White clouds in blue skies; grass blowing around in warm sunlight; horses that amble across their field to come and say hello as one passes by the roadside.
Wabi-Sabi
Appreciating the aesthetics of brokenness and decay in suburban Yorkshire.
Decrepit Warburton’s lorry
Flaking paint textures
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept, an appreciation of beauty in imperfection, seen for example in reconstructing tea cups from broken crockery fragments, contrasting with Western ideals of unblemished perfection.
A Change of Direction
Sometimes, one’s photography takes quite a turn.
A few years ago, I was all interested in large-format landscape work, when a fellow member of the photo-club inadvertently threw the spanner in the works by saying his particular approach gave results that represented how he felt at a given scene. Hang around: how come every LF landscapie I know feels exactly the same way then, if that way is defined by 5×4 format, tripod low on the ground, golden-hours (normally morning, strangely), portrait orientation, near-mid-far, Fuji Velvia film, grad-ND sky and rear-tilt perspective, amongst other things? Having seen that as a clique fashion rather than individual expression, I rejected it and promptly went digital, making a photo a day using overcast dull light to show the shapes of trees in the local woodland realistically.
Last Saturday marked something of a milestone: 4 years of posting a daily photo on Blipfoto. Over time, the idea of forcing a photo a day (especially one as considered and well-processed as I strived to achieve) has become artistically unhealthy and my enthusiasm for the site has waned considerably, so I called it a day.
In some ways, the future looks to be a return to landscape; certainly I intend shooting a lot more of it than I have previously, but I’m intending letting the inspiration drive matters not forcing it by the calendar. I’m hoping to post more often on this blog as well, but using the real camera as well as the mobile, so there’s been a bit of re-branding happening too…
So it was, on Sunday afternoon, with head slightly reeling from the decision, I set off with Dog for an afternoon stroll, with no idea how far or where we’d go except that I wanted it to be a long walk. And it was the longest we’ve been on since moving here, I think – left Portpatrick and walked past the golf course to Port Mora where I usually turn inland and walk through the Dunskey Glen, but this time I continued past Port Kale and the transmission huts (where cables came ashore for monitoring communication during the Troubles in Northern Ireland)…
Transmission huts in Port Kale, outside Portpatrick
…and with a bit of determined plodding along the Southern Upland Way, the next thing we saw was Kilantringan Lighthouse in the distance.
Kilantringan Lighthouse along the Southern Upland Way, black and white with my favoured platinum toning
It took 2.5 hours, so probably 8 miles or thereabouts, given very few photo-stops and some leisurely steep bits.
All in all, an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Pea
Detail of raindrops on a collection of sweet pea flower petals.
Beginnings of Success
Some of the first apples beginning to form on a tree in the garden.
We all live in a…
…grey submarine. First time I’ve spotted a submarine out in the wild, so to speak. This one was lurking somewhere between Portpatrick and Northern Ireland yesterday lunchtime.
Incidental Impressions
Last Thursday tea-time, the Queen’s Baton came to Stranraer as part of the run-up to the Commonwealth Games. It was quite fun to watch the crowds milling around in anticipation – arguably made for more interesting street-photos than the baton itself.
Noctilucent Clouds
Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are a rare phenomenon: the highest clouds in the atmosphere, at altitudes between 47-53 miles, consisting of tiny crystals of water ice about 100nm in diameter and requiring very cold temperatures to form. Not fully understood, they are a recently discovered meterological phenomenon with no record of their observation before 1885.
They also make a beautiful display of pale bright fibrous blue against the cobalt velvet of night…
Two views, part of a stitched panorama.
Unidentified Flower
“Step 1
Determine whether the flowering plant is an annual or perennial, herbaceous, deciduous or evergreen.”
Huh? It’s pink/purple and has distinctive fine pointy petals in a 6-pronged star arrangement.
Does anyone know what it might be?
My Favourite Camera Settings
There’s one particular combination of camera settings I keep coming back to, that forms a base for almost all my work. Just in case anyone else is interested:
Great Success: a replanted willow tree budding, in black and white
Circular polarizer filter: for acting as an optical control of local contrast
RAW+JPEG: so I have vast amounts of data to process properly and a reference of what the camera thought of it, which can also be recovered more easily in case of SD-card corruption (rare, but not unknown)
Mode: maybe 90% aperture-priority (auto-ISO, auto-shutter speed), 5% shutter-priority (auto-ISO), 5% manual (because the NEX-7 fixes ISO to 100 by default); of these, unless I’m doing a long exposure, the aperture is the most distinguishing control between closeup and landscape work.
Processing: black & white, so I get to think in terms of shape and form and colour-contrast even if sometimes a scene is processed for colour.
Great Success: a replanted willow tree budding, in colour
Metering: matrix/multi-zone metering, because it’s quite good enough, especially when coupled with a histogram on-screen
Compensation: normally +1/3rd EV for reasons of expose-to-the-right, improving the signal-to-noise ratio.
Shooting: HDR +/-1 EV
The shooting-mode is a new departure; not because I’ve suddenly started “doing HDR” (I’ve been open to that workflow on demand for several years), but rather because the ability to produce 30-40megapixel photos requires multiple input images. By shooting hand-held at high frame-rate I get enough image-data to combine upscaling (using super-resolution) with noise-reduction (using stacking). Full-speed burst-mode on the NEX-7 is a very fast 10fps, which leads to taking bursts of 5-6 images by the time I’ve thought I’ve got 3; the camera enjoys a wide dynamic range so even if the scene contrast doesn’t require HDR per se, there’s only a little difference in quality and using the HDR bracketing restricts the burst to 3 frames at a time.
A little barn: scenery from Steel Riggs on Hadrian’s Wall
Solar Halo
It’s one of the more common atmospheric-optical phenomena, but I still had to stop and admire this ring of colour in the wispy clouds, sun hidden behind the chimneys.
What It Looks Like
Two views of Portpatrick from the middle of the harbour; one taken on the mobile and processed as usual with snapseed:
and the other on the Sony NEX-7 with an ND1000 filter to give a long exposure brushed silver water and hint of movement in the clouds, processed with Photivo and Darktable (amongst other things):
Portpatrick Harbour under a mackerel sky
A Democracy
For the past month or so, my Facebook and Twitter streams have been fairly awash with politics – several positions represented from `at least do something’ to more specific suggestions. And so one’s braincell has been suitably spinning with big ideas of economy and nation-states, social equality, whether proportional representation is the right model for governance, whether one can apply `reduce,reuse,recycle’ to politicians, and all sorts of things.
What you actually get is the local defence budget blown on no fewer than 8 A4 printed direction signs guiding you 20yd into the village hall, finishing with “Queue Here” taped down a table-leg.
A Democracy
“I’m being a queue.”
Ten seconds later the two elderly ladies gave up personning the stall and came out to talk to Dog instead.
A View Down a Hole
My most popular photo on flickr, Raw, is a view taken an increasing number of years ago, as the light faded, looking down a big hole in the ground – the gorge below the lower bridge at the Falls of Bruar.
Today, whilst strolling along with Dog, I looked over some railings in the village carpark to another small gorge, and saw the cloud iridescence above me, reflected in a pool, the surrounding rocks draped with slimy green moss. How elegant…
Shades of pastel colours
Roadside Geranium
And why not? No need to multiply words of explanation. Just, roadside geranium.