Calendars and Concerts

November is proving to be a hectic month for me.  First, the concerts... in the 'about me' section of this website, I mentioned I used to be a professional flautist, but this is a long time ago.  Imagine Florence Nightingale enjoying one of my concerts and that will give you some idea of the timescales involved.

I still have my flute and although I never practice any more I can't quite bring myself to part with it.  I work at a children's hospice for my day job, and around this time of year our chaplain sometimes sidles over to me and ever so politely asks me if I'd like to be involved in their 'Light Up A Life' service. 

We are very VERY lucky to have several music therapists on our care team - it says a great deal about the hospice that they are forward thinking enough to have both musicians and artists on the team, and it reflects the holistic nature of care that the hospice provides.  The musicians are also very, VERY good at improvising, I am not.   Last year I arranged parts for two flutes and a saxophonist and I'm still not sure what happened but I did something wrong with the transposition for the sax and the poor lady kept doggedly trying to come in, in completely the wrong key.  My bad...

They STILL asked me back.  So this year I'm playing in a number of hastily arranged numbers which we have TRIED OUT, having learnt from our experience, and they work!  So, shameless plug, should you wish to go, the Light Up A Life service is at St Mary's Church in Boston Spa, near Wetherby, on 5th of December, at 7.00pm. 

When I was a professional musician, and at the zenith of my career which included some freelancing with London orchestras, one of my colleagues archly suggested that I was probably going to end my career playing 'Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam' on street corners for spare change.  This tells you something about how supportive professional flautists are in general;  And I have come perilously close to fulfilling that prophecy because every year our Chaplain asks me to play 'Little Donkey' (Tune A Day, Book 1) and every year, I politely refuse.  

In preparation for this august event, which is paradoxically happening in December,  I boiled my flute.  Not recommended unless you really know what you're doing, but it's one way of getting the tarnish off the tube and I'm not going to tell you how to do it in case you have a go and then sue me.   However, this is the result...

Not bad considering this flute is 30 years old and has never been repadded.  Also incredibly risky thing to do, as I had to take all the mechanism off the tube to clean it, and flutes can go out of adjustment very easily.

As I'd got it out of its box, my partner, who plays professionally for a living, tentatively asked me if I would be interested in playing in a concert he's got coming up.  He's a member of the York String Quartet and they are planning a concert in a village church nearby.  They've decided to do String Trios and I am on the posters as the GUEST ARTIST.   From 'Little Donkey' to 'Guest Artist' in two paragraphs! We're playing a Mozart Flute Quartet and the Entr'acte from Carmen by Bizet, and they're playing some much more competently executed pieces by Dohnanyi, Saint Saens and Schumann.  It's taking place at St Peter's Church, Thorner, LS14 3ED on Sunday 3rd of December at 3.00pm.  Tickets are £5 (free glass of wine, AFTER the concert...) proceeds towards the church.  Should you wish to go. 

You should - the church has a fantastic acoustic - most churches are really boomy and over-resonant, but this one is quite small and the acoustic is brilliant. Just enough to add natural reverb.  And I can't speak for myself but I have heard them practicing and some of the other pieces are JUST LOVELY.

Mozart unfortunately requires me to do some serious practice because in spite of the fact that it sounds easy and a lot of people know the tunes, it is very difficult to play well, and in spite of my self-deprecating comments previously, I am trying to do this thing properly.   So most evenings at the moment have an element of dragging myself into a music room at the end of a long day at work and trying to get back in shape.

And other things - November is the season for New Year Calendars.  I've got into the habit of producing one of these over the last 4 years, and this year, I've had two to do (you can find websites where you upload your pictures into their template and they send you the finished thing.  You can even add special dates to the calendar like your birthday, but I always thought that was a bit obvious really so I haven't done it). 

My partner's dad, a Kiwi, is seriously into fishing and I thought it might be a nice idea to do him a special calendar, with a general fishing theme.    So I had to trawl through (forgive the pun) photographs from several years and try to find pictures of boats, not just boats but fishing boats, and eventually, I did manage to do it.  So we have some fishing scenes from the port of Porto, a few from Amble-By-The-Sea, one from Loch Pooltiel in Skye, and as a bit of a surprise, one of his own fishing boat, with his two sons getting into it.  (If any relly's from NZ are reading this, please don't let on, we haven't sent it yet)

The second calendar is more of my usual fare, which, because I can't afford to go anywhere because of the expensive Gear Acquisition Syndrome I have been afflicted with over the last year.... consists of various pictures of Leeds and Environs, with a broadly seasonal feel.  For some reason every year I have a hell of a job putting together March and April, and I've always got loads of photos for August, but there you go.

So without further ado, some calendar shots (as ever, clicking on any of these pictures will bring up the full size version).  Several of these have quite a lot of work behind them - some are layered photographs with different focus points, to get the foreground and background in focus (the daffodils, autumn on the lake, the acorns, and the shot with red berries), a few layered with different exposures to get the sky and the land both in balance (the meadow and the cornfield), one involves multiple exposures of the same two swans (quite tricky to balance because as they flew past, they flew into the sunlight so as light flooded the camera the background contrast changed) and in the last shot of the snow scene, there were some TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES as my dogs came barrelling out of nowhere into the picture and knocked over the two kiddies in it so I had to do some pretty quick apologising...

And following on from this, a few of the pictures from the fishing boat calendar...

That's it from me this evening, I'd like to say I'm going back to practicing but it is 9.30pm and there is a Vodka and Coke with my name on it waiting downstairs.  Have a lovely evening!

Acorns and Rainshowers

Saturday afternoon found me watching television after a long and heavy week at work. I realised very slowly that I was actually quite engrossed in Little House on the Prairie, and that I found it Gritty and Insightful.  Both of these facts would indicate an altered state of mind, probably brought on by the heavy work week.

Who knows though, perhaps to counterbalance my reality, in another reality maybe someone was watching an Ibsen play and finding it fast moving and superficial.  Go figure.

This week on returning from holiday, I managed to wrest the last ounce of life out of the week by working an enjoyable 7 days in the space of 6, that is, if you redefine the word 'enjoyable' to encompass a much broader spectrum of less joyful feelings, and as I did the same before I went on holiday, I've managed to claw back about four days from my annual leave, how clever is that, eh?    The Tardis might be bigger on the inside than the outside but it has nothing on me when it comes to time management, where I can steal time and reallocate it cleverly from my home life to work.  Time that perhaps I might have otherwise wasted in those 'primrose hours of dalliance';  evenings between 6 and 8; weekends; or those slack hours between 2 and 4 in the early morning.

I'm not bitter.  Well, I can't really be, as it's only myself I'm answerable to, and as I broke the Working Time Directive last week, as an HR professional, not only can I NOT pat myself on the back for all that hard work, on Monday morning I'm probably going to have to have stern words with myself, and I may even find myself issuing me a warning.

Somewhere in that sentence the grammar just ran out.

So, whilst sat on the TV with two sleepy dogs on me, I suddenly, and possibly for the First Time, realised that I could be doing worse things with my time than taking photographs.   I was brought up with a healthy guilt complex, as many English people are, that we're simply not doing Enough with our lives and we should be doing more.  In between popping a casserole into the oven and cleaning the house, we feel we should be fighting world poverty or doing something about Kim Jong Un.

Thankfully Facebook has given many of us guilted armchair slacktivists (as I believe we're known) the opportunity to feel we can do just that by clicking firmly on a LIKE button, signing petitions, or engaging in hostile banter with a Trump supporter.   In Perfect English, something which no matter what their political argument happens to be, they seem to be unable to reciprocate.  

So when I'm out taking photographs there is a little voice in my head buzzing away like the Tinnitus of Conscience, saying "rather a waste of time this....... does anybody really NEED another photograph of a bee...... what difference will this sunset make to the national debt or the crisis in Korea...." and aligned closely with this is a very real voice that I hear when I arrive home and my partner comments rather sarcastically that "You can never have too many photographs of ducks, can you...?"

So, shock horror, watching Little House on the Prairie on a Saturday afternoon was the thing that forced me to realise there are worse things to do with my time than photograph stuff.

So I'm sad to say I don't know how it ended.  Probably with that little girl running down the hillside pretending to be an aeroplane, in an era when aeroplanes hadn't been invented yet. 

EEEEEEEEEEEEEyyyyyyyyyyy

EEEEEEEEEEEEEyyyyyyyyyyy

YYYYYYYYooooooooooowwwwwww!

YYYYYYYYooooooooooowwwwwww!

Back in the room.

Off I went with the dogs, and today has been a day of sunshine and showers.  The dogs rendered themselves completely unphotogenic by plunging in muddy water and pestering little girls who will now Not Like Dogs, in the same way as they persuaded my workplace to amend their previously 'dog friendly' policy after one visit.  So I was left finding myself something else to photograph.

Almost at the end of the visit, I stood under an oak tree that had been battered by showers earlier and around its roots were acorns, bits of twigs, and the occasional duck escaping from Dexter, so I picked up some of these acorns and then once I got them home, spent a small lifetime photographing them with tiny manual changes to the focus, and stacking them to get some close up photos that didn't show the shallow depth of field flaw you usually get out when you do close ups.

Life in miniature.  Each of these pictures can be seen full screen if you click on them.

Acorns, from 33 exposures

I am, however, running out of Saturday.  I have had to factor in a number of mutually exclusive activities into the same time slot.  First there is my recently re-started weight training programme, something to do with seeing that mass of bloated humanity on the cruise ship, oozing off the sun deck and into the restaurants, has made me get back into it.  Secondly, I'm spending hours waiting while my computer to stack photos, during which time it can do nothing else, and thirdly, writing this blog on a different laptop, because of the aforesaid problem.  And behind all that lies 'fixing' the shower, which has been putting out a faint electrical burning smell for the last day or so.  Perhaps I'll leave that one till daylight when I don't have to do it in the dark...

Moss, from 22 exposures

Excuse me while I do a set of reps...

More acorns... from 28 exposures

Thankfully Dexter is sleeping in the bedroom and hasn't cottoned on to my impromptu exercise routine.  The last time I tried to multi-task and watch TV and do bench presses on my back, on the coffee table, he decided he'd just 'climb on' and lick my face in a leisurely way.

20 exposures

Who says guys can't do multi-tasking!

So that's Saturday taken care of, and alas, Sunday is also already pre-arranged, in the morning I will be walking the dogs, and electrocuting myself in the shower, and if I survive, the afternoon will be spent being an Independent Visitor, which in this case means going to a film with a 12 year old.  

He's chosen it.  I had rather hoped it would be Spiderman The Homecoming, but alas, it is Captain Underpants.  

I may yet come to the conclusion that Little House on the Prairie is high art...

Until the next time...

 

 

Iberian Treasures...

Well that was what the brochure called it, and one can call Malaga many things, but in my view 'Treasure' is somewhere down around Thing 99.

So, we decided to go on holiday in the Mediterranean for a week, and through a long and completely illogical series of decisions, made alongside a very bored travel agent, we chose a cruise, our first!  She had already suggested we try Ryanair or Easyjet's website by that point to give you some idea of how frustrated she was with us... 

Don't judge her too harshly - if it gives you any idea of what the poor woman had to deal with, I'd specified mountains and scenery, he wanted 'somewhere cool like Lanzarote', and we'd helpfully told her that our normal holiday was a secluded cottage in Skye.

She had diplomatically pointed out that at no time can Lanzarote be called 'cool' in any sense of the word, unless you're 19 and going with your mates, and mountain resorts booked at the last minute tend to be stratospherically expensive.

So we compromised on a cruise around the Mediterranean.  The feeling was, if it got too hot for him, he could sleep on the balcony and pray there were no freak waves, and I could photograph seagulls. 

I'm going to try to stay on topic for this post and not wander off into 'my holiday in the Med'. So what's difficult about going abroad with your camera?  Well, nothing, if it's not a very expensive one I guess, but if you're into something chunky with expensive glass to match, quite a whole lot.

Smaller things included switching the camera strap, so the standard Canon one with CANON 5DSr boldly emblazoned on it as a useful guide to thieves was replaced by a more discreet one.

Bigger things included dealing with my anxiety about a momentary slip leading to a long slow plunge over the side (depended on the time of day, sometimes this was about me, or about my camera); sinking and lifeboats; food poisoning; being latched onto by sticky passengers.  I got a handy tip from a landscape photographer about managing this kind of stuff - rationalise it, ask, how many times has that happened to you in the past?  how likely is it to happen in the future?  He was rationalising away fears about being mugged or becoming ill when out in the wilderness.  

I thought of all of these and put them in their place, with the possible exception of the sticky passengers.   You know, that loud couple who somehow grate on your space, latch onto you and drag down your holiday.  That's never happened to me either, but I know it happens to other people, which leads me logically to conclude that we might BE that couple.   

Packing, that was probably the biggest actual headache.  I had images in my head of the grand old days of ocean liners, huge trunks marked up with 'Not Wanted On Voyage', and I was unduly influenced by a friend's recommendation to watch 'Now Voyager' with Bette Davis (and I can confirm, Tommy, it was absolutely NOT like that in any way...), I was rather surprised to hear there was a total baggage allowance of only 20kg, and your carry-on baggage was limited to 5kg.

I weighed my camera kit and bag, and discovered that it was over 7kg, so then had to decide which bit of my treasured equipment I could do without, and which I could pack into the hold to be lobbed about by some oik on the airport apron.

So the macro lens stayed at home and the zoom lens went in the hold baggage, and I had pretty much worked out that if I left most of my clothes behind, and did not pack the Tux (people still do dress up, apparently), I could just about manage.

The night before we set off, I checked the baggage allowances and OOPS, found that I'd not read the small print about what could be packed where...  For example, a monopod - mine resembles a hefty walking stick - I thought as well as stabilising photos, this would be a good way to fend off attackers, but unfortunately clubs are forbidden in hold luggage, so they would have taken a very dim view of it.

Why had I never come across that before? well probably because I have never taken a club on holiday, for exactly the same reason that I usually leave my Swahili spear collection and my rifle at home...

Secondly, I discovered that laptops can't go in hold baggage (needed for backing up photos), so my plan of swathing it in underpants and jumpers in the middle of my suitcase went out the window, and I had to squeeze a full size laptop into the camera bag.  Lithium batteries can't go in hold luggage.

And there are all the other anomalies about security on planes.  The warnings about letting cabin crew know if your mobile phone gets hot or falls down the seat, set against the fact that you can still carry a lighter on board, as long as you have it on your person?   Do not understand the logic of that.  All these things might go wrong if they malfunction, but you can, like, set fire to a seat in seconds with a lighter, and as far as I can recall I don't remember seeing sprinklers in any plane I've travelled on previously...

Ours not to reason why.  By the following dawn, or rather 4.00am, flight schedules being what they are,  I was all sorted. 

A lot of work went into my packing, it was a work of art.  I took the concept of minimalist clothing down to new levels of omission, everything had a multiple purpose, casual wear, formal wear, and padding for a camera lens.  

'Course, you know how this ends, after this skillful Luggage Weight High Art, I get to the airport and they don't even look at my hand luggage let alone weigh it...  

Wor ship.

Solitude and the time of day.

Ah, so two big problems inherent to cruising.  Firstly, there are over 2,000 people on board, and as far as I could tell, most of the committed to getting skin cancer on the sun deck.  We all know this of course, it's obvious, 2,000 people in a confined space, have to go somewhere.  Yet, interestingly, if you look at the brochure pictures you tend to get something that looks like this:

Actually taken at 9.00pm, brightness cranked up (and over-saturated for the brochure 'look')

Actually taken at 9.00pm, brightness cranked up (and over-saturated for the brochure 'look')

When in reality it tends to look more like this...

full sundeck.JPG

Advertising, eh?  

So, we have a combination of thousands of people, wearing Less Clothing Than Normal, any number of small children also present, and someone wandering around the deck, with this...

canon kit.jpg

Could this look more pervy?  

Possibly not.  However this is where my natural aversion to photographing people came in handy.  In over 1,500 pictures I took on holiday, only two are of the sun deck, and if you look at this one, the 'excuse' is a demonstration of how to stack cocktails, so I'm not really photographing the masses.  I also discovered I'm so averse to photographing people that it worked a bit like the machine gun on a Lancaster, as you're following your target around the tailplane, the gun stops firing so you don't shoot your own tail off, so it was with my camera, when it was pointed deckwards, no pictures are taken. 

The city excursions were another matter, you just can't avoid photographing people, and I'm pleased to say I managed to break down some of my own barriers for this.  Look at this picture of a busy street restaurant, for example...

but also check out the guy on the left with the expletive-ridden tee shirt.  I turn round, take a photo of the whole street, and he's looking at me like "Why are you photographing my little girl???"

So it's not just in my head, is it?  I only noticed him afterwards.

I think photographers naturally tend to fix in on a part of their photo, probably down to focussing, and don't necessarily clock the whole scene.  If I can digress for just one picture, an interesting example of that is a photo I took on holiday in Iceland.  We were in Reykjavik, and I just wanted a photo of the hotel we'd stayed in...  

Not a particularly remarkable photo is it? and I didn't understand why the man sitting on the bench glowered at me when I walked past them some moments later.

His wife is breastfeeding.

Or, back to the Mediterranean, this interesting gentleman whom I photographed because it was kind of like street art and he seemed to be heavily plasticised...

.....and completely failed to clock the fact that he was floating in thin air until I transferred the photos to my laptop.

But back to the Mediterranean.  Solitude, not the easiest thing to find on a cruise ship and the second problem was with light, and the time of day.

For most of the city excursions, I was to find, you set off around 9.30, and they're designed to be short, so that you can come back to the ship for lunchtime I think;  Which is why restaurants tend to hate cruise ships.  One good example of this is docking at Vigo, to visit Santiago de Compostela, well known Catholic pilgrimage site and probably very beautiful, but after an hour's journey, pulling up around 10.30am, you've got thousands of people infesting every view, and you also have the harsh overhead light of the mid-morning sun which does not often look good in photographs.  So no chance of getting the moody early morning or late evening shot. You also only get an hour in the city itself, so the chance of finding the interesting picture down a secluded back street is pretty limited.

However, this was more than compensated for by the fact that each night we were sailing to a new port, and that meant spectacular sunsets and sunrises, with an apparently empty ship (although in some of these shots, taken at 6.30am, there were still people 'booking' sun loungers... and it was overcast...).

And I have to say, overall, the cruise was a brilliant experience.  Although there were hordes of large people exposing more bare flesh than was perhaps wise, it was quite easy to avoid them.  And even possible to walk among them and 'tune them out', which I suspect is one way people cope with being practically naked 5 inches away from an equally naked stranger on a sunbed.  

The Captain also had a very entertaining banter with his Entertainment Officer, Paul, the odd faint innuendo that you knew was being missed by most of the passengers - Paul's comment that 'Porto was a very windy port and the last time we left here it was so windy the captain had to have a tug...'

So, where did we go?  We started in Malaga, and first stop was Vigo, in Galicia, so that was a day's sail away, and the stopping off point for Santiago de Compostela.  Click on any of the following photos to get them full screen.

Vigo is famous for mussels and seafood generally.  In the far distance you can see the mussel beds.  In the next shot you can see them more clearly.  There's a strict limitation on the number of beds they can have - and because it's big business, each one costs about as much as a house.

Closer shot of the mussel beds

The next stop was Porto, a short distance from the port of Leixoes, and a good reason to be up early as we came into the port.

Fishing boats unloading - swarms of gulls because they are cleaning the fish on the dock

The Old Town of Porto is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is absolutely beautiful.  Many of the houses are tiled, and some of the churches have raised this to an art form, for example, the Igreja do Carmo - beautiful inside and out.

Two exposures here, focus stacked in the foreground and background.  Tourists on either side were screened out ;) and this was taken on the Luis 1st Bridge.  These banks of Morning Glory cascaded down the hill, blanketing the ruins of old buildings

From Porto we went to Lisbon - another beautiful city, but note to self not to try to see it on a Tour Bus... so pretty much no decent photos.  From there we went on to Cadiz and I got up early to get another sunrise at sea. 

Cadiz just comes into view

And finally, pulling into Gibraltar

The Rock - the high bit is to the left under the cloud.  

Cathedral Cave, Gibraltar - they have concerts here.  

Barbary Macaques.    Monkeys don't like being photographed either...

Late night film on the sun deck

The journey home.

Cornfields and Countryside

Sunday morning, and the dogs are expecting to be Priority Number One, so I'm debating where to take them for their walk.  There are their usual haunts, Temple Newsam Park, or Roundhay Park, but in the end I settle on Leeds Country Way, a less travelled path.

Well it's less travelled now but I have a strong suspicion they're going to replace bits of it with the Leeds Outer Ring Road and that will have a completely different character. 

Leeds Country Way is a series of walks around Leeds that go around the back of all sorts of little settlements, under motorway flyovers, along canals, places you would not normally even know exist.  It has a forgotten feeling about it.  We once found three terraced houses, standing on their own.  Imagine the Tardis appearing in a field.  They looked like that.  Lifted from an inner city street and just planted there.  With a rather odd pub next to them that was so off-worldy and unwelcoming, it made the Children of the Damned look like the Brady Bunch.

There's something about the rural bit around a city - it goes rural real quick.  You sidestep past gentrified villages, and end up in a place with dead end streets, derelict farms, and a dry wind blowing through the yards.  If you drive down Manston Lane, on the east side of Leeds, it goes past some new housing estates, and then the road narrows, and so does the mindset of any of the remaining residents.  They tend to stare at you balefully with uncomprehending eyes and say things like "You're not from these parts, are you?"

If you imagine Deliverance, but without the banjos, you've pretty much got it.  

I'm not really selling it, am I?

Anyway, there are some loosely defined 'walks' down here, and that's where we went today, and at one point I bore left instead of right and found myself in the middle of a wildflower meadow.  I can't exactly tell you where I was, partly because I was lost but also because I suspect I was trespassing.   Any walk which ends with you having to lift your dogs over the barbed wire fence onto the road in full view of the farmhouse, I'm pretty certain has included trespassing.

Anyway, the meadow - the flowers were waist high, and they were literally buzzing with life, every flower had a bee, hoverfly, or beetle on it.  You could literally hear nature humming.

Obvs I have my camera with me, but I'm fairly certain the reason for all this serendipitous insectivoral fecundity was linked to the fact that a) I have left my macro lens at home and, b) God knew I would and is messing with my head. 

So I made the best of it, and took photos with what I had.

This is the meadow (all photos can be seen full screen if you click on them)

Canon 5DSr, 24-70mm L lens, ISO 100, two exposures, polarising filter

I took two photos of this in rapid succession, two different exposures and then merged them together painstakingly in photoshop.  No doubt I will find an automatic way to do this some day but for now it involves 'painting' out either the sky or the land, and being very, very careful about the join between the two, so you get a balanced exposure.  

This is quite tricky when you're using a mouse on the side of a door, basically what my office desk is.  I think my mouse must have arthritis because it moves painfully and in jerks.  

The following photos were produced the same way.  Several shots at different exposures, to get the sky and the land balanced, and blended together by hand.

You can do this using something called HDR technology.  HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and you can get most camera software to do it (a lot of cameras can even do it in-camera).  The camera takes three shots in quick succession, one over exposed, one under exposed, one just right (a lot of photography is based on the same principles underpinning Goldilocks and the Three Bears...) and then software balances them out, with multiple algorithms working together to get the end result (or, if you have a deep mistrust modern technology, you can this of this as a number of very small pixies inside your camera all furiously working at painting the same picture).

I confess I don't particularly like HDR photography, as an HR Manager, one can never completely switch off and I have some concerns about the working conditions of the pixies and whether they get appropriate breaks and a reasonable pension scheme, but the real reason is that the pictures somehow seem to come out looking a bit burnt and fake.  

Walking a bit further, I found a cornfield, under a deep blue sky.

Directly beyond this hill is the main Leeds to York Railway Line, then behind that Thorpe Park Retail and Housing Development, and beyond that Leeds.  But you'd never know, would you.

Canon 5DSr, ISO 100, 24-70mm lens, various exposures and one dog

Tomorrow, I am off to Welwyn Garden City, which I am hoping will be similar to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, it certainly sounds lovely.  I am driving 170 miles to get a firmware update to my macro lens.  It was either that or chance putting it in the post for a third time and risking not having it for when I go on hols.

Live fast, burn brightly, leave a very old corpse.  At least I think that's how the saying goes...  I've certainly skipped past the 'die young' bit...

My First Photography Prize...

And possibly my ONLY photography prize, unless they start awarding prizes for being annoying, and to be honest, I've had a number of nominations for that over the years due to my Day Job, as an HR Manager.  

Immediately, loads of people switch off.... Oh God, I thought I liked this guy...

Look, try to get past it, OK?    There are some very nice Tax Inspectors out there, Parking Enforcement Officers, Divorce Lawyers, people who have chosen that job because they want to... because they want to... becau... OK I see I've just defeated my own argument.   Let's just say I needed the money, and you can pretty much get away with just carrying a clipboard around and saying "Sorry, if it's not in the policy, the answer's no..."

But to be fair I've also spent a number of years telling people - no, you can't get rid of her just because she's old/black/stares at you funny - my favourite recruitment comment of all time is probably "She wouldn't be happy here"  Rolls up denying an opportunity to someone in a lovely warm fluffy passive aggressive blanket that shows you really CARE about them...  This is not my most recent experience but it has happened a lot.  And if you've done it yourself - you're not fooling anybody, the HR Manager sitting opposite you is not working this one out, they're thinking "Oh, this one again, here we go.  Where to start..."   

Picture Frames Express Badge

Back in the Zone.  Nobody wants to read a blog about an Annoying HR Manager, do they? because they're ALL annoying.  And anyway, if I wrote one, I'd probably have to haul myself up in front of myself and discipline myself for breaching confidentiality.  I might even have to sack myself.  You have NO IDEA how difficult that is - it's not just a matter of managing all the voices and leaping back and forth across the desk, there's a massive conflict of interest that's quite difficult to get past.  I'd be strongly inclined to Let Myself Off.  And you try escorting yourself out of the building, particularly if you're inclined to resist...  

That way madness lies...

So this picture won 4th Prize.  And I am going to roll in that glory, in the same way as the dog on the right rolls in other stuff when she goes out.  The boy on the left has his own very distinctive doggy smell, which to me is the best smell in the world, sort of like Dog Honey, but she has virtually no scent at all, so she replaces hers.  I guess she feels pretty much the same way about that as I feel about Jo Malone cologne.

The story behind the picture, is there one?  Well, always, but not necessarily the one The Photographer would want you to know.  The Photographer in me would want you to know that this picture was shot with a shutter speed at 1/640th of a second to freeze the motion and the aperture was set at f4.5 to ensure a narrow depth of field to concentrate attention on the subject.  The truth is this photo was taken with the macro lens I use to photograph bugs, on Auto, and I took a random shot of them because I'd given up on the bugs.       

One thing I've learnt about photographing bugs, is they are very, very sensitive to someone pointing a big lens at them.  Bees happily buzzing all over a plant will move to the back, if you come up.  Suddenly, although nature seems oblivious to you, you find there is a wide pool of dead space around you as they all quietly move away.  Sort of the same thing that happens if you mention at a party that you think Trump is actually quite switched on...

I know, I know, you're thinking, there goes another batch of blog readers, but the truth is if you voted for him, you probably don't read a whole great lot...  

But back to bugs.  Another thing I've learnt is never wear a white tee shirt.   Nothing in nature is completely white (not even a Polar Bear).  A black camera lens with a white tee shirt background is the insect's equivalent standing in front of a guy pointing a loaded bazooka at you, and trying to eat a yoghurt.

By the way, I couldn't remember the word for 'bazooka', so had a quick look on 'tinternet for "hand held rocket launcher", "anti tank gun", etc, subsequently realising that's rather a novel way to get the site traffic to the blog up, as half of Menwith Hill Monitoring Station will now be reading it - Hi Guys!...

Endless digressions...  To get decent photos of bugs you have to either a) find a very stupid one with a short life expectancy - if they can't clock you there, something's going to get them pretty soon, or b) hang around motionless for hours until you become part of the Wallpaper of Their World.  Life slows down, and you start to see it in a microsphere, it goes quiet as you tune out the distant sounds and listen instead to what's immediately around you, a sort of peace of nature starts to seep back in.  Peaceful in the sense of multiple tiny assassinations, sucking dries, entrapments, poisonings that are actually going on terribly quietly. 

What doesn't help in those circumstances is having someone like Dexter around.  For him nature is just something you crash through on the way to a bunny.  And if there are no bunnies, he likes just barging in to see what you're doing.  He usually manages to trample the actual plant that the bee is resting on, knock me over, and lick the front of the lens, in one movement.

But enough! I must away, and make something of my life - I would be out taking photographs on this rarest of rare things in Leeds, a Sunny Day, but I am awaiting the arrival of sofa men, and they have just rung to say they will be here in ten minutes.  

Last night I dismembered the old sofa (they don't take them away) and it's currently lying in the garage, looking very much like an unfortunate bug that's been caught by a spider and been rearranged into a crunchy ball.

Damn difficult to take to bits too - as a work colleague commented the other day...  "I took my old sofa apart the other day, you wouldn't BELIEVE how difficult it was.  It would have been easier to dismember a body..."

Note to self.  Don't go round to her house...

Yes, but is it ART?

Well no, not if it's one of my photographs.  

There are photography purists who eschew the Phaustian Phrivolity of Photoshop.  It must all be done 'in-camera' they shout.  Or rather, intone, in hoarse sibilant whispers...   

Interesting thing about purists.  There are usually some sort of unspoken parameters around the purity that they espouse.  So the vegan accepts that their transport to work is probably powered by an engine using oil, diesel or gasoline, all of which have come from the sacrifice, albeit billions of years ago, of millions of tiny animals and plants.  All those millions of tiny screams....  Aha - I use a bike I hear you cry - yes, it has bearings that are greased, a chain that you need to oil.  But I walk! - yes on tarmac'd pavements, billions of tiny animals, PRESSED into roadways.  Now that's not awfully nice, is it? 

I'm not really being serious, I don't really have it in for vegans, and life is tough enough for them without us giving them a hard time I think.  All that cardboardy stuff they have to eat for starters...  Stop Stop STOP.

Apply the same argument to musicians - Maxim Vengerov, astonishingly talented violinist, imagine hearing him warm up in the green room before going on stage to play the Sibelius Violin Concerto, and saying to him "You shouldn't really need to DO that you know, if you were a real violinist you wouldn't need to practice at all.  You should have been able to do it from birth.  And by the way, are those GUT strings you're playing on ???"

So back to camera purists - the argument is that you should just get it all right 'in camera' because that's pure art, everything else is fakery and devilment.  

So we find the same parameters around the concept - first, you need a camera - well, that's not natural, is it, I mean, were you born with one?  if so, my commiserations to your mother that must have been extraordinarily painful for her.  

But seriously, modern cameras do tons of stuff for you, set the tone, focus the lens, visualise the world through fluorine coatings to reduce flare, balance the aperture settings, exposure, shutter speed, and compensate for the hand tremors you acquired when you were drinking 7 pints last night.  

Landscape photographers often use Neutral Density filters in front of the lens to bring the brightness of the sky down, so the picture is evenly exposed.  I would ask, have you ever picked a bunch of Neutral Density filters from the side of the road?  Or grown a peck of flash units in your shrubbery?  Or perhaps you've hand drawn a condenser microphone on fine parchment paper and clipped it to your camera?

The thing is, back in the day of film cameras, a true photographer was a rare thing, struggling with a technological beast that couldn't even focus on its own, let alone get the lighting and exposure right, and most of us (me included) would use up reams of rolls of film and hardly get a decent shot out of them.

Personally, I'm a bit of a tart, and that is because my Art needs Work.  I have shown some of my 'before' pictures here, in previous blogs:  Nobody want to look at that stuff, do they?

I'll admit, I've toyed with the fakery of posting something like a close up of a bug, with an accompanying caption saying "I set up this shot to take advantage of the moonlight striking the carapace as the beetle opens its wings for the first time", implying this magic was somehow all planned, when in actual fact the real caption should have read "I took about a million of these, hand held, in my back garden, using high speed continuous shooting with my eyes shut, and blow me, ONE of them came out OK".

I particularly like it, by the way, when someone posts a picture of something with an obvious flaw in it, and then pretends that was part of the composition.   "The out of focus grandmother scowling in the background gives a sense of history..." etc etc etc

From my perspective, photoshop is just a continuation of the magic you can make with modern cameras,  

Without special astrophotography software like Autostakkert2! (it really is called that) you wouldn't get decent pictures of nebula and constellations at all because the light is so faint - and the technology allows you to stack photos on top of each other and use them to strip away the blurry bits and anomalies - here for example, we have two images of the moon, taken with the same camera and lens combination.   

One of the original photos.  Canon 5DSr, 100-400mm lens, teleconverter, 1/250, f14, ISO 640

The final image.  Stacked from over 300 of the original shots

Pretty unbelievable, isn't it?  Genuinely is taken from the same photo.  So there's definitely some good reasons for a little bit of experimentation, I think.

I can understand that photographers sometimes go a little overboard and you get those horrible over saturated photos that remind you of early postcards of Torquay.

And who among us hasn't used photoshop for the odd visual gag.... 

I have two dogs.  I also don't have hordes of swarming wildebeest outside my back door.  Usually.

This particular photo was sent out at Christmas and had several relatives asking me pointedly "How many dogs do you have NOW????"  The Wildebeest, not a comment.  Well, it is Leeds - as my bank manager in London once said "Leeds.... they have sheep all over the road up there, don't they?" to which I responded - "Not so much, not since we got the wheel..." 

So to finish with, two more photos, both of these were taken using a macro lens, and compiled of about 30 photos, with different focus points on the flowers, stacked and merged shamelessly in Photoshop.  

Oh the scandal!

Until the next time!

Canon 5DSr, Sigma 150mm macro lens, 1/160, f3.5, ISO 100

Canon 5DSr, Sigma 150mm 1/15, f4, ISO 200 (same flower, indoor lighting)

Making Money!

OK, so not really making money, but I've found another thing that doesn't mind being photographed.  Coinage.   In fact I've found money to be something totally devoid of feelings or morality or ethics, which I'm quite grateful for given how much I have abused it over the years.

However this is a little post to demonstrate progress, or better still How Not To Learn To Do Something.  Take me into a shop, where I can't find what I want, supermarket, clothes shop, camera shop selling millions of tiny and very specific accessories, do I ask for help?  No, absolutely not.  I am unable to do this.  I will quite happily, or unhappily, wander round the shop constructing a complex catalogue of everything irrelevant they sell, in the hope that I will chance across what I'm looking for.  Don't ask me why, some childhood traumatic experience relating to abandonment maybe.

So it is with my progress in learning how to use new computer software like Photoshop.   Do I book myself on a course? No.  I skulk around Youtube watching various small and perfectly formed videos and attempt to piece it all together in my own head.

So it was with learning how to produce photos that were entirely in focus from the front to the back.  This is something that can be difficult in everything but the most wide-angle shot, where you can sometimes set the focus point to near infinity and pretty much the whole picture is in focus.  Mostly with everything else, part of the photo will be out of focus.  It also comes up in macro photography where the bit of the picture that is in focus (depth of field)  is so narrow, it literally doesn't even cover the width of an insect.

Excellent example of a narrow depth of field - fly eyes bang in focus, rest of fly not - and you can see a 'stripe' of leaf in focus that also demonstrates it

There are photographic ways around this of course, there is a sort of triangular relationship between the shutter speed (slower speed lets in more light), the aperture (smaller apertures give better depth of field but let in less light) and the ISO (film speed, how sensitive it is to light), and you can mess about with these three - or alternatively you can just flood it with arc lights, but macro photographers tend to frown at this because you're supposed to be photographing the insect, not frying it.

However, one way to do it, is the ubiquitous 'stacking' technique - used for different reasons in astrophotography, but in macro photography, you can simply take lots of pictures, with slightly different focus points and blend them together.  It's got to be the same broad image to be able to stack them, so it is impossible to do in the field, and that brings us to the other no-no in macro photography;  it's not considered the done thing to photograph dead bugs, put simply.  

You could glue one on a stick and take hours photographing every micromillimetre of it, but it wouldn't be accepted among your photographic peers.  I have done it once with a dead butterfly I found, and I have to say, I felt spiritually soiled afterwards and I never shared it...

So we come to the bit about Learning How To Do Stuff.   I found a youtube video which talked about some basic photostacking techniques you could use for landscape photography.  You load all the pictures up, put masks on them (no I don't know why either) and then paint out the bits that aren't in focus.

So this first picture, is an example of a penny.  Or rather it's 11p.  It is 11 photographs of a penny, photographed with different focus points, and painstakingly blended together by hand, using a mouse, and leaving me with a slightly more frozen shoulder and slightly worse eyesight, as well as several unproductive hours older.  However it looks quite good, I think.

 

So, I have done many photos this way.  And quite by chance, the other week, I discovered that you can load the lot into Photoshop, and press the 'AutoBlend' button, and it does it all for you. 

Second attempt, using More Money is below.

Both photographs taken with Sigma 150mm macro, first shot taken with Canon 70D, second with Canon 5DSr.  Tiny dents in the £1 coin on the left probably due to Sookie, my dog, trying to eat it.

First photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 2 hours editing it.

Second photograph, 5 minutes taking the pictures, 5 minutes editing it.  To be fair, 4 of those minutes were spent with my computer going 'AAAAARRRGGGGHHHH what the hell are you expecting me to do with this lot????'  The working file size was 254Mb, or, put it another way, 8,000 times larger than the memory held by the Apollo Command Module used in the first moon landing. 

Progress.  Very slow progress.  But at least I didn't bother anyone...

Descent into Astrophotography

Even an Annoying Man With A Camera can't annoy stars.  

Having lived in UK cities all my life, with all their inevitable light pollution, I didn't really know stars existed, until I visited New Zealand and the Coromandel Peninsula, and I looked up and saw the Milky Way for the first time.  WOW - where have I BEEN all my life????

Cameras are not very good at managing extremes of contrast, so where your eye can cope quite happily with a sunlit sky and a landscape, your camera will quite often over expose one or under expose the other.     But in astrophotography, they really come into their own.  You can look up into a night sky and see maybe 10 stars, but take a photograph of it with even the most rudimentary DSLR and you'll be amazed at what the sensor has picked up.  

So we start with this - 

And the camera sees this...

This is the same image.  To be fair I've faked the effect slightly because obvs I can't demonstrate to you how your eyes work, you are looking at this with them, so I've simulated the effect with the original picture, and the same picture, that has been worked on in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit.

I thought this was absolutely mind blowing, and I was pretty impressed with my own handiwork, but a quick search on the internet will show you that these are beginner pictures compared to some images that the big boys (and girls) post on the net.  Some of them are actually boys, too - one of the most spectacular shots I've ever seen was posted by a 17 year old who has obviously spent far too much time on his own, and who is headed for a successful career in astrophotography, just as surely as his genetic line will die out with him.  

The camera will pick up the faintest points of light, so faint that it will actually pick up stray photons that hit the sensor - and register that as a 'star'.  So although this is pretty, it's not that accurate.  Some of the stars you're seeing, are not there. 

Of course in reality quite a few of the stars you are seeing are not there - they burnt out billions of years ago, but their light just hasn't finished getting to us yet. 

There is a whole realm of utter geekdom in astrophotography, not just in the equipment, where surprisingly the actual camera is the cheap bit, but also in the post processing where you truly descend into Astronerdia - however I'll try to chip away at that massive topic in another post.  

For this post, I'd like to concentrate on what I had to do to get this shot.  

So picture Sutton Bank, a 'dark sky' site about 40 minutes drive away.  I had to wait for a clear night, of which there have been, let me see, in 2016, three of them...

In the UK we're blessed with three different weather systems, one coming from the arctic, one from Europe and one from the Atlantic, and they all fight with each other, giving us mostly, well, clouds really.  Which is partly why British people are so obsessed with the weather.  So actually getting a night that is clear, and REMAINS clear while you drive for 40 minutes to Sutton Bank, is a challenge.  

These shots were taken in Summer so, with the long summer days, that means waiting until about 2.00 in the morning to take the shot.  It's getting less attractive, isn't it?

So, waiting up until 1.00am, then bundling the tripod, camera, two layers of thermals (yes, I know, in JULY) and a hefty wrench, into my car.  The wrench is not actually essential photographic equipment, but a safety precaution which will become obvious shortly.  

Finally I arrive at the car park of the Sutton Bank Visitor Centre.  I pay my £1.50 car parking charge, even though nobody will ever know I was there, because I had an honest chip embedded at birth.

Interesting thing, waiting in my car in pitch darkness for the sky to clear, is a whole lot creepier than standing outside it.    If you have the interior car lights on, all you see outside is a wall of black, harbouring axe murderers, chainsaw wielders, venomous snakes, crocodiles (I have a fertile imagination).  

There are strange noises.  Some startling - sitting in your car with all the lights off and the doors locked, when you haven't fully read the car manual can, for instance lead to your car alarm going off.  More unsettling are these strange dull thump noises coming out the dark woods.  Days later I was told these were conkers, dropping off the trees.  It was that quiet they sounded like poachers taking pot shots in the dark.

Sutton Bank has an atmosphere all it's own at 2.00am.  I'd like to say quiet and peaceful, but peaceful isn't quite the right word.  Menacing, threatening, intimidating, 'they found his body in some woodland, drained of blood' those are better words.   Now you understand the need for the wrench.

I had driven around up there once in the early hours, trying to make myself feel more comfortable.  There are occasional farmsteads up there, usually with a yard lit with one solitary light, and a lot of dark corners and the vague feeling that these premises have witnessed a lot of inbreeding over the centuries, producing a lot of closely related cousins who have an unhealthy interest in chainsaws.

So that didn't make me feel any better.   

I set the camera up on the tripod, with a manual wide-angle lens (Samyang, really good optics, completely manual so no autofocus - but autofocus is useless for astrophotography anyway).  I used something called the '600 rule' to decide what the exposure should be - it's a calculation based on the focal length of the lens, that will allow you to expose the sensor for the maximum amount of time without getting 'star trails' as the stars move across the sky.  

It means that with a wide angle lens you can expose the sensor for about 20 seconds for each picture.   It actually takes 40 seconds to take a shot like that because after you've taken it, the camera takes another picture, with exactly the same settings, but without exposing the sensor.  This is because the rays of light are so dim that tiny fluctuations in the sensor can appear like photons - so having taken two shots, the camera compares the image shot with the dark shot, and if there are 'stars' on both, it knows the one on the image shot is a fault, and cancels it out.

To take really good astrophotos, photographers use the same technique by shooting sometimes hundreds of photos of the same image, and software can compare all the photos, delete out the anomalies that come from stray photons, atmospheric waves, passing jets, and produce one, much sharper, picture.  

This picture is compiled from about 30 photos and has been stacked into one image.  Posterity will judge whether it's better than the ones above, but theoretically at least, it SHOULD be a more accurate picture because there shouldn't be any stray photons or faults masquerading as stars.

Canon 70D, Samyang 14mm manual lens, F2.8, ISO 1600, 25 second exposure (30 images)

Of course, while you're up there in the dark, taking these multiple 40 second photos, time passes, you get colder.  Random people drive past in their cars and you wonder idly what you would do if one of them stopped, and say, 4 burly guys with a chainsaw got out...

You keep thinking it was such a trek to get out here, I'm going to stick it out as long as I can.  And you don't know until you got home whether you got anything that's any good or not.

One time I went to Sutton Bank, it was winter, so I could take advantage of the shorter days. 

Cold, shorter days.

I stayed out too long, and the reason I called it a day was because it was getting increasingly difficult to stop my breath fogging up the lens, and I was vaguely conscious that my fingers were not working as well. On this occasion, I wasn't in the car park, but deep in the woods, where, paradoxically, I felt safer.

I looked down at my tripod, and saw this. 

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Ice, on a tripod leg

Time to go.

I was having to take my glasses off to look at the back of my camera and so around this point I put them down and decided I should call it a day and pack up. 

Put them down.  

Where?  

I'd just put them down somewhere in the grass.  No idea where.  No matter, I thought, I'll just use the torch and get the reflection off the glass.  But by this point all the grass was covered in ice too, so everything was glittering and reflecting, and I gradually realised that a) I wasn't going to be able to find my way back to the car, and b) I wouldn't be able to drive home anyway...

Oops.  Obviously it wasn't just my hands that had been affected.   Incredibly stupid thing to do, meaning I was going to have to ring my partner and ask if he'd drive 40 minutes, then hike into the darkness somewhere to come and get me, because I'd mislaid my glasses.  Otherwise there was a pretty good chance I was going to die out here of exposure.

About 15 minutes of frantic searching later, I found them, so I'm pleased to say that the outcome of this story is I still have my glasses, and a relationship.  

So ended one of my last forays to Sutton Bank.  I dare say there will be more.  One moonless night, the stars will call to me, and I will away.

It's still easier than street photography.

First Days with a DSLR

So how did my love story with cameras start?  

I mucked about with a bridge camera for a few years before a kind photographer took me to one side and carried out a simple demonstration.

"See, these two grains of rice..." he said, laying them side by side like grubs undergoing military training,  "That's a bridge camera picture sensor.  And take this large postage stamp.... " he placed this next to the military grubs.... "That's a DSLR camera sensor.  Your dreams of getting an A2 sized poster print from the first one are somewhat dashed, no?" 

He had a point.    So after much geeky research, I bought my first DSLR - a Canon 70D (roughly equivalent to a Nikon D7100 - see how nice I am, I even translate into different languages...)  

I think in the end I went for the camera with the most bells and whistles that I could afford, and an 18 - 55mm kit lens, a surprisingly capable lens, although in terms of build quality, it had a sort of crunchy crisp-packet quality zoom and was entirely plastic.  I think it floated in the bath and if you had enough of them you could probably make a pretty decent feature necklace out of them. 

This is from my first evening with the camera.  It is almost the first photo I took - the actual first photo is of the manual, so nobody wants to see that... 

This shows one of the more obscure advantages of having a flip-out viewing screen, you can photograph your dog without her realising you're doing it.  

This picture was AutoSetting Everything, and I was hooked.  No more bridge cameras for me.  

However, as ripples radiate out across a pond from a falling pebble, so there have been repercussions as a result of moving to DSLRs:  When I had a bridge camera, it seems I could travel around the world, I had something called money which assists this.  So I have many photos of Singapore, New Zealand, Venice, Rome, Iceland, New York, Rarotonga. 

Now I have a DSLR and the various bits of kit have the potential to be so wildly expensive, I no longer seem to have this money commodity and I find I can't afford to go anywhere.  

I've got awfully good at photographing my home city of Leeds...  

In The Beginning...

Every so often on a photography website, you'll come across an article about how to fulfil your interest in cameras, and still keep your family and friends.  How to go on holiday without being an utter pariah for the people you travel with, and the people who cross your path.  How not to turn every family occasion into one where you are hunting among the guests pointing a bottomless circle of black glass at them and asking them to 'just be natural'.

One day, I hope to find that balance;  but not today.  

Life's a continuum, isn't it? and so it is with photography.  When I first got a camera, I was far, far over one end of the spectrum, and thus I have very few photographs from that time.   I used to find people's reaction to my camera so un-nerving that I hardly ever got it out.    

As I have got older I have learned to confront the world more, and to care less what it thinks. Nevertheless, you will not find street photography one of my strong points, or portraiture.  You will never see a picture on my website of an aged Yak-herder looking suspicious.  My photos currently have a common theme, peace, tranquility, very few people.    

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Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello

See, in some subliminal way, even this building is NOT LOOKING AT ME.

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Grand Canal, Venice

And these ones, are quite clearly asleep...

 

Nevertheless I'm getting better at this.  When my partner says 'Oh god you're not bringing your camera, are you?', I don't put it away, I still bring it.  

And as the continuum develops, I hope one day, not only to bring it, but to take some photos as well.  

All things happen in time.

This does, however, stand in the way of good photography.   So, in the interests of becoming a better photographer, I'm learning to push the boundaries a bit.  This blog will be about that journey.  And who knows, by the time I reach the end of it, maybe I will have reached the far side of that continuum, the wedding photographer, the one that makes you do star jumps in your wedding dress and marches around barking orders at your mother in law.

Every cloud has a silver lining, eh?

This isn't a blog that will teach anybody about being a good photographer, at best, sharing my experience may make other budding photographers feel they have a companion along the way, but hopefully as time passes, the photos will improve, so if you don't like the blog, you can just look at the pictures! 

To end on a positive note, the thing I really like about the photography world is the good nature with which so many people approach it.  In spite of having the capacity to be a massively tekkie, 'boys' toys' type of world, there doesn't appear to be a gender bias, men and women get equally enthusiastic about it, and there's absolutely tons of stuff to learn.  There isn't a great deal of negativity either, the camera market is dominated by two big players, Canon and Nikon (with some other players who are trying AWFULLY HARD) and people are generally very nice about whatever equipment you use.  There is an abundance of spectacularly good photographers out there, and they generally seem to be a very tolerant bunch. 

Apart from the annoying ones, of course...

Distant view of Leeds.  No people...