As mentioned earlier, here are some retrospective blog posts from Jennifer:
Friday 21st September 2019
This week was spent mostly up ladders – at least for those of us who
were volunteered! We were blessed with good weather so took the opportunity to
re-photograph some of the table graves , however they are too tall and long to
photograph without a ladder, therefore the shortest (and youngest) person went
up the ladder, kindly supported by two arm rests so that photographs could be
taken, one handed and blinded by sunshine. Some were even taken upside down, or
between other graves in an attempt to accurately record the inscriptions. The
rest of the team were finishing off recording gravestones with a little less
gymnastics. There’s not really much else to say, the week was mostly about
catching up and finishing taking photographs, the only downside was that we
used up all the camera battery and ended up sharing one camera between us all!
However on the upside there was no-one to take photographs of us practising the
sometimes extreme sport of graveyard surveying.
Under sufferance my mother has allowed this photographed to be used,
solely because it has the step ladder in! (I promise I was trying to take a
picture of the gravestone really!!)
Jennifer Stearn
Wednesday 23rd August, 2019
The weather at last had sorted itself out with sunshine on the cards;
brilliant for plain photographs, but next to useless for RTI, but never the
less we persevered. Splitting our time between Holy Trinity Skipton and
Conistone churchyards we made a happy caravan of taphopiles. The sun just about
remained behind the clouds for several tricky RTI’s, eventually setting aside
the infamous table top RTI and finishing at a reasonable time, once the sun had
made itself well known.
The challenge of doing RTI on a sunny-with-cloud-interval day and the
different angles and conditions of each grave certainly challenged us all.
Interestingly it took four of us to do one grave, one taking the pictures, one
holding the flash, one holding the string and one holding the coat. The coat
was very key to blocking the sun, but also provided a rather strange line up
for passers-by. Owing to the fact that we left behind the very useful if
slightly “Heath Robinson” garden cane to hold the string, we even had to
fashion a string-hold stick out of a handy branch - with only minor puncture
wounds. Obviously we worked very hard and didn’t do any dancing or eating of
chocolate cake!
Jennifer Stearn
Friday, 25th August, 2019
With the sun inching out between the clouds at very awkward moments we
attempted the intricate art of horizontal RTI’s, with same added slope work. The
bar, once eventually set up and strapped together and screwed the right way, we
realised why we need tall people with allen keys. But once the bar was set to
the magic height of 130cm above grave slab we got into the swing of things,
right as the sun made everything rather useless.
There aren’t many people in Britain who are unhappy when the sun comes
out, but we are some of the few. It is a very good thing that we were all too
busy and otherwise engaged in the very careful and slow dance of the RTI
photographing that we couldn’t take pictures because we would have had some
very interesting angles and shapes.
We also learnt that it is very difficult to angle a flash when perched
precariously on a grassy slope, and even more difficult to swap sides when the
string attached to the flash is attached to cane that someone else is holding.
Despite the challenges, we managed some work and briefly mused on the
challenges yet to come of performing RTI on half a step in the sunshine, hemmed
in by walls and gates.
Jennifer Stearn
