Annoying Man With A Camera

This gallery is a bit of a retrospective, I have looked back at my time using DSLRs, and more latterly, mirrorless cameras and taking pictures from the beginning of that journey, with a common theme.

I was out for a walk today and I reflected that there were a number of places that I had photographed over the years for their timeless beauty. In a relatively short space of time, those places are no longer there, so their beauty was not timeless after all.

At one point I lived in a street on the ‘edge’ of Leeds, and that has changed. When we arrived here, we walked on the motorway link as it was being built. Over time, we’ve seen the development of a new business park, a retail park and a housing estate, and the development of a new ring road. We still, just, live on the edge of Leeds, but not for much longer.

I did have the quite sobering thought that when I took these photos, I never assumed they would be their epitaph, but so it has been.

The pictures cover a period of five years.

First of all, the address now known as The Springs Retail Park. Formerly known as, well nothing, a field with no name. This was also the place where I began my photography journey with my first DSLR, back in the Summer of 2015.

This quite simple photograph of a bumble bee is a fitting start to this little monologue. It is one of the first shots I ever took with this camera. Everything is now gone. The thistle, the bumble bee, the area, and even the camera. But the reason the photo is significant is that I realised some time after taking it, that the bumble bee had already gone. At the time I could not believe that he stayed there long enough for me to focus and take the picture, but, perched, between two leaves of a thistle, he had already passed away. So in every way, this photo is the ultimate epitaph.

The following photographs are of the same former field, now the Springs Retail Park.

The first image is the wild area where all of this took place. It is not an outstanding photograph - I was not an outstanding photographer, but this is one of the few images I took of this place. The white building in the corner is 4600 Park Approach, Thorpe Park Business Park. The place I am standing to take this photo is now a stunningly unimaginative glass cube with a car park around it.

Why have I posted so many moths, bees, and butterflies? Well, it helps to remember I was a very inexperienced photographer, and I had a very poor ‘hit’ rate for decent photographs. And yet, I have thousands of pictures of insects from that time. And one of the things that we’ve lost, over the last five years, is a huge amount of insect life. I have become a much more experienced photographer, but I have far fewer images of insects. They just aren’t there.

The second photo is a 5 Spot Burnet Moth. There must have been 500 of them flying around on that day. The UK Butterfly Conservation website describes them as a ‘sometimes common’ moth. In the last 5 years, I have seen only one.

Honey Bees. Actually quite difficult to photograph, because of their combination of rapid activity, and the fact that they spend very little time in each flower, usually one nanosecond slower than it would take me to set up a shot... They also ‘notice’ that you’re there, and as you approach a bramble bush, humming with bee life, and started taking photos, they very rapidly all move to the back. In the last year, I have seen honey bees making a comeback, but in the intervening years, their population plummeted.

Bumble bees have been fairly constant, I suspect they took the pollination role of honey bees over when their colonies collapsed. These are one sign of hope, over the years I’ve seen a variety of bumble bees, Red-Tailed, Garden, Tree, White-Tailed, and even Forest Cuckoo Bumble Bees, the latter quite unusual in that they lay their eggs in other bumble bees’ nests. They seem quite resilient.

The little gold moth is a Small Skipper Moth, and the white butterfly is the Cabbage White, I am patiently waiting for the chrysalis of one of these to hatch out on my kitchen window. There are plenty of those around, but I have only seen one Skipper since 2015.

This last photo in this set is of one of my two dogs, in the middle of all this glory. I am pleased to say she is still with us, but the field and the forest are gone.

The next few images are from some walks I took around East Leeds in the Autumn of 2017. This area is what prompted this post. I did not visit for a few years, and went back as lockdown was eased, for a walk with the dogs.

My other dog is playing in this picture, again, he is thankfully still with us. The rural avenue through this cornfield has now gone, in the process of being flattened by a new ring road which is due to connect up with the motorway junction near the Retail Park.

This small field of flowers is still with us, although it is now showing signs of the trampling progress that comes with new ring roads, and in a few years this too will be gone, replaced by housing estates.

A little closer to home, at the end of my street there’s a wood and an old railway line that used to run to the Leeds-York railway from a local mine.

This is the last year this field was sown for corn. This walkway is still there, but the view ahead is now populated with diggers, and construction crews. The new housing estate is taking shape just beyond the trees on the right. This field is supposed to become a playing field, so there is some prospect that some element of grassland in front of us will remain.

The truth is, you can’t live on the edge of a city and expect it will remain ever thus, but at the same time when I took these photos, I just thought, rather naively, that they would always be there. There are plenty of childhood photos where the house has gone, the area has been built up, something has changed, however this is only a span of 5 years.