FALLING SOMEWHERE AS RAIN

With the year rapidly drawing to a close and the clocks going back an hour to prepare for the onset of winter, photographic opportunities are becoming limited, as the weather and good daylight can no longer be relied upon. So, I decided to make the best of what I had and jumped the train across the Mersey to New Brighton, on the top of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the estuary. With a long history of smuggling and deliberate shipwrecking, the town has a rich and varied history, with secret tunnels running underground from the coast and legends of hidden treasures. New Brighton was once a popular Victorian holiday destination with fairground, pier and a large tower in the style of Blackpool. Favoured by Lancashire's industrial towns as a seaside destination, it enjoyed popularity for many years, until just after the First World War, the tower had to be dismantled and later the pier fell into disrepair. When the regular Mersey Ferry services ceased in the seventies, traffic to th...

 Speke Hall is a 16th century Tudor mansion, which was completed in 1598, by Sir William Norris, a devoutly catholic landowner, who used his wealth gained from the slave industry to create the hall. Situated on the banks of the Mersey, near to the original Speke Airport, this was an oddity which I found to be completely out of place in the industrial wastelands surrounding it. I moved into Speke in the late sixties, following the slum clearances of the inner cities, from Dingle in the Liverpool 8 area. Initially, I found the transition from the terraced streets to the brutalist estates quite jarring and missed my old home, but I was gradually swayed by the presence of the airport and the amazing hall. My first visit would have been with primary school and as an impatient 8 year old, I did not fully appreciate the significance of the place. However, I was particularly taken with the two massively ancient yew trees, situated in the central courtyard of the site and towering over the ...

Recently, I have been looking at ways to expand the experience of going on a photo walk, to include a different element to just taking photos of an area. To this end, I started to look at the possibility of geotagging my photographs, so that a random photograph of the countryside could be easily identified years later, by including some extra data with the photograph. Most phones will offer the ability to automatically include GPS mapping data, which makes cataloguing photographs a lot easier.  Whilst looking into GPS apps, I recalled the activity known as ‘geocaching’, which is a pastime involving tracking down hidden caches and logging them on a map. Originally, this would have been done by hand using maps and compass, but lately, it uses satellite GPS signals and a special app. Having downloaded the app on my phone, I checked the immediate area around my place of work and found there were a couple of small caches nearby. Caches vary in style and content and can either be a simpl...