Di Meo’s ice cream and the Whitella

The beach at Whitley Bay is just a short walk from our house. Down at the edge of the beach is this ice cream hut run by Di Meo’s, who have a pizza restaurant and ice cream shop on the parade nearby.

This little offshoot has a unique speciality of Di Meo’s that the main shop doesn’t: the Whitella ice cream.

Basically a ‘Mr Whippy’-style ice cream with Nutella mixed in, it’s very tasty and definitely worth trying out when in the area.

The photograph was taken on a family walk at the seafront, when I was playing with the Canon 40mm F2.8 STM lens adapted to my Fuji GFX 50R. It’s a relatively compact combination (as far as medium format ever gets compact) and the little Canon pancake lens is surprisingly good in terms of sensor coverage and image quality. 

Autofocus is quite slow with the Kipon adapter, but at least it’s there and it’s kind of like using the original Fuji X100. Manual focus is good with focus peaking, making it a pretty decent street/walk-around setup for the GFX.

Anyway, nothing too deep to say about this one. It’s a snapshot of a local landmark I enjoy.

That said, as we all bunker down to avoid COVID-19, it’s small businesses like Di Meo’s that are going to really struggle and I hope they and everyone else makes it through the next few months OK.