Number 6

Ooh, I'm having such fun on my photography course at Shipley College. Last term for me was more about revisiting and learning how to do things the proper way(!). This term, we are moving rapidly on to techniques I've never really understood how to do, like using layers and layer masks in Photoshop. This week, amongst other things, we learned how to do 'spot colour' or 'colour popping' as I have seen it termed in photo mags. It's not difficult really - and, as always, there seem to be several ways of achieving much the same effect - but it's quite fun and on the right photo it can have a lot of impact. For example, I noticed in a restaurant I was in recently the menu had a montage of photos of fruit, veg and the farmers that grow them. Several of the photos were black and white with the fruit or veg in colour - and it really looked very effective.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here's my first attempt at colour popping! 6 Caroline Street, Saltaire, with its nice red front door. A round of applause, please! (I know - you've all been able to do that since you were knee-high to a grasshopper... never mind. I'm enjoying myself.)

I've looked up the 1871 census for 6 Caroline Street. It is one of the three-storey houses built as boarding houses. In 1871 it housed two families: Joshua Wilson (66) a cotton twister, his daughter Ann (31), a cotton weaver, and son John (28) a worsted weaver. Also, listed as 'boarders', were the young family of John Lund (29) a stone mason, with his wife Maria (24), a cotton weaver and their baby son Albert Edward, born in Saltaire 10 months before the census. (Although Salts was a worsted mill, it used cotton fibres as the warp thread through which the wool weft was woven to produce very fine cloth. I don't know if that explains the women's job titles. )