My workplace is close to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, and being someone who appreciates interesting architecture, I often gravitate towards it during my lunch break, sometimes with camera in my hand.

Designed by Frederick Gibberd, it was built between 1962 and 1967 on top of what remains of the first attempt to build a catholic cathedral on the site - now known as Luyten’s Crypt - itself built on the site of a large Victorian workhouse.

The modern cathedral was built comparatively cheaply, leading to problems with the fabric of the building almost immediately, resulting in Gibberd being sued for £1.3 Million. I was surprised when I learned this. When you’re nearby it, it feels like such a solid, confident piece of architecture.

I took pictures close up to it, capturing the lines and the detail of the various chapel exteriors that protrude around circumference of the building.

It was a sunny day with a cloudless sky, so not ideal for creating negatives with a broad tonal range. The fact that I didn’t have my light meter and had to use a phone app for the task didn’t help. I subsequently realised it was giving readings leading to underexposure by two stops. I tend to shoot one stop over the film’s rated ISO speed anyway, so I just needed to push process the film by one stop to correct things.

My Leica MDa is a camera originally designed for scientific use while mounted onto microscopes, so it doesn’t have a viewfinder, rangefinder (focus), or light meter. As such it’s a slightly cheaper way to get into the Leica M system but requires a slower, more methodical process to use it, which I like.

The film is Ilford HP5+ and the lens is a 28mm Voigtlander Ultron. The film was hand processed using Bellini Hydofen developer and scanned using Nikon LS-50 negative scanner, with a small amount of cropping and spot removal in Lightroom.

The images are published under a Creative Commons license. Email me at mail@mattjon.es if you would like high resolution versions.

I deleted my Twitter account in November 2022, after Elon Musk hilariously carried a sink into Twitter HQ, having sensibly purchased Twitter for forty quintillion dollars. Let that sink in.

I just couldn’t bear being a member of a platform owned by Prime Tech Doofus Musk, despite having lots of Twitter friends, the glue of those virtual friendships being mainly the politics of cycling infrastructure.

Instead I found Mastodon offered a more pleasant experience free of algorithms and full of interesting people posting interesting things.

Although I did something that was classic me; instead of finding and joining an existing instance (or to use an analogy, an island) of like-minded folk, i created my own island with just me as its sole inhabitant. A castaway shouting out to sea with the hope that the tech on which island ran would allow me to be discovered by other islands of like-minded folk.

But that didn’t really happen, and as a clone of Twitter, I had the same problem with it; that I found myself posting stuff just to seek that dopamine hit, the attention, the validation. When that didn’t come, my feelings were negative and my mental health took a small inverse hit.

ActivityPub is an important open protocol because it allows social media platforms to be created that are decentralised and not owned by anyone. But I’m not convinced that social media isn’t fundamentally - whether it uses an open protocol or not - a corrosive model of online engagement.

So now, I’ve decided to make these pages, again, my one online home. Just like it was when I started writing this blog 24 years ago. And with that I’m going to work on my relationships ‘in real life’, and be more reliant on those dopamine hits from offline human interactions.