Capturing the Moment

by Sheldon

The Cemetery Club was founded as a place for me and Christina to celebrate the Magnificent Seven Cemeteries and as a place to share, pass comment and remember the times we’ve spent walking around appreciating a bygone age.  This quickly developed into something more, and we’ve covered a wider range of topics including Skateboard Graveyards, a long forgotten Rector and the Heygate Estate.

Nick Richards

What many of you may be unfamiliar with is that there’s actually a third, silent member of the Cemetery Club. Unlike me and Christina, he prefers telling the story of something through a photograph as opposed to a blog post. My cousin Nick started dabbling with photography roughly two years ago as something to try, and hasn’t really looked back. Armed with his Nikon D3100, He’s taken an impressive array of pictures that’s garnered a lot of praise on Flickr.

His involvement began a few months ago when he learnt I’d been touring the cemeteries of London with Christina. Spying Christina’s own pictures and a growing interest in unusual settings/cemeteries in general, he asked me if he could join us on an excursion so he could get some shots for his already considerable portfolio. I agreed and we arranged to meet at Archway station, for a photographic meandering during a tour of Highgate Cemetery.

It was high time to share his work as what he captures is far more potent than what I could ever put into words.

The Egyptian Avenue in Highgate

As we were touring Highgate Cemetery West, this Fox appeared and didn’t take one blind bit of notice at the group of people traipsing through the undergrowth. Nick captured the moment

‘I find it very hard not to process my cemetery shots in black and white, it just seems to fit. Breaking ‘the rules’ here a bit, odd numbers are supposed to work better in photographs. I went for evens. Rules are made to be broken :)’

Carved from a single block of Marble. The tomb of Mary Nichols, Highgate Cemetery West

The shots he manages to take utilise an artistic bent that he’s had ever since he was younger. I’ve been itching to use his images on here for a long time and I wanted to have more than one opportunity to get him on board, so it’s of little surprise that when I suggested paying a visit to Brompton, he came along and played with some exposure tricks and various filters., the results of which you’ll be seeing soon in my upcoming post about it. It’ll also tie in nicely to another long-running thread that we’ve been running here on Cemetery Club, which will be explained in the next couple of weeks.

Postman’s park, City of London.

Bistro on Cowley Lock

More of his photography can be found on his Flickr page.

All photographs  © NJR Photography 2013

Related articles

• Peering Into the Past (cemeteryclub.wordpress.com)
• Mary Nichols & the Sleeping Angel (Cemeteryclub.wordpress.com)

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