Photo walk with Dave - 2

Yesterday I had another very pleasant photo walk with Dave, almost 8 months after our first one.  Since our last walk I have upgraded my camera to a 50D while Dave has upgraded his zoom to a very impressive Canon 70-200 F/4 L.  I have been busy recently with wedding jobs and my holiday so it was good to get out and about for an afternoon just taking photos for no particular reason.

We started off meeting at the Millennium Gallery to take in the fantastic Kid Acne exhibition.  Unfortunately member of gallery staff told me straightaway that no photography was allowed – which did seem strange considering he is a graffiti artist – so I can’t share any photos from the exhibition.   But I did take a photo of some Kid Acne merchandise in the gallery shop.  I was taken by this cool hip flask:

I was really very impressed with Kid Acne’s art and that inspired us to hunt out some of his graffiti around Sheffield and shoot it.  But first, Dave wanted to take some photos of running water so we headed over to the train station to take some photos of the water falls on Sheaf Square. I was happy to go there first as it was the location of this competition winning photo of mine from 3 and a half years ago.  And as I’d not taken any photos there since it was nice to try to come up with some alternative views.

Dave had wanted to take long exposure shots of running water to make the water look milky so I joined in and made a couple of shots using a shutter speed of 3.2 seconds. I thought these two worked well in black and white:

I soon got bored with that as I felt they were too similar to my previous work so I decided to go to the other extreme and take photos of the water using the fastest possible shutter speed.  I wanted to freeze the water so that the individual droplets of water could be seen.  These were taken using speeds of between 1/4000th – 1/8000th of a second and I think I’ve been pretty successful with showing the water droplets:.

Here is Dave, taking a look at his latest masterpiece!

Suitably watered out, we then headed off in search of cool looking graffiti.  This was a Kid Acne work but it was a start…

I’m not sure if this was a Kid Acne piece either but I liked it a lot:

Next we found some Kid Acne stuff.  The work below on the left looks like Kid Acne but the stuff on the right less so.  It was next to a definite bit of Acne graffiti though, the amazing purple “You’ll Thank Me One Day”:

Problem was, we were on a lower level to the graffiti so had to work our way around to get a better view.  We headed up a small path that linked the two levels and spotted a doorway that I thought would make a great location for a portrait.  So as Dave was the only model handy i made use of him…

I liked this graffiti we spotted on a wall nearby:

Once we reached the top of the path / hill we spotted the Rutland Arms and the fantastic graffiti that had been painted onto the walls of the pub…

While we were snapping away, we heard a group of Bury fans walking towards us.  The Sheffield United ground wasn’t far away and their match against Bury had already kicked off.  So the fact that this group of lads had obviously not got into the match and were heading our way was a bit of a concern.  I obviously know a little karate but luckily Dave is a brown belt and will be doing his grading for his black belt soon so I didn’t feel too threatened.

Anyway, the lads approached us singing about how they were Bury ‘til they died.  Two young ladies were walking towards them and the Bury fans decided that making them feel uncomfortable would be the best approach to try to attract them.  It didn’t work….

They then decided to pose for us.

And then, thankfully, they were gone…

We then remembered that we wanted to photograph the Kid Acne graffiti so we found the wall where it was painted on.  Unfortunately it was on a wall in a locked and gated car park.  So we couldn’t get a good view.  And a couple of cars were parked in front.

That was frustrating but at least we got a shot of a Kid Acne original.  We decided that the best thing to do in these situations was to cut our losses and head to a pub.  As the Rutland Arms was opposite and we’d taken lots of photos of the pub outside. we felt it would be rude not to pop in for a pint.

Several hours later we emerged from the pub suitably refreshed and were thrilled to see that the car park had been opened and the cars had left.  Leaving us with an unobscured view.  Shame that my hands were no longer as steady as they had been a few hours before but I did manage to get this shot: