The winter of 1978/9 we had snow fairly seriously, and in the last few days I’ve been going through my contact sheets from that time, including quite a few pictures taken in the snow.
I went up to another workshop at the Photographers Place in Derbyshire with Paul Hill and Ray Moore, I think in early January, and it seemed quite likely that we would get snowed in. I’m not sure that we would have minded all that much, as we were all having a good time, though of course we all had work to get back to. As usual we went out a few times together taking pictures, including a visit to a snow-covered Alton Towers, but one of the few images I now felt worth preserving was one from a walk on my own along a snow-covered lane. Most of those taken on the outings I seemed to be trying too hard to be ‘arty’.
It didn’t help that the Leica M2 which I took most of the pictures (though I think the one above was with an Olympus OM2) with turned out to have a shutter fault – perhaps it didn’t like the cold weather, and it gave uneven exposure, with a strip at the right hand edge of the frame getting rather less than it should. As soon as I developed the films it went off for repair (at excessive cost, being a Leica) but by then I’d ruined quite a few images. I did manage to print some of the pictures fairly well, dodging the affected area – at least the boundary was a nice straight line, so a simple straight piece of card held in the right place and height above the paper could do the job. And now of course with digital it would me much simpler to correct.
But we did manage to get home on time (I think with Peter Goldfield driving his van through the snowy roads), and I went back to work, but soon there was more snow, and there were several days when my colleague and I spent an hour or so trying to drive to work before finding roads closed or impassable. So I had a little unexpected time to wander around with a camera in the snow. But again most of the pictures I made seem now to have little interest. Again the exceptions were mainly those which were more straightforward – such as the surprisingly almost car-free Crooked Billet roundabout above.
Perhaps the best of my snow images from 1978-9 was a scene in the snow at Marble Hill Park, on the banks of the Thames in Twickenham, where a group of boys were cycling on the snow-covered grass. I only had time for a couple of frames as they were moving around, and the first, taken a second or two earlier shows a fourth cyclist going away to the right of the group. I moved to more accurately line up the cyclists with the house and managed to take this frame with just the three of them in a tight group in a near-silhouette against the snow. Although it has a wide-angle feel with that wide expanse of snow, I think the only lens I had for the Leica (fortunately now repaired and working well) on which it was taken at the time was the collapsible 50mm f2.8 Elmar. Taken in a hurry it also had quite a slope to the horizon and needed a little rotation and subsequent cropping.
Here was the only example of the ‘artier’ snow pictures I bothered to scan, and this shows the entire frame. I suspect when I took it I didn’t mean to include the black spot near the top right corner, but decided not to crop it. The picture has a certain mystery about it that I like (it could be an alien landing site) and I’m not going to dispel by telling anyone much about it!