Life Observed

Once upon a time, you would take your film to Boots to be developed. "Come back in a week" they would say. Then you waited to see if your snaps had come out. Gradually Boots started to sell more types of films, and cameras, and they started to offer a minilab service on the premises. I called in to our local Boots this week. The shelves of film were so depleted that I doubt they will have any film for sale in 12 months time. Furthermore, £7 for film plus maybe another £7 to process and print it makes for an expensive alternative to digital photography. The camera display was a small locked cupboard of a dozen point and shoot items which may have been covered in a thin layer of dust. I did notice the four digital printing machines were popular. There was a selection of folks plugging their memory sticks into these machines and selecting their images for printing.  Times change. Instant results....

I say it's about time for some Monochrome in this blog.  Imagine: Recording an image by exposing a Gelatin* base and the Silver Halide* crystals in it to light using a wind up clockwork shutter. That image stays locked in the silver provided you keep it dark. It stays there until you treat it with a sequence of chemicals* and then it produces a black and white negative view of the scene. Now you must repeat the process with Silver Bromide paper and yet more developer. Eventually, now that the image has passed through two lenses and two different light recording media and untold chemical reactions, you finally have a picture you can look at. You can't change from a slow film to a fast film on a whim. You have to wait to get the film back from the chemist before you know it the "pictures have come out". There's grain and fogging to contend with, and the ever present smell of Amfix on the fingers. So, I wonder what new image recording techn...

The Light at the end of the Tunnel is always a tempting photographic subject. It gives the viewer something mysterious to consider. The photographer in turn has to consider the tonal range and how to convince the camera to render all that black space correctly . This usually involves some fairly strong exposure compensation. The first images comes from the Tombs of the Kings. It sounds like something exotic in Egypt, but in fact its an archaeological site on the edge of Paphos in Cyprus. There are lots of tombs dug directly into the rocky ground here and a splendid disregard of health and safety. This second image is a passageway in the close near Durham cathedral. As they don't let you take pictures inside , I took this one instead. Finally the Saxon Crypt under Ripon Cathedral. This tiny space is fantastically old and well worth a visit.

If I may quote from the excellent if gloomy A.E.Housman: These well known lines come from his collection of poetry "A Shropshire Lad" published before the first world war. Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. And here are my own personal Blue Remembered Hills. in the far distance is the Vale of the White Horse , overlooking Wantage, and one time home to another poet hero of mine, John Betjeman   So, in those carefree childhood days, before the dead hand of adulthood falls upon all of us, I lived on the arable farm in the far distance, the one with the red tiled old stone barn. These long evening shadows would grace the sunlit summer school holidays and we played in the fields and lanes.  Perhaps we all have our own Blue Rem...

One of the many theories of composition is that a good picture invites you into it. The viewer should feel intrigued by the view and be set wondering what is through that door, or round that corner. Well, it's just a theory, so let's try some examples... Here is a view down some of the Painswick Yews that carries with it the invitation to explore. And here is a lucky alignment of arches and windows in a dissolved Monastery in the Yorkshire Dales. Each doorway or window offers an opportunity to go further into the image. And here is a narrow alley in Florence. Here the deep shadows and the distant sky draws you towards the figures further down the lane. This theory of invitation is what draws me to poke my camera down alleys and side lanes, generally annoying those around me...

For some reason, Newbury seems to have a remarkable number of Almshouses. I did a Google on the subject and ended up with this list: St Mary's Almshouses, Newbury Pearces Almshouses, Newbury Coxedd's Almshouses, Newbury Child's Almshouses, Newbury Kimber's Almshouses, Newbury St Bartholomew's Hospital, also known as King John's Almshouses, Newbury Raymond's Almshouses, Newbury Church Almshouses, Newbury Essex Wynter Almshouses, Newbury Mabel Luke Almshouses, Newbury Robinson's Almshouses, Newbury So, here are some examples of this ancient tradition: This below is St Bartholomews Hospital, in Argyle street. The other entrance now faces a car park and looks very old indeed... Part of the Upper Raymonds almshouses Some are not as old as they seem. I think this below is a lot newer than its Tudor hints suggest. If you want to see the original and genuine item, I comment the Hospital of St Cross at Winchester, which ...

Its all digital these days. We watch digital television, listen to digital radio, I even read digital books. We take digital pictures as well. I resisted buying a digital camera for several years, and as an alternative I took pictures on Fuji Provia and Velvia slide film and scanned them into the computer. This was a long and painful process compared to the instant gratification of a digital camera with a tiny screen on the back. Thus it was 2003 before I finally accepted that digital cameras were good enough and these pictures are from that changover year. This first picture (scanned the new way) is from my last slide film, a holiday in Wales. I recall it rained and the slides are dull and unremarkable. Thus my era of analogue images passed with a whimper. Here's a bright and brash picture from the new digital age. Unfortunately my first digicam (the Fuji S2800, a 2M pixel thing) was a poor substitute for old fashioned film. It was however a great deal f...

Warning. This post is all about cars, so if you are not a car nut you'll be bored, dear reader... There 's a nice picture of a horse in this post instead. Right. where were we. Ah yes, rewind three decades. In those days I was an avid car tinkerer. and bought cheap old cars and generally sold them at a loss or scrapped them. after a year. I'd had four BMC 1100s, then four Fiat 124s of various states of tune, then finally five Alfa Romeos. I think that qualifies me as a bona fide petrol head. Well, I spent weekends with a mate who had the bug worse than me, and helped him with getting this thing back on the road... This is the noisy end of a Porshce 911 2.4E coupe with the early Bosch mechanical fuel injection system. If you drove it carefully it would return eighteen miles to the gallon. If you  thrashed it you would get fifteen to the gallon. We figured you may as well drive it quickly in that case... ( There is no legal proof that we got 140mph out of it...

I have been visiting Halifax in West Yorkshire on and off all my life,  I can remember it when I lived there as a child. In those days we kids were told not to run our hands along the walls because they would end up covered in soot. Yes, its true that just about every structure, every building bridge and wall was black in my memory. It was accepted as part of Industrial Britain. Now that I am completely grown up I find these blackened walls just as fascinating, although this time from a photographic perspective. They are an endangered species. Ever since the early 1990s Halifax has turned the pressure washer on itself and street after street has emerged as golden grown sandstone and blinking in the sunlight. The transformation is remarkable. Thus these grainy monochrome images from twenty years ago show historical traces that are becoming scarce and hard to find these days.  Furthermore, there is also another technical problem. How do you photograp...

Not just any old Bert, we're talking about Weston birt here... Westonbirt Arboretum is what you get when you put a load of fancy trees together. Its a bit like a designer forest.  I paid it a visit early one Sunday in October a few years back.  I wanted to get there early to catch the golden hour when the sun is low. They directed me to a parking field and popped my old 911 * in the corner, paid my entry fee and followed the other half dozen folks into a fantastic riot of colour. This was a first outing for my new Manfrotto tripod. This is a Big Tripod with large tubular aluminium legs, a proper rising column and support stays. I have this theory, you see. If you want people to take you seriously as a photographer, don't get a bigger camera, get a Bigger Tripod... I have to admit the era of the hard core tripod didn't last long. The thing is a solid as a rock and beautifully made, but it's so heavy it now only leaves the house on special occas...

Three blooming pictures with black backgrounds: This first one, of a poppy bud opening, was taken right at the end of the film era. I shot this outside in the garden under a cloudy sky with a black card behind the subject. The result was a Fuji Provia transparency, which I sent off in an envelope to the pro printers to get a Cibachrome 10x8 done. It still hangs on a wall 12 years later. Printing direct from a transparency! We don't do things like that now. When was the last time I had anything printed without some serious Photoshop work? In fact the digital age has brought  other changes. I now take so many pictures that I very rarely have them printed. They all get their Photoshop treatment, just in case they ever get enlarged and placed on a wall somewhere. This next one was taken with a DSLR, also outdoors, but this time the background was made black using an off camera flash to define the exposure. This final minimal image was taken indoors with ...

We live close to a gravity stabilised unshielded nuclear fusion reactor . So close to it, that you can make out its disk in the sky. Surely this is clearly a risky strategy for a planet with a paper thin atmosphere* but I guess that's how its been for a few billion years. Midsummer Sunrise (a favourite subject of mine) at Hampstead Marshall, west of Newbury near the river Kennet. This giant and potentially lethal reactor rises above the horizon. Sunset, Spring Equinox. I once lived in a house where my view to the horizon between the houses was due west. Every year the Sun would set in the gap at the right time. How does it know it should do that, eh? Here is one from just last night. A January sunset from the end window at the office over North Hampshire. Our neighbourhood fusion reactor gives the clouds a golden lining, while the rooks perch in the tops of the trees to survey the scene. I confess have some previous form with nuclear fusion. My first...

Here are two examples of tinted monochrome images. Tinted monochrome was once a popular and perhaps unavoidable method for adding colour to everyday images. These days tinting is done in the computer and merely as a photographer's conceit. In fact they are recreations of black and white prints I produced and tinted in the 1990s. I bought a tinting kit at great expense, used it a couple of times, then the inks dried up and times moved on. As it happens, both of these shots are back lit.  A standard photographer's trick: Using back lighting to photograph glass. Almost any other technique will give you reflections of the light sources. It may be that the reflections can form a useful part of the image but in the case of this wine glass, I wanted to keep it nice and simple. This image was lit using a remote triggered flash unit with several layers of diffuser in front of it. The rest of the room was kept dark. This image of sliced onion was created on a conventiona...

Aah, those evenings in the darkroom with the enlarger. What strange alchemy was worked with Ilford RC multigrade paper and those strange hued rectangles you dropped in the enlarger filter tray. Out of the other end of all this foolishness you were supposed to get a high contrast gritty black and white print to put on the wall. Of course, hard black was quite difficult to achieve, and there were the ever present dust spots to contend with. On a good day something worthwhile could be created... I suppose my question is this: Is it easier to make a black and white image these days. I guess you would take the picture as a raw (colour) image and then convert to monochrome in Photoshop. Even that first step has a myriad of choices, how much red, how much blue? Should you use tone mapping to adjust the look of the image? An finally, how would you get it printed so the result were truly black and white with no tint at all. Deliberately tinting a monochrome image is a comple...

I try to take interesting pictures with some impact. Don't we all? However from time to time I aim the camera at an everyday subject: Many of these boring images get deleted and are gone forever, but I wonder if perhaps we should be photographing the nondescript and recording it.  The following examples are boring images that time has made special. Let me explain: Here is a view of Christ Church College meadow , off St Aldate's in Oxford.  I took this picture forty years ago, and it must have been one of my earliest slide films.  It is poor quality and I should have done a better job, however what makes this boring picture special is that this view doesn't exist any more. One by one these splendid great trees died or were blown down. Eventually they were all felled and they started again. The overhanging branches and shade are gone, and it will be 2070 before you will get a picture like this again.. Here's another example. This is Dorchester ...

Allow me to introduce the medieval hill town of San Gimignano near Siena in Italy. This mini hill top Manhattan is quite a tourist draw, and we certainly enjoyed our short visit there a decade ago. We find the typical Mediterranean hallmark of tall buildings and narrow streets, but there are also these huge almost windowless medieval towers. From Wikepedia: "While in other cities, such as Bologna or Florence , most or all of their towers have been brought down due to wars or catastrophes, San Gimignano has managed to conserve fourteen towers of varying height which have become its international symbol." I can't argue with that. The towers  were apparently used as statements of wealth and status, with each family attempting to outbuild its neighbours. Although the town is an architectural delight, it is also a photographers nightmare. The deep shadows and the bright stonework are at war with each other, and everywhere there are your fellow tourists...