Retro//Reflection - Issue #16

An evening photo walk at Mumbles Pier.

Once or twice per month I send out a letter with a handful of (my) photographs and share a bit of insight on the ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. As an enthusiastic photographer, anything goes.

Maybe you learn something?
Or perhaps it will spark some inspiration?

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An extraordinary landmark from days gone by.

At least that is how it felt when walking around Mumbles Pier on an early evening in May. It had been raining that day, but in the afternoon the weather cleared and I set off to visit this pleasure pier at the far end of Swansea Bay on the southern coast of Wales, UK, to see what the fuss was all about. I had an hour or two, but it was very quiet with only a few people wandering around the area.

Perfect.

Mumbles Pier with its café and the old (left) and new (center) lifeboat house at the far end of the pier.

Clock at the pier. Although it didn’t display the correct time, it did look quite interesting. Something you would see in an adventure game where it turns out to be some sort of puzzle to solve :)

The pier was (is) still in the middle of continued restoration work, so I couldn’t walk all the way out, but I tried to capture the pier and its surroundings in as many ways possible within the short time I had: from underneath the pier, from up hill and from a short distance away.

Mumbles Head Lighthouse, right next to the pier on a rocky headland a little out into the water.

I focused on some of the details too, for example the railings along the pier.

Next to the café and the arcade hall they had put up a ferris wheel. To be honest, it looked a bit out of place. But it seems that it is a permanent attraction, so I included it in my photographs (often it was way too present to be excluded anyways).

The Big Wheel

After the ferris wheel closed for the night (with a clear “clunk” of a big lever power switch), the arcade hall was the only thing that was still open. Everyone left, and so did I, happy to go home with a nice set of photographs that I knew would make for a nice short ‘visual story’ about this place.

The old boat house

Afterwards I did some culling and edited those that made the cut with the Fuji Nostalgic Negative film simulation as a base.

Above I showed you a small selection of these photo’s. For the full collection - and the whole ‘visual story’ - please have a look at my website:

That’s it for this post. Have you ever visited this Victorian pleasure pier, or the Mumbles region in general? It is quite nice really. The whole of the Swansea bay area and nearby Gower peninsula are well worth a visit (or two, or three, or more).

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Each issue I want to end with mentioning a photographer, a photography-related website or publication, simply to show my appreciation for what they do.

By no means I’m an expert in “film simulations” or how they compare to real film stocks of the past (I really have no idea), but I do like to play around with them, in-camera (Fuji) or in post-processing in Capture One or DxO PhotoLab. I do like to understand (how to use) them, so for that I often consult the superb Fuji X Weekly website run by Ritchie Roesch.

Since I have a Fuji X-T5 I often read through these sections: https://fujixweekly.com/fujifilm-x-trans-v-recipes/ or https://fujixweekly.com/fujifilm-x-trans-iv-recipes/

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That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading until the end. Feel free to leave a short comment or message. Appreciate it!

Until next time, cheers,
Ronald
ronaldsmeets.info

ps: this article/newsletter/post is free, because I’m not doing this to make a profit. Also, I don’t like subscriptions at all (Tom Pendergast has a great article about not going paid, which I agree with). However, if you do want to show your support, a coffee always helps me writing and posting here ;-)