A recent exhibition of street photography by the Tea Amantes photowalk group highlighted some fine work from the collective in 2024. The group is already well on its way to building a body of work for 2025. David Simper loaded his rangefinder camera and headed down to the cafe to join the group, as it hit the streets of Blackpool for the third photowalk of 2025.
The team gathered at the Tea Amantes cafe and gallery on 29th March 2025, its collective work still exhibited on the walls. It seemed to have grown since the new year and the room was quite crowded.
I’d selected the Leica CL rangefinder camera and slipped in a 36 exposure roll of my favourite Kentmere 400 black and white film. This gives what I think is a pleasant retro effect when shot through a colour filter. The camera is fully manual and might be slightly slow for street photography, but pre-setting helps with this; a 35mm lens gives a lot of depth of field easing the pressure on focusing.
The light was not brilliant, but was ok; overcast has the advantage of no harsh shadows. It deteriorated towards the session’s end and I seem to remember a couple of spots of rain. A reasonably fast film helps maintain a reasonably high shutter speed.
The group sallied forth. I think we were supposed to do some sort of exercise, but I straight away saw a shot and thought ‘I’m not missing that’, and that was pretty much the end of that. We turned right at the end of Coronation Street and wended our way up to St. John’s Square, where’s there’s always some sort of action.
There also seemed to be some sort of lacrosse match in the offing, resulting in young men chanting in a somewhat tribal manner. This seemed to require the presence of police vehicles.
The group became dispersed, but there was a rough plan to rendezvous at the Central Pier and lo, this came to pass. A sub-group had ventured onto the pier to grab some shots and been evicted by security, due to apparently requiring permission. This didn’t seem to particularly bother anyone; another experience.
There was time for a few more frames before the light unfortunately began to fail. I ran out of film, having promised myself I would only use half of it. There are ten of the thirty six here; they may not be the best, but they are the ones I’ve chosen.
Not all the party had reappeared but most had. It was getting cold and I, and I suspect most people were wanting a coffee. We wended our way back to the cafe.
Apologies to Stan: not only did I fail to do his buddying exercise, I failed to photograph any hats; I just didn’t see any hats.
This was a somewhat different photowalk, due to the group splitting, but it still felt like a team/communal/group activity. The next walk is 26th April 2025, meet aound 11:00 at Tea Amantes (corner of Albert Road and Coronation Street). There will be a 2025 exhibition in the early part of 2026, so this is an opportunity to get your work on the wall.
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