Stills

A twitchen?

I can't make up my mind about this. I admire the tonal control that stops the blacks falling off the bottom of the histogram and like the seeking out of an obscure part of the district. The bright rectangle on the lefthand wall gives a lift to the picture. I'm not so sure about the figure; ideally, he would have been walking 6" to the left! Whilst I am unhappy about the lack of clues, I also recognize that it is the definition of the tight use of space that is the story - rat runs for humans.
 

Where I used to live, alleyways were called twitchens.

Live and learn as they say!

:-)
 

Thanks Rex - it didn't feature on the first three pages of Google, nor in my elderly dictionary, nor in Wikipedia! It must have been very local dialect.

I forgot to mention that the picture is not quite vertical, which in this case would benefit it a bit. But it is not a vital component.
 

This is seriously OT, but Chambers says: " twitten - a narrow lane between two walls or hedges. Also twitting. Perhaps from the LG twiete, meaning alley or lane".

Chamber. Never out dialected.
 

More OT.

Put twitchen dialect into Google and the first response has twitchen in

Spenser writes, ‘To straggle up and down the country, or miche in corners amongst their friends idly’; and in a pamphlet written in 1493 we find, ‘At such fayrs and markets there be many theyvs, mychers and cut-purses.’ If a micher in his lazy peregrinations went up a narrow lane, he would be said to have gone up a twitchel, in some counties called a twitchen, and as such classified in Dr. Brewer’s ‘Phrase and Fable.’
 

If anyone can use peregrinations in a sentence then they can be allowed to use twitchen.
 

A twitchen eh? I'm going to have to try to use that in a sentence sometime soon. Perhaps I'll teach it to my students at the English school.

The funny thing about this picture is that I remember this alley, twitchen if you will, as being much narrower. In my mind there weren't 6 centimeters to his left let alone 6 inches.

I'll chalk the slighly off kilter vertical up to how quickly I was shooting. I was more concerned about getting the exposure right; thank god for good luck and Delta 400's monstrous dynamic range.
 

Having got the language classes over and done, I thought I would go back and look at the picture.

The way you have framed it, I tend to look at the windows in the background as the main point of interest. That is I'm looking just above the head of the figure. What is behind those windows?; is the person going to that building?, and so on. I think that this is because the bright white rectangle is catching my attention and that has lines which lead me beyond the figure.

The tonal control is great. Definitely not a shot to be looking at on a screen with sunlight hitting it! I bought a block of Delta 400 a while back but I've not used it yet. I've always assumed it would be less tolerant than HP5.
 

I've actually found the t grain b&w films better suited to this kind of situation than traditional b&w films. The t grains can capture a much wider range of information. Flattish midtone contrast and a somewhat weird spectral response (particularly TMY) seem to be the biggest reasons people think they are hard to use.

I think Delta 400 might be one the nicest b&w films I've ever used, although TMY pushes better.
 

Offers me up a lot of questions. Hope that the real print has some shadow detail left hand side? The hand rail on the right keeps a firm base to the shot (I keep expecting the picture to roll forward once our guest gets a little further forward!). I also get the feeling of being very enclosed with all the darkness around the figure. The shard of brightness in the distance offers me my escape... but not too quickly.