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Report - - Salford Cathedral Spire - 21/4/07 | High Stuff | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Salford Cathedral Spire - 21/4/07

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Damon

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Took a trip out with Userscott and Cass tonight to finally get up the spire of Salford Cathedral. Sadly since we first spotted this, the restoration work to the uppermost section of the spire has been completed and the scaffold reduced in height. Infact, since last week its come down considerably, now not even half way up from the main cathedral roof. Gutted.

Wikipedia has a good article on the history of the Cathedral and of previous work to repair and refurbish the spire.

We met up nearby at about half eleven, getting thoroughly bogged down in the event traffic leaving the Manchester Evening News Arena, and made our way to the Cathedral.

Being pub chucking out time, it was fairly busy with passing traffic, but not a lot of pedestrians about, so we made our way onto the scaffold and upward. Easier said than done....

Barely 2 floors up and we had to emerge from behind the relative cover of the netting to circumnavigate a section of the protruding masonery, right out onto the main road. Some very embarrassing army crawling later and we were back behind the net. This was about 3 minutes into our ascent, and I'd managed to snag my tripod about 4 or 5 times in the process. My lowepro and I are having teething troubles. :(

This scaffold is like a ratrun, and we took wrong turns on more than one occasion, courtesy of Scotts rather dubious navigational abilities. Having crossed the rooftop and climbed some very exposed and wonky ladders, we finnaly made it as high as we could go.

Time for a breather, and for me to suss out how to work a D50. In hindsight I should have practiced a bit more first, particularly when it comes to the white balance, as the spire is illuminated with a ruddy great orange spotlight. Said spotlight was casting a rather large shadow of Cass' head onto the spire for about 10 minutes before we realised :eek:

Scott chose this as a rather inopportune time to announce his bladder was in need of draining, however it was decided that taking a leak off the spire of a cathedral might possibly secure him his own parking space in hell. However I was suffering with another "affliction". Suffice to say it is rather hard to keep still on wobbly scaffold boards for 30 second exposures when you're letting rip every 10....

More wrong turns later and we finally found our way back down to solid ground, Scott dropping from the last level of scaffold right infront of a couple of passing drunks, and Cass landing on Scott, twisting her ankle in the process (she's fine ;) )

So here's a few shots I didn't cock up. I make no apologies for the variation in the colour tones, since I haven't got the hang of my new toy in the dark just yet.



Spire1.jpg



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Spire5.jpg



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