I love a wet pavement shot. "The architectural character of Bury (St Edmunds) is predominantly Georgian", wrote Pevsner, "pleasant and quiet, perhaps a little sleepy, but most attractive". Angel Hill, the agreeable open space before the abbey's Great Gate, looks as though it must once have been the site of a market. I'm not sure. Although I now live quite near, this is not the place of my nativity, and at this stage of my life I have not time enough left to steep myself in local lore.
Eyes! See again, in those years before subsidised Euro-crops, quotas, set-aside, oil-seed rape, battery farms, growth hormones, butter mountains, wine lakes and the internal combustion engine, the greasy setts, with their litter of cow dung, straw, sheep's wool, chicken feathers and cabbage leaves, as the cattle pens are dismantled at the end of another market day, and well-to-do farmers from Sudbury repair to the Angel Hotel to seal their bargains. These days, as you see, it's an asphalted Pay & Display car park. Why do I harp on about setts and asphalt? Well, paving and surfacing materials do much to determine the look of a place. A summer shower brought a sudden beauty to this undemonstratively attractive place, largely because of the effect of light and rainwater on flagstone pavements. You don't see them much now. They are gradually being replaced by featureless ashalt or the sort of thing we see in the foreground ...fake setts, made from reconstituted stone, relentlessly durable and faultless in their regularity. This is the planning bureaucrat's idea of an "appropriate" surface for "sensitive" sites in "heritage" locations. The tree ought to go too. A place such as this takes its character from its "open" nature. The tree, when fully grown, will have the effect of filling, blocking and dividing the aerial space. The parked cars are, at least, authentic and, should this humble snap survive, will prove interesting to future viewers, if any.
I am delighted with this little camera, a Zeiss Ikon Nettar. This, the 517/16 variant, first produced in 1949, was a very basic "budget" model. The periphery of the photographs are blurry, but I can live with that. The main part is beautifully sharp. This cropping excludes quite a bit of the original square negative. In an attempt to reduce the edge-blurring, I am using fast film and small apertures. This time I cut back on agitation during development. If I have understood correctly, agitation tends to make grain more noticeable. Although I quite like the look of grain, as long as it's not obtrusive, I also like its absence. This was Kodak T-Max 400. If I zoom in, I see pixels before I see grain. Exposure was guesswork, 1/200th at f11, I think. Medium format could spoil you for 35mm.

Come to think of it ...and before any of you locals correct me... trading still takes place at a market place further up in the town.

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