north yorkshire | Dave Johnson's Photography

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to York races with my best friend to celebrate his upcoming marriage to the wonderful Miss Frank. Now it is not normal that a camera attends stag parties due to the potential for life changing, marriage wrecking incriminating evidence that might be captured by that little CMOS sensor! However, fortunately I decided to leave my camera at home once the races had finished so there was no chance of this catastrophic event happening 😉

The Saturday races are one of the biggest in the calendar for York racecourse with the big race, both in prize money and runners, being the 4.15pm Ebor. With it being a stag party we decided to all put a £5 in to the pot and to let the Stag choose a horse. To cut a long story short if it had come in we would have had a tidy £1.2K to share between 15 of us, however, it didn’t win and we walked away empty handed! In fact the result on this race pretty much summed up how my day at the races went from a gambling point of view – lots of bets+duff horses = no wins! Always next year…

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been using Snapseed for editing some of my photos. The picture above was edited using this software but the same effect could easily be achieved using other photo-processing software. Basically, the colour was washed out, a blue tint and quite a strong vignette added. For an extra effect I tweaked the highlights and brightness of his eyes to make them stand out more. I like the end result giving an edgy, cool but hard look to the man – kinda like the man who would come round and collect the money, if you know what I mean!!

When major fail, if you can call it that, was when I left my camera in the trust hands of one of my friends whilst I went to spend a penny! When reviewing the images at the end of the day there appeared to be quite a few of the ladies who were sat in front of us for most of the day. In fact, there were so many photos taken in such a short space of time (my fault for leaving the camera on high-speed shutter) that I could have stitched them together to make a little gif of the girl in purple walking from right to left, but I can’t be bothered…

Have a look at the rest of the set on flickr

The North Yorkshire Moors railway runs between Whitby on the east coast of England, to a market town called Pickering, approximately 20 miles inland. The station of Grosmont is, give or take a few miles, half way between the two. Grosmont is one of the key stations on the line serving as the starting point for many of the scheduled services, as well as for the specials that run throughout the season. Growing up not far from Grosmont, I have fond childhood memories of being taken to see the trains by my Nanna, who incidentally was born and raised in the town. Now that I have children of my own, I am reigniting those memories by taking them to see the steam and diesel trains.

As well as providing a fantastic opportunity to take pictures of steam trains, the surrounding countryside, in my opinion, is some of the most stunning in the world. To add weight to support this outrageous statement, is the little fact that some of the scenes from the Harry Potter movies were filmed on location on the NYMR!

To clarify why I’ve chosen an unusual post title. Well, for some reason whenever my son asked to watch Harry Trotter I would respond with ‘Barry Trotter’ in a fake mockney accent. Needless to say he didn’t find it very funny…but I still do it anyway. What else are Dads for apart from to be annoying?!