Life Observed

Lent.  Time to reflect a bit. Oh dear me. All those mistakes I made in my life. All those bad decisions and stupid moments. Have they all faded into the mists of time or do our failings get written in the book of life?  Perhaps we are fated to continue making mistakes to the end of our lives.  Then comes the big apology.

Silent and green, yet strong enough to fell a tree. The Ivy of life will make fools of us all if we are not careful. Oh dear. That was deep. Normal flippancy will be resumed shortly.

Yes. It's another leaf picture. I can't resist leaves in sunlight, especially in Autumn when the colours are so intense.  I spotted this fine leaf at head height, one of the last on the tree, with deep shadow beyond. Light and shadow are another recurring theme of mine. I operated the camera one handed while holding the leaf still in the light breeze. It was just a matter of turning the leaf to get it face on and therefore all in focus. (We artists have our little tricks you know).

Making a point.  Here we want to point the viewer towards the point of the picture, which is a set of points in miniature. I chose a wide aperture to minimise the depth of field and maintain the shutter speed for this hand held shot. The only down side to this little work of art is that it cost me three pounds, a figure charged retrospectively by the Broad Gauge Model Society when the man on the door noticed I had taken a picture. I could have argued but what would be the point. Hmm. I remember these things you know.

You focus a lens by twisting a thing that moves the glass forwards. The further forward it goes, the closer the focus point.  In the old days this was obvious: You could see the lens move as you did the twisting. These days something magical happens deep inside the lens and elves move glass in secret ways. Anyway, you can force a lens to focus loser by fitting tubes between it and the camera. I have a nice set of Kenko tubes made for the micro four thirds camera range, and here's what you get if you park them on a legacy Tamron 135mm telephoto lens.. That is not too shabby at all. Let's hear it for good old fashioned extension tubes.

Aaah. A nice cup of tea and a sit down. Lovely. This is a small family get together with tea and cakes.  I wonder if they do this abroad where Johnny Foreigner lives? I don't expect the do it quite like we British. Anyway, this reminds me of an observed moment recently. We stopped for a coffee in our local town, a well deserved reward after a minimal amount of shopping. The coffee shop only has eight tables and it was deserted.  After taking our order the waitress asked ".. and where will you be sitting...?" I notice these things you know.

Here are two diverse mechanisms I photographed recently. Can you tell what they are? Yes of course. It's part of a bicycle. We know that because we have seen lots of them. Even this neglected example is readily recognisable with it's spokes and it's rust. But what about this then? It looks like a fob watch with it's rear cover open. But surely no-one ever made a watch this crude. Where are all the jewels? Where's the delicate cog wheels and escapement? Well, this is the workings of a hundred year old Pedometer, which is a thing that measures feet, as far as I can tell.

Macro or Close up? Well, macro should refer to a magnification of one to one, where the subject is the same size as the negative. (This leads to an ineresting scenario if you use a whole plate camera...) Anyway, this picture qualifies as a close up under these rules. Taken with the Zuiko 45mm portrait lens mounted on a 10mm Kenko extension tube using off camera flash. Strawberries were harmed during the production of this work.

During a clearout, I came across a little collection of old pennies. Many are Victorian, and one is a hundred and forty five years old. Some are so worn they only display the date and the ghost of their inscriptions. Just think what stories they could tell. The life they have lived and the changes they have seen. This handful of coins might have been a day's pay for a working man in 1860. And fourpence ha'penny would have been the price of a pint of beer in 1897. There's a ha'penny here that is completely worn smooth, no sign of any date or inscription. I wonder if it spent it's life being shoved? (BTW, a Photographer's note. Lighting old coins turns out to be surprisingly difficult..)

The ancient North Door at the village church has been renovated and remounted on a new Oak frame, but the metalwork and the diamond pattern of nails are till there. Parts of the church are more than a thousand years old, exhibiting traces of Saxon long and short work, but I could find no information on the age of the original door.

Aah, the humble Chive flower, one of my favourite subjects. Our Chives are raided by the local bees continuouslly, and this flower is slightly on the turn. It was photographed, as always, with my excellent Olympus 50mm macro lens.  Provided you and the subject keep still, then this lens will deliver the picture for you... And here, just a few meters away, is the middle of a giant poppy, also caught up close with that lens. Lovely...

If you pile enough old fashioned toffee together you can exceed it's critical mass, and it starts it's own chain reaction, glowing white hot and emitting Alfa Particles*   This is another exercise in lighting. The more I try, the more I learn: Here I am using remote flash to light a subject from underneath. Combine this with a suitably short shutter speed to get this glowing coals effect. *As any owner of Italian cars will know, Alfa Particles cause painted steel to rust spontaneously from underneath. By the time the paint bubbles, the steel has already gone. This also explains why old fashioned toffee is suspiciously rust coloured.

This spring we were told that the Moon was at its colsest approach for some time, and dire consequences were predicted. In the event,  nothing particular happened (apart from a major earthquake and tsunami in Japan) and the moon just receded again and life went on. What if something new and unexpected appeared out of the night sky, headed in our direction. What would you do? Take for example this unwelcome visitor spotted with my camera yesterday: Fear not. Having a planet like this hit the Earth is about as unlikely as having this sentence end with the word Ptarmigan.

Yes, these are truly nice buns. In fact they are hot cross buns, a peculiarly British thing, I suspect.  These are presented on a plain curved white card background with diffuse overhead lighting. This image is available as a strictly limited edition 6 x 4 inch print on Fuji paper directly from the photographer for £7008.00 plus 98p postage. Here is another classic virew. This recreation of the birth of photography honours the humble pinhole camera. This was created directly using a real pinhole, not Photoshop. This image is available as a strictly limited edition 6 x 4 inch print on Fuji paper directly from the photographer for £9300.00 including postage to the UK.

Where they are not disturbed by a thousand hands and boots, the village gatepost and stile are slowly turning green. A close up (not a macro) image of the subject with a touch of context in the background. I feel context in a picture is an important element in composition.

It seems to me most farms are run on a shoe string. Specifically, farms are run on baling string and nails. There is so little profit on livestock and milk that farmners are natural corner cutters and reclycling experts. In this case, its staples and nails that are being recycled, kept in a corner of the barn waiting their next use. The barn smells wonderfully of straw, hay, diesel and oil. This is the oily corner where the grease gun, the oil cans and the electric welder live. When welding and greasing no longer keep agricltural equipment working it is sidelined to a nearby hedge. But it is kept nevertheless, just in case....

Here are a couple of examples of nature's colours this springtime to lighten our mood amongst all the depressing and worrying news. Here's a sunlit macro of a lichen encrusted twig that I spotted recently. I'm not certain what the tree gets out of it, but the lichen seems to be enjoying itself. My favourite method for flower pictures it to get to the same level as the flower. If that means the camera has to be put right down in the grass, then so be it. Fortunately my DSLR has one of these new fangled swinging rear screens, thus avoiding the embarrassing and painful business of grovelling in the mud to get the shot....

I suppose by my time of life I should be retired, or I should be in charge of some large admin department somewhere, devoting my weekends to perfecting my golf swing. Instead I solder on at the bench and the CAD pc screen, spending my time chasing impossibly small electronic components around tiny circuit boards with tweezers and iron. (Here's one I designed earlier) Later that same month: Here we are, attacking the unsuspecting board with test equipment and data manuals.  This is one of the lonelier moments in the Electronics Designers life: Making a new design work for the first time is always a testing time (pun inteded). This new thing has never seen the light of day before, there are no previous examples to fall back on for comparison. No-one else in the company understands it to the detail that I do, so there's no-one else to ask.   Is the schematic right? Did I make any mistakes on the layout? Will the processor start? Are there mistakes in the ...

Fog and low cloud seem to be the Winter bill of fare in the hill top village where I work. When its a dull day five miles away, the village might be in the cloud. If there's very little wind, then all this humidity can build up on wires, gates and twigs to give a nice effect, if you like drips that is... Here is the gate leading to the sports field. There's no-one playing football today, as usual. Here 's the farmhouse as context for a roadside twig complete with its watery passenger.

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 ...