Weathered Letters

Traffic signs don’t usually make good weathered subjects because they’re durable by being silk screen printed on tough-wearing surfaces. Yours, on the other hand, has been painted onto a wooden surface that, luckily for you, hadn’t been primed properly. Your square crop fits the round sign perfectly wirh the green brambles set against the red, black and white giving your photo an added flourish of colour. Had you been driving faster than 10 miles per hour you’d probably have missed the photo opportunity.

There’s probably no better place to find weathered textures than along coastal regions where salt water and sea breezes play havoc with external surfaces. Like the distressed hulls of boats your illustrated pub sign shows similar wear and tear. The Old English typeface has seen better days but being distressed over time has made it more in keeping with the traditional olde pub image. Your entry sailed to the head my chosen fleet because first-rate photographs win competitions - schooner or later.

Your Apple iPhone has managed to capture a photo using an extremely low aperture and ridiculously low ISO where a regular camera would have struggled without a tripod. But it’s the building’s content that makes your photo. There were lots of old brick wall painted advertisements entered into this challenge but yours stood out for two reasons:- the brickwork along the wall’s right edge resemble matches sticking out of a partially opened matchbox and the seven chimneys do the same at the top of your frame. Wether this was intentionally planned by Brymay and purposely highlighted by you doesn’t matter - what does matter is that your photo struck a light with me.

I say ‘yes’ in response to your ‘no’. You’ve thoughtfully cropped your composition to include the two metal rivets acting like a colon before your two letters. It was a wise choice to look beyond the beauty of the large steam engine and zoom in on the rusted lettering. The background mixture of browns, pinks and reds offset the yellow serif typeface perfectly - it turns your negative comment into a positive photo.

This is surreal. A sign standing high on four wooden stilts advertising absolutely nothing. I would have cropped your photo as a square, to remove the rocks and pylons at the bottom to make sure it definitely was showing absolutely nothing. One can read all kinds of reasons for the sign - personally I imagine it was placed there by Gambler’s Anonymous to remind punters leaving Las Vegas that they came with something and left with nothing.

This lovely brick-textured photograph could almost be a layered composite of two images. The builder merchant’s wall has been beautifully weather-beaten over the years. The exposure of original advertising showing through later promotional text gives your photo its double impact. The inclusion of the word ‘windows’ next to the blue view window is the subtlety-observed touch that gives your photo its extra edge.

At first I thought this might be a weather worn billboard advertising a rock concert. Reading between the lines I realised it was once a clever radio promotional poster. Whatever the intention of the message you have taken a perfectly aligned photo of the colourful, time-faded, band names. The inclusion of the ornate wall at the bottom gives the poster an indication of its huge size. Given the choice, I’d prefer to hang a copy of your distressed photo on my wall rather than the newly printed original.

You have photographed a very clever visual onomatopoeia with the word describing the way it looks. I imagine the cropped letters missing a ‘G’ at the front (which had it been there) would have describe the colour of the textured word. A low aperture has ensured that ‘OLD’ stands out against the blurred background. My slight criticism is that the photo could have been skewed on the right to straighten the edge but that doesn’t deter from your photo being worth its weight in (G)OLD.

I had just about selected all my top ten places when along comes this humdinger. I like to be taken by surprise when sifting through entries and this one didn’t disappoint. I envisaged all kinds of weathered letter scenarios but your original take was a revelation. In my mind, your 3-dimensional shop and factory letters stacked on top of each other could only spell ‘Top Ten’.

Impromptu layers of fragmented posters merge to make your photo a well-weathered piece of street art. I’ve always maintained that expired posters would be better appreciated if they were dissembled and reassembled to hang in modern art galleries. Your colourful abstract captures the metamorphic genre perfectly and (through your vision) brings the montage to the attention of a much wider public.