Electric Pig » Hammersmith

Funfair

Electric Pig — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:08:26 +0000

This is the Carter’s Steam Fair in Ravenscourt Park. I remember going there every year as a kid. It’s pretty much the same. The same penny arcade and coconut shy, waltzer and candy floss. They no longer have the spin-dryer ride we all loved. It was always the scariest ride they had. You would stand in a round cylinder against the wall. The cylinder would start to move. It span faster and faster, pressing us back until eventually, the floor would descend leaving us sticking against the wall, legs dangling. We felt like miniature astronauts in g-force training. When it was spinning fast enough, the more daring among us would manoeuvre themselves round so they were hanging upside down, laughing at eachother’s squashed faces upside-down.

There was a story at the time, (inevitably someone’s friend’s sister – probably just an urban legend), that a girl did the same thing, and, when the floor came back up, her hair went down the gap between the floor and the wall and was caught up in the machinery under the floor. The floor and walls kept spinning but the girl was held in place by the hair until it was eventually ripped out. Could this even have been possible, or was it simply made up to give an extra authority to the ‘no handstand’ rule? It seemed worryingly reasonable at the time – the worn paint and chipped wood didn’t exactly scream safety. Even so, we all laughed as we stepped back out into the sunshine at the end of the ride, laughing as we picked the splinters from the wooden wall out of each others’ backs.

It’s no wonder it’s not there any more.

Photo taken at about 6pm, 17.04.2010. Hasselblad 500c/m, Zeiss 85mm Planar, f5.6, Fuji Astia.

Tunnel Vision

Electric Pig — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:19:26 +0000

First shot with my new camera. There’s obviously some kind of light-leaking problem on the left hand side, but apparantly it’s pretty common, something to do with the foam under the darkslide that needs to be replaced, which I should be able to do myself if I can find the parts. Hopefully have it done before I go to Japan in a few weeks…

Happy New Year

Electric Pig — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Happy New Year! Here’s a few photos from my New Year’s Eve shenanigans, taken on my new OM-1. I did a little post processing on them, combining them with some bokeh shots I took while still in Tokyo. I’ve seen the look a few times on one of my contacts-on-flickr’s shots and wanted to try it out, although I’m not sure how she does it. I’m not all that keen on all the results, but I do think it works particularly nicely on the greenish one.