As mentioned earlier, here are some retrospective blog posts from Jennifer:

Friday 21^st 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 23^rd 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, 25^th 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