Horse & Trap on Beach

Copying Photos from our Photo Library....

50 Years ago this week - We did photos of a John Barnes & Albert Franks (Scarborough FC Captain) on a Horse & Trap on Scarborough's South Bay beach, North Yorkshire.

Not sure what the photos were for, but most likely for a news or feature story of some kind for a local or national newspaper. 

It's really interesting digging out the photos we have within our photo library. We're going to be creating a Scarborough Photo Library web site in the coming months, where people will be able to search for jobs and people we have photographed through the years and be able to purchase photos. The photos will also be available to purchase for editorial usage too.

JOBS: Diary Entries

It's taken some time to input all the information from our diary entries into a searchable digital format. But a much bigger job will be scanning the negatives in order to product digital images. We will then need to edit, process and clean them up so they can be made available to buy.

NEGATIVES:  Old Black & White Negatives 120 & 35mm

ENVELOPES:  Packets of Negs

 Most of our Negatives in our archive are in old brown envelopes. We are soon getting a proper scanner to get decent scans of these negatives. The way we have been doing it so far is with an old Light box, a mask and an my little Fuji X10 set on Super Macro mode on a Tripod. Once the images are copied, I then invert the images in Photoshop and crop & edit them. But once we get our Scanner, we are hoping to get much better quality images.

Copying Setup: Fuji X10 on Super Macros setting.

Please share our story. And look out for our SCARBOROUGH PHOTO LIBRARY web site coming soon. In the mean time, we will be regularly be uploading basic scans from our archive photos each week. Showing what we were up to 50 years ago.  

These photos will be regularly shared on our Social Media sites such as....

Twitter - https://twitter.com/dobsonagency
LinkedIn - uk.linkedin.com/in/keithmeatheringham/
Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/UKPhotographer/

Dobson Agency Celebrate Half Century Milestone

Fifty Years of Photography.

A small Yorkshire photography business, the Dobson Agency.co.uk, is celebrating 50 years in business this month. The Scarborough based company is proud to be still documenting news & events for businesses and publications half a century on. 

According to they’re own records the company was created around November 1964 by the late Scarborough photographer Dennis Dobson (hence the name), a name which they have kept to this day.  

FOUNDER: The late photographer Dennis Dobson.

Fifty years on it's now run by Director and Photographer Keith Meatheringham.  Keith was born in Plymouth, Devon, but grew up in Cirencester, Gloucestershire.  ‘I moved to Scarborough over 20 years ago, he said - I guess I'm almost half Yorkshire now - Although I know a lot would disagree'.  

OWNER: Photographer/Director Keith Meatheringham.

   

Award winning photographer Keith said “I have had a real passion for photography from a young age and I’m really excited at the prospect of opening up the Dobson Agency’s 50 year photo library to others in the Scarborough and surrounding area via a new web site in the next few months.

Images & jobs will be able to be searched, with a scan and printing service being made available for anyone who wants to buy prints of interesting photos, scenes or even themselves or they’re loves ones from days gone by.

‘I came to work for the Agency back in 1994 and took it over around 10 years later’ said Keith. ‘The business has had to diversify slightly through the years, but our main source of income is providing creative photography for our many PR companies (Public Relations) and magazines all over the UK, as well as providing images for regional and national newspapers and other corporate and commercial clients too’.  ‘We would love to do more photography for local companies in the North & East Yorkshire areas too’.

Not only is Keith an active photographer himself covering Yorkshire and the North of England, but the business also has a network of over 100 photographers throughout the UK. Keith has had photos published in most of the National newspapers in mainland UK, as well as having images published in newspapers all over the world including the USA, Canada, Australia and Thailand and many more.  

COMING SOON:  Scarborough Photo Library.

Keith says ‘Editorial photography is the main part of the business and we must have covered over 16,000 jobs over the last 50 years with a photographic library containing over half a million images at least’. ‘Most is yet to be digitized, but we are making plans to start scanning in our archive of negatives dating back to the early 1960’s soon’. 

Keith announced ‘We are planning on using our social media platforms more to share our nostalgic images with others’. ‘We have already started sharing some of our historic photos from our earliest jobs back in 1964 and our plan is also to share regular ‘Fifty Years Ago This Week’ picture stories via our Twitter, Facebook and Blog etc’. 

‘Surprisingly, we have already had two people interested in buying photos that we have only just shared this week - one person who wants to buy a photo we have of his Dad and we have even had a former Miss World (1964) Ann Sidney contact us interested in photos we have of her too’! ‘This is all in the first week of sharing our archive material’.  ‘So it’s all quite exciting’.  ‘The jobs and photos we have on file are so interesting and we will have thousands of people’s family members on film’.  

OUT OF THIS WORLD:  Miss World 1964 Ann Sidney

A good majority of the photographs they have on file will be news and events in the Yorkshire coast areas including Scarborough, Whitby, Bridlington and surrounding towns and villages. However, they also have hundreds of photos of celebrities, politicians and performers as well as local celebrities, councillors and local business people too. Other photos include Yorkshire cricket & Scarborough FC matches, and also thousands more social interest photographs of general views, seaside, village and street scenes and local interest stories involving local people and businesses through the years.  

BORO:  Scarborough FC Team 1964

 The Dobson Agency can be contacted at www.dobsonagecy.co.uk and our Twitter account is @dobsonagency 

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Berlin Wall - Unseen Photos from 1990

Photographer Keith Meatheringham shares previously unseen images taken shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

The date was 21^st July 1990 only months after they had announced that the Berlin Wall was to be brought down, and I was in Berlin and truly in my element, surrounded by the aftermath of the fall of the Wall.

I was a young 20 year-old photographer from Cirencester, Gloucestershire and I was in the early stages of my photography career.  I was having my first real foreign adventure and with my trusty Nikon FM2 I was eager to capture the atmosphere and document this historic occasion myself. I had seen all the news reports and newspaper stories months earlier and it was now my turn to witness it too first hand.

I had travelled over with some friends to attend the Roger Waters ‘The Wall’ concert which had been organised to commemorate this historic achievement and while I was there I was determined to take as much of it in as I could. It was such an amazing news story and I remember there being people from all over the world there, all wanting to take in the scenes for themselves. 

Everywhere I looked there were men, women and children breaking up pieces of the wall.  Some seeking out their own little memento from their trip and others clearly doing it more for commercial reasons, selling pieces of the wall and other artefacts to the ever increasing amount of tourists flocking into the city.

The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 by the East German communist government to prevent its fellow citizens from fleeing the country. The amount of East Germans leaving for the economic prosperity and political freedom of the west was continually escalating and was in turn undermining the government.

The Berlin Wall consisted mainly of concrete with electric fences, vehicle barriers and an area called the "death strip" which was patrolled by the border guards - this is the area in which most of my photos were taken. 

The Berlin Wall divided Berlin right down the middle and sadly split up family and friends. It became a symbol of totalitarianism around the world. It remained for 28 years until its demise in Nov 1989. It was headline news around the world and former Pink Floyd singer and bassist Roger Waters decided to celebrate the occasion by organising ‘The Wall’ concert right in the heart of Berlin itself.  

The concert was staged on the vacant land between Potsdamer Platz and the famous Brandenburg Gate, a location that was part of the former "no-man's land" of the Berlin Wall. The show had an original sell-out crowd of over 350,000 spectators, but shortly before the beginning of the performance the gates had been opened to allow another 100,000 people in to watch.

Twenty five years on and to mark the anniversary of the fall of the Wall, I decided to dig out my old negatives and copy them so I could share them with others. I’ve been a press photographer for more than 25 years now and after digging the negatives out and editing the scanned images, I noticed that one of the buildings in the some of the photos is the Axel Springer head office - I realised that years after taking the photos I had in fact sold many photos to the Axel Springer group, who are a major publishing company in Germany. 

The photos you see have never been published before and so are until now unseen images.

I now live in Scarborough, North Yorkshire with my wife and two sons. And I will never forget my trip to Berlin that year. 

By Keith Meatheringham
Freelance Photographer
Dobson Agency

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