the four-centred sibling. Either way, I was definitely depressed after I'd consulted my books and the internet and come to no definite conclusion!

The photograph was taken using natural light, and the effects that might suggest the use of flash come from artificial light sources that are designed to make the tourist's passage safer, and natural light penetrating through small windows.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/44mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/13 seconds
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On