Life – Page 7 – Riccarpics

Hop On, Hop Off

Last week I was in Scotland and spent a day in Edinburgh. It’s a beautiful city with plenty of sights, friendly people and things to do.There’s even a Tesla showroom!

Walking on Princes Street I photographed one of the City Sightseeing Tour buses with Jenners Department Store in the background. I would’ve liked to have taken the tour but I didn’t have time and to be honest it was a bit windy for an open topped bus.

It was only when I got home and was editing the photographs that I remembered that only the previous week I had photographed a City Sightseeing Tour bus in Belfast with the Albert Memorial Clock in the background. A Tale of Two Cities?

Edinburgh Tour Bus, Princes Street, Edinburgh

A Belfast Hop On, Hop Off tour bus approaches the Albert Memorial Clock

The Ford Capri Club

Today the Ford Capri Owners Club, Northern Ireland had a charity event in Bangor in aid of The Northern Ireland Cancer Centre. Although the event was organised by The Capri Club all Fords, old and reasonably new seemed welcome. Walking around the cars on display you cannot but be impressed by the work put into these vehicles both to get them to such a high standard and then to maintain them.

My first car was a Ford so I have a soft spot for the marque.

Ford Capri Club, Northern Ireland — Lots of Capri’s

See more here.

The Old Days

The weather remains cold and wet, to cap it I’ve now picked up a cold and yesterday was the annual Horse Ploughing and Country Skills Day at the Folk Museum in Holywood. I try to go every year and I’ve made it for the last five or six but yesterday I couldn’t face standing in the cold in a mucky field sniffing and coughing and trying to take photographs.

Anyway with the Folk Museum in mind I continued organising my images and came across these photographs taken in the printers shop in the museum. They show printing frames with type. I have an interest in such things because many years ago I trained to be a Compositor or Typesetter and used similar tools, albeit not as old as these. I moved on to other employment and the memories faded until about ten years ago walking past the Belfast Telegraph I glanced in the window and saw a Linotype machine on display. A Linotype machine was a machine for casting type from molten metal. I know that sounds really dangerous but things were different then – not less dangerous just different. It was displayed in the window like some kind of ancient artefact with a mannequin sitting at it as if operating it. I had used one of these machines and seeing it on display like a museum piece made me feel a bit, well, uncomfortable. I suppose its part of getting not old, but older.

Family functions

We’re in the grip of winter now and there are few opportunities for outside photography. I’ve been spending time cleaning out my Lightroom catalogue and attempting to learn Photoshop.

I have family in Cavan and visit usually three or four times a year for the usual events like weddings, birthdays, anniversaries and sometimes a family get together just to catch up. It was while cleaning out my Lightroom catalogue that I came upon images from my last visit in August past.

We had been there for a wedding anniversary and while I knew I had taken lots of photographs of the actual function I had forgotten that earlier, between lunch and catching up with family news, I went for a quick walk around the town to find an ATM. Of course I had a camera…