Westhoughton ...

I'd noticed a program on the TV here in the UK about a photographer called Francis Frith.  This gentleman attempted to photograph each city, town and village in England using what was then the new photographic camera.  We're talking about the 1850s and later.  I was seriously impressed with the quality of the images Mr. Frith and his photographers achieved and decided I'd take a stroll into Westhoughton to the library to see if they had any books about the man.  Sadly I found nothing, but did manage a couple of shots of the town on my travels.  After watching about Francis Frith I had to convert the shots to monochrome now didn't I?

Looking towards the town centre with the town hall the dominant feature centre right of the image.

Looking down the main street towards the church.

The town hall, built 1905.  Quite stunning in a very red brick.

Hall Lee Bank Park, Westhoughton.

Hall Lee Bank Park, Westhoughton.

What a glorious morning today here in Westhoughton.  The weather has been quite lovely for the past few days and today was no exception.  The light coming through the trees has a lovely warm look and feel to it and it makes things look really quite special.

I took a wee stroll through Hall Lee Bank Park and was really quite taken with the way the light shone through the new growth.  For the first shot in this post I really wasn't sure what to do.  There are some very dark areas as I was shooting into the sun and some very bright areas on the water.  I decided to take several shots at different exposures and blend them together in Photomatix Pro.  Please click on the image to get an enlarged view and perhaps let me know what you think.

I must say that it was really very lovely to see things springing into life and looking so new, fresh and clean.  For the rest of this post I've added just a few more shots from my stroll through the park to amuse you.  In the one with the hawthorn, perhaps you can let me know what the large brown growth is.  I haven't a clue but I'm sure one of you reading this will know.

I just loved the way these new leaves were illuminated by the sun

A hawthorn tree, but what is that brown growth?!?  It looks like a conker ... but it isn't!

New growth on a sycamore tree.  Gorgeous the way these leaves unfold from the buds. 

Daffodils lit by the morning sun.  A really lovely time of the day.

A bit of black and white ...

I've been looking through some old photographs ... well, not that old really, just a few months old.  The shot you see in this post brought back quite a few memories.  It was taken last year whilst visiting the UK.  I'd been walking around Westhoughton and spent a bit of time in the graveyard and this particular monument caught my eye.  The light was quite pleasant, but I was shooting into the sun.  As such I tried a bracketed set of shots and combined them into an HDR shot with Photomatix Pro.

The memorial is for the 344 men and boys who lost their lives in the Pretoria Pit as a result of an explosion.  This tragedy is Britain's third largest loss of life from a single mining event.  The explosion occurred at 7.50am on a Wednesday morning and took everyone by surprise.  There's a quote at the foot of the inscription on the memorial which says,

"Be ye therefore ready also, for the Son of Man cometh at an hour when ye think not"
 Luke 12. v40

Quite a fitting quotation I thought.

I must admit to being quite stunned by the magnitude of this event.  Westhoughton is much larger now than it was back in 1910 and 344 deaths would have a big impact on today's town ... it's hard to imagine what effect this event had back in 1910.

Interesting what you can find if you look in old graveyards, and how thought provoking some of those finds can be.