Bits of the Minster #4

I was very pleased to discover today, in the dim and murky depths of my groaning "My Pictures" folder, a set of photographs I took about a year and a half ago, and which I'd started to think I'd taken in a dream. I thought this one fitted nicely into my "Bits of the Minster" occasional series.

Can you guess where I was when I took it? The answer is in a photo I posted ... oo, around a couple of weeks back, I reckon. ;-)

Bits of the Minster #3

For me, this was the obvious shot of the Minster to take, and is the first one I took, in fact. I probably didn't put it on first because it seemed obvious.

It's difficult taking pictures of something that everyone takes pictures of, because of the need to make it different, and capture something original. Photos taken from an odd angle to make the thing look different can look as cliched as those taken as a straight shot, which is why I wasn't too thrilled with the one above. It's sort of a mixture of "straight on" and twisted angle, to get the lampost in as well. But having left it to "rest" for a week or two, I don't mind it as much this morning.

About this morning. I am excited. I'm going to meet the friend of a friend that I mentioned before. We shall be having coffee (and possibly a cake :-) ) in the Pig and Pastry. In fact I had better go and get ready now ;-)

Bits of the Minster #2

What a lot of clever people got it right. It is indeed the Minster that you see when you come out of the Shared Earth shop and look left. I avoided putting down the Shared Earth shop address in my last post, 1 Minster Gates, incase it made it too obvious, but it was anyway :-D !

Technically speaking, it's only a bit of the Minster that you can see, so this photo fits in nicely to my Bits of the Minster series! On the top left in the photo, you can see the Shared Earth shop sign. The shop jutting out there on the right is an antiquarian book shop which I intend to go and visit sometime soon. Ruby Senior has a couple of antique books on the shelves here gathering dust, so we're going to take them in and see if the bookseller is interested. On the bin in the foreground is a poster advertising the York Ghost Tours. I've never been on one, but that's another thing to do at some point - there are lots of ghost stories associated with York. And at the top right of the picture you can see a signpost indicating the way to the Museum Gardens, and the National Railway Museum. Things to blog another day.

A bit of the Minster #1

York Minster is enormous. Like really, really, neck-achingly tall and wide. Impossible to photograph in full.

I have however made it my future mission to try and get it completely into a photo, even if it means buying a wide angle lens at some point when I have more money than I do at the moment. For now though, we will have to make do with pics of small portions of it, like the above. And if I don't ever manage to fit it all in, we can put all the pics together like a jigsaw to make a whole one :-D

I like this scene because there's lots happening at once. I didn't even see the school girls arriving from the right when I took it. The cyclists are a bit in the way, frankly, but that's generally the case in York. Not that I can say anything because I'm a York cyclist too.