Life Observed

Work with the light. Look at the situation and use what you have. Here we are in Winchester around dusk in midwinter. The low cloud sweeps overhead and all is grey. It feels like rain. Here I decided to contrast the statue with the sky and dispensed with colour altogether.

Full moon at Christmas.  Apparently this is the first time for a long time. Cool. No snow though.

Every culture has it's own standard of taste. Scandinavia favours the look of minimalism for instance. Clean plain lines and muted colours.  The middle East and Asia has a very different set of ideas. Get a load of this: Oh, my eyes...

As the days get to their shortest and summer seems a million miles away, here are three pictures from Jordan and the West Bank to remind us that you can have sunshine and blue skies.

An odd arrangement I spotted recently at a stately house on a rainy day. There was something about it that caught my photographer's eye.  The black and white?  The faded print?  The absent people perhaps.

What do your neighbours look like?  I wonder if they look like this male and female I snapped recently on the nearby planet Tharg. They are not great conversationalists, but look how proud they are of their tame stick.

"I'm looking for a nice painting".  "Certainly sir. There are a couple at the back of the shop, past the weird tin hanging fish, behind the Harley and the Oak table, past the sporting memorabilia cabinet and just next to the croquet mallets". "Ah yes. Thank you".

Gentlemen's shirts sir? Certainly. They are at the back of the shop, just past the old side valve BSA M21.

Quick! A fugitive is leaving the building by the nearest exit. Fortunately we have our best men on the case.

Another one of those odd things I see. 

Here we are in the depths of the Jordanian desert with no hope of rescue. "I'm going to be late. I'm stuck behind a flippin caravan"

If you are going to cross country like this: You are going to need one of these.

A huge archaeological site in Jordan, mostly destroyed in the earthquake of 749. This is well worth a visit, but try to chose a cool part of the day. There's very little shade and there isn't even a tea shop. Harrumph.

Maybe this ultra-wide panorama (click for full size) gives a better impression of the Treasury in its environment. It is hard to imagine how this was constructed by cutting it out of solid rock. So here is your humble scribe taking in this World Heritage site.

The fabulous Petra in Jordan. What an amazing place to visit. Alas the whole world and his dog goes there these days, but it is still worth spending a day there.

Look, can we all calm down a bit? This is getting out of hand.

Try as I might, I can't make this whole thing add up...

Be careful what you say, where you go and who you meet when you are a tourist in Jerusalem right now.

Who is that wrinkled old git in the mirror? Oh dear. Nature has its own way of telling you when it is time to reach for the skin cream.

So, here's the story. One of our smartphones dies and we take it back to CarPhoneWarehouse (CPW) because it is still within the 2 year Samsung warranty.  After a week they return it. It can't be repaired. it isn't under warranty: The cause is "water ingress" and they give us a printed report with a picture of the problem in our actual phone. It looks awful. But wait. This phone has never been dropped in water. In fact the guy said it was the cleanest two year old phone he had seen. I smell a rat. It is out of warranty apparently, so I may as well dismantle it. What do I find? That picture is not from the inside of our phone. It is from some other much worse phone.  Here is all they managed to find in our phone. Some small blemish on the main board ground plane. I design this sort of stuff and I know what a PCB looks like if it got so wet it stopped working. I am not impressed CPW. We bought a replacement phone from another shop....

Hint: Never order a Tree Kit from IKEA:  It comes in hundreds of individual pieces and with no instructions.  I have no idea where to start.

This is a nice leaf taken with shallow depth of field and nice soft lighting. It looked so fresh and perfect I just had to commit it to, er, whatever it is that stores pictures inside the photographometer. Should you take pictures of leaves? I don't know. I will report back after Autumn is over... 

Don't take photographs of Swans . Or Kittens. If you want a picture of a cat or a swan just go to the interweb and download one.  Every possible picture of these have already been taken, so you can save yourself valuable time by using someone else's picture.

Sitting in one's summer house by one's private chalk trout stream reading a magazine and grumbling about the state of the world. When the tea gets cold one rings for one's butler. Scrollocks!

A return visit to Houghton Lodge . I do recommend this place near Stockbridge, it is small and perfectly formed. We were far from the madding crowds on bank holiday Monday. O, what bliss. The essential tea shop has been extended and I found this lovely artistic arrangement on the wall at one end. I decided to frame it tight, so both composition elements leak out of the edge of frame.  This is normally anathema but rules are made to be broken in my book* *This particular book has been torn up on more than one occasion.

Seen on Stockbridge high street on bank holiday monday. En-route to the Dorset steam fair I suspect.  What a fantastic piece of machinery. Not a steam roller, not a traction engine but a showman's engine with a great big generator up front. Chariot racing?  Really?

Ah! The New Inn, Salisbury.  What a great pub. It looks like it has settled slowly into the ground, and the floor inside is indeed lower than the street outside. That is always a good sign as far as I am concerned. The architecture is as mad as a box of frogs and don't you just love the idea that a 13th century pub can be called the New Inn .

The same rain that launched this flower from the succulent sward surrounding it has also brought the harvest to a halt. The ripe golden wheat that still stands in the fields is now dripping wet.  It will shed water for a week or so but eventually it will blacken and start to sprout on the ear and become worthless If you ask a farmer about the summer you will just get a low groan.

They say the first thing a smith has to learn is how to make a nail. You should be able to turn out a nail from heated iron bar in a minute or two. So here we find the door to Upwey church completely covered in hand made nails. A job for the apprentice perhaps?

Here's a high key picture.  This splendid bloom is presented against a white background to captivate and impress.  This is not a studio picture, I found the subject in a garden we visited. In fact the method I used was to photograph the flower from below and I used the grey sky as a backdrop.  Suitable application of exposure compensation pushes the entire image towards white and gives it the high key look.

Upwey is a little village inland from Weymouth.  Weymouth is where the river Wey meets the sea, and Upwey is where the river Wey leaps fully formed from the ground at the foot of chalk downland. I suppose that makes it a spring line village. See: A free Geography lesson.

Something with classical overtones and very pleasing symmetry: The iron hand rails are particularly well presented. This is Kingston Maurward house in Dorset. A Georgian pile built by a Pitt, but now used as an agricultural college.  The gardens are most pleasing and it is well worth a visit but it is, alas, not a National Trust property.

I think this is not a bad deal. Ten for twenty quid. I bet that will get snapped up quickly.

When they described the Merlot as light , I had not expected this sort of thing.  In fact I found it all rather worrying and I couldn't sleep. Fortunately we had some of these in the cupboard. Soon all was well.