Staithes, a day out | Photography | Ant Smith

Or 'Claw and Cross', I can't quite decide; a composite image.

The cross is the top of Staithe's War Memorial. The blue reaching 'hands' are actually the claws of a giant lobster sculpture just across the street.

Neither image felt quite special to me on their own so I experimented in post (re-visualisation!) with a merged digital image and kind of liked the result. Staithes is packed full of little church halls and lobster pots so the result seems a fair representation of the village, even if it wasn't planned to be so while I was there!

The way the headland juts out is very dramatic. I tried to capitalise on that by cropping in on just those two elements. I could have included various little buildings at the foot of the cliff, but that would have been a different story!

I used a colour select in the original image to seperate sky and cliff so that I could add a lot of texture detail to the cliff, whilst also softening the sky - I then turned the whole thing Black & White because it is meant as a graphic, not pictoral, image.

This is a really small model in the corner of someone's very dusty window. I felt the dust and grime spoke of time-passed and put me in mind of all the adventures such a little boat may have had in its long life. The reflection of the greater world also just visible in the window adds a sense of yearning for further destinations. Normally when shooting through glass we want something that is clean and reflection free (possibly with the help of a polarising filter) - but in this case the glass itself, its grime and reflections, form part of the story of the image.

This old Methodist hall is now a free-entry museum, and from the inside the large stained glass window cannot be seen - it has been totally obscured by display cases etc. I was suprised to see such a window in a Methodist hall as I thought the Methodists were more into words and music than the visual arts

...it is not certain that the Nonconformist Churches in England understand visual art at all.

attrib. Reyntiens

I asked if it were possible to see the window from the inside, but the museum attendant seemed suprised that I would suggest such a thing existed - so much so in fact that I had to go back outside to have another look to convince myself it was really there!

But as you can see, it is really there!!

I have flipped the image (thus you see 'METHODIST' is backwards on the building face) so that the text within the glass can be read. At the top it says

Peace be still

And at the bottom you can read most of the names of the people whom this window memorialises from the first and second World Wars.

I was drawn to the strong graphic nature of the reptition of pattern that these concrete pillars/stepping-stones carve across Staithes' Beck, which is why I decided Balck & White would be the most appropriate treatment.

I was suprised (and in fact overjoyed) when I made the conversion because the effect was so very striking. I ended up rotating the image 180° so that it would look like a leg in stripey stockings - well it does to me.

There's clearly a lot of artists living in Staithes and here is a shot of someone's wooden bird sculpture standing proud in their front yard.

It's important, I think, when photographing other people's artwork not to inadvertently rip them off - it is after all their intellectual property not mine. So here I have tried to avoid just snapping an image of the work, and instead tried to highlight the harmony of the colours of the sculpture and its backdrop. This required a very precise crop and point-of-view to exclude any and all 'distractions'; just behind the neck there being an overflow pipe in the wall!

I also liked the juxtaposition of the lines of the brickwork with the grain of the wood.