Life Observed

A quick contre-jour shot down the high street from the weekend as folks leave the annual Remembrance ceremony.

"Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin' for the train: Feeling 'bout as faded as my jeans.." No, not Baton Rouge* but the grounds of Bristol Cathedral and not busted flat either, just a student getting out of the sun. I took a similar picture at Salisbury a couple of years ago. I converted this picture to monochrome with a strong red channel bias, making the grass look more like snow (and bleaching it white in places...). *By the way, why to American places sound so much more hip than our town names?

Here are two pictures from the old monochrome archives . They both come from my film era and the first dates from about 1980. This shows a Halifax back street in winter and I went to some trouble to preserve the grainy look of the original negative.  Grain was always part of photography, and was a character building component in gritty black and white images of the 1960s. The second picture comes from 1997, taken on XP2, a rather more modern film. In this case compressing the picture for the web has removed what little grain there was. One could argue the smooth picture of a storm damaged barn in the Cotswolds represents industrial decay while the grainy image of Halifax hints at a vibrant community, however the grain seems to say otherwise. So grain and noise in a picture does affect how we see the image. The question is: In banishing it from modern digital images, have we made the world look more or less realistic?  Answers on Quark please.

Crunchy on the outside, smooth on the inside... Here's a gritty contrast for you. There's nothing quite like peeling paint to attract a photographer. In this case it is one of the horse jumps down on the farm. It reminds me of my film and darkroom days when hard black and white prints on the wall were the thing to have. Arty.. Mmmm.

Our run of good luck came to and end, and the skies over the Lakes turned to their more traditional grey yesterday. Furthermore it started raining today, so here's a standard walkers on a hilltop picture. This is the peak just below Catbells looking over Derwent Water. Click on it for a larger version. Here is a stone Stoup. It seems these were made to take wooden gates that slid into the holes. The advantage is that the stone gateposts don't rot away and you don't have to make hinges either. The practice seems to have fallen out of use and individual Stoups stand here and there to puzzle the passing stranger . More rain pictures tomorrow I suspect...

Another Wet Weekend. Here is a picture of how I saw it. Too wet to work in the garden and nothing on TV. This may seem like a typical point and click image. After all how difficult can it be to get a picture of rings in a puddle when it's raining? Well, it took sixty shots in bursts of what we used to call "motor drive" in the old film days. The light drizzle meant that most of the pictures had no drips at all. Yet another benefit of the brave new film free world. A question for the statisticians: I shot these pictures at five frames per second and ended up will all those missed shots. Should I have set the camera to three frames per second? Would that result in  a better hit rate, drip wise? Answers, as always, on a postcard.

It is a difficult thing, clearing a house when a close relative dies. It is difficult deciding what to keep and what to discard. You can't keep it all and you end up throwing away someone else's memories. These are some of my Mum's pictures waiting to go to the tip. In the future this will be easier. In the future our pictures won't be prints or slides like these above. The thousand memories will simply be files that can be dragged to the bin in a single click of the mouse.

Freezing fog fills the valley, and the farm lane suddenly seems to lead nowhere . Sometimes less is more when it comes to painting a picture or telling a story.

Almost exactly a year later , a Winter anticyclone brings still air and fog:  Everything is covered in drips. The car park is empty and the children's swings remain unswung. The world holds it's breath.

It's a while since I indulged in a high contrast texture picture. Back in my film and developer days I was a slave to hard contrast paper and those rich blacks and dazzling whites. Spotted this week in the barn: straw and canvas. This is an example from the film years. Beach huts in Herne Bay This begs a question. When you print an image, you know how it looks. When you show one on the web, the image will only look as good as the viewer's monitor. Are the blacks really black?  This is why I put the monitor test strip on my blog :-)

I'm going slightly stir crazy here, having been stuck indoors for three days after a previously mentioned operation . Quite apart from the limited mobility, the weather has been dismal: Here's the proof: Typical Autumn anticyclonic gloom weather. These flat featureless skies have a function however. If you really are stuck for something to do, you can use the matt grey sky to test and calibrate your lenses for vignetting :-) However: Let's consider this. In one month's time it will be the twenty first of December, and after that... the days will be getting longer up here in the nothern hemisphere.  About time too.

Here's a bleak and cold view of the world. I took this one lunchtime last week, the day before I went into hospital for an operation. Black humour? Maybe. However, speaking as an engineer, there is something rather frighting about general anaesthetic . The idea is that you shut a person down to the point they can't feel pain or be aware of their surroundings. They can still breathe, but otherwise they are out of it. Yet you can bring them back with all their faculties and memories intact. Scary or what... So let's hear it for the medical profession. I thought designing computers was scary, but doing a power down restart on a person is serious stuff.

It was a Moody Morning one day last week. There was low cloud over the village as I drove to work. I diverted to the longer but prettier route and caught this view of the distinctive church tower across the fields. Fortunately the sun came out properly for my lunchtime wander later in the day.. . Which is better, cheerful or foreboding? Is this a half full or half empty question?

Just a moment from seven years ago. I caught the walker on a Wiltshire hillside outlined against the sky. Are they composing a pocket book of poetry, inspired by the astonishing view. Or are they heads down, fiddling with their iphone like most people these days? I wander lonely as a cloud I feel the peace that silence brings. Distanced from the madding crowd: When all at once an iPhone rings.. It speaks of "recent accident" I don't recall, I feel no pain. But then I am reminded of - my long lost compensation claim... (No it can't be an iphone, it hadn't been invented then. Let's imagine it was a book of poetry shall we..)

Here's a mean and moody shot of a storm threatened crop.  Well, all is not quite what it seems, as I took my portable sunshine with me and created the mood myself. It was an overcast day, but I felt the look needed enhancing. This is a standard strobist trick. I used an off camera flash to put light down onto the corn from overhead, giving the look of a shaft of sunlight. It is then just a matter of adjusting the flash power and the camera exposure so that the background goes dark while the foreground is over-lit. The trick can also be used in a more subtle manner. In this case the post box has a small splash of light to lift it, while the background is once again allowed to be dark and brooding. In addition to the lighting trick, narrow depth of field also separates the post box from it's background.

Yes. We have been to RHS Wisley today. Here is the standard shot that I guess everyone takes. Tomorrow I hope to show you my non standard Wisley shots...

Hang up the broom, have a wash, make a nice cup of tea and have a sit down!  Lovely. I am very pleased to report that the Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down website is still there, and still reviewing cake and biscuits. Do encourage them and support their vital work, it's folks like them that keep Britain so sensible.

It's that time of year when the local Rooks start to tinker with nests. They are refurbishing last year's nests or else building new ones. Until now they've spent their days just messing about in the sky, so far as I can see. There is a lot of ferrying to and fro with the essential stuff that makes a nest. In fact I have never succeeded in grabbing a classic "bird with big twig" picture, so this will have to do. This is the point that I start to wonder how this works . Imagine you are a young Rook, and this is your first nest. Something drives you to go find your first twig, which you take to the very top of a hundred foot tree. How do you get that first twig to stay there while you go and find another one. How do you join them together so they stay fixed to the tree? Bear in mind you don't have arms and hands, just a beak... Perhaps that rhythmic taptaptap from the woodland is not Woodpeckers after all. Perhaps it is actually Ro...

After all the drama of Sunrise and Dusk discussed recently, here is a more muted subject. Now we turn to those foggy days when it seems a wiser move to stay indoors. In fact mist can be your friend, obscuring unpleasant backgrounds and adding depth to an image. I know I've been here in this blog before, but I thought I would show some more examples... Here's an oddity in a field. The housing estate in the background has almost completely vanished. The oddity is in fact a marker for the secret GPSS fuel pipeline that runs along the A4, installed before WW2 as a method of moving fuel from Bristol to Aldermaston airfield. Here I have combined dusk with low cloud to add atmosphere to this end of the day riding session. The floodlight beams add a little depth to the composition as well. This shot required considerable exposure compensation to get the dark look I wanted. The boating pond. I caught this view one cold and still January morning. We are right ne...

The only good thing about the Shortest day is that one may now claim the days are getting longer. You can hold the memory of spring in the mind as a reward for all this dark and dismal foolishness. Why we have to revert to GMT for the winter has always baffled me: Looking out of the office window at four pm to see it has already gone dark is such a depressing experience. Winter Sunset It is in the Winter that we pay for those longer days of the Summer. For every lovely late  Summer evening there has to be a dark drive home from work in December. BTW, my time travelling ability lets me tell you there will be a post including winter sunsets in the future. So, what about it folks? Surely a mild readjustment of the Earth's orbit would reward us in the Northern Hemisphere with a (say) fouteen hours of sunlight averaged over the year rather than twelve. That small change would be enough to make life a lot more tolerable in the Winter.  Let's have a go at it. Afte...