Beach Towns: Batch 1
Hello again!
If you have followed my previous posts on here, you’ll know I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a new project on English resort towns. I have recently began shooting for this in earnest, and have this week got the film back from my first deliberate ventures out to get photos for the project.
I’m currently wanting to keep the visual style and criteria for which towns to visit pretty loose as I go through what I’ll call a sort of “data collection” stage. That’s to say, I’m just going out, seeing what’s about and what interests me, and capturing a lot of it. If my interest in this project continues, I imagine my focus will narrow. But for now, it’s better to take more photos and be able to choose between them later than to be kicking myself for not taking a picture - particularly with the price of rail travel meaning it’ll be much harder to go back to certain spots than has been the case for any previous project I’ve done.
First up, I went back to Weston-Super-Mare. On this occasion, I took just my Fuji GA645Zi, so I was restricted to medium format. Quite quickly, I realised that this was not going to be the best way of shooting for me. I think that quite a lot of what interests me when actually at these “beach towns” is not only the aesthetics of the place, but also the interactions between people. To capture these, you need to be able to react much quicker than I am comfortable doing with a medium format camera. When shooting medium format, I usually take quite a while to decide whether or not the photo will be worth taking, considering the cost of the film, and I’ll tend to be quite perfectionist about the composition. By the time that mental calculation is done, the moment has passed. Going forward, I knew I’d need both formats (35mm and medium format) at the ready. Anyway, enough spraff, here are the photos from Weston.
With the great weather we’ve been having this spring, I was able to get myself out for another day trip pretty quickly. I decided to go a little more ambitious this time, and took the train down to Paignton in Devon, and walked from there along the coastal path to Teignmouth (via Torquay). It turns out that this is a much more ambitious walk than I had realised, though well worth it.
I brought both the Fuji and my Minolta, so I was well-covered for different situations. There was, fortunately, plenty to shoot, and I almost went through the whole roll of 35mm in a day, which is pretty rare for me. I was also confronted with my first street portrait opportunity on Paignton Pier, which was very exciting, when I met Spider and Ann, and their parrots Chester and Charlie. They were very easy to approach for a picture, the parrots were basically an invitation for this. While I’m hoping that I can get more street portraits in as things develop, I’m not counting on as many such easy opportunities.
As always, I’ll finish here with my favourites. I’m really happy with these as a first batch for this project, and looking forward to seeing where things go from here!
Thanks for checking these photos out, see you on the next one!
