A juxtaposition.
In 1875, local blacksmith John McWilliam presented Stranraer with a well/pump, originally installed near his forge on Sun Street but now moved round the corner to Lewis Street.
In the background, there’s the peculiar architecture of council accommodation. A grim grey desaturated processing seemed appropriate…
At a guess, I’m assuming the dental practice that was here has moved on.
Perhaps the NHS should update their webpage, although the banner image serves to illustrate the former glory of the building.
Am I elegant enough? Am I?
It’s been a hard day for Dog – no bed (been cleaned), chasing birds and playing in the garden.
Presumably the gravel is warm, but how on earth does he find it comfortable enough to snooze on?!
Having discovered one or two people on Blipfoto who use it, I’m finding intentional camera movement (ICM) interesting as a means of artistic expression.
I make at least one photo per day; a few weeks ago I settled on wiggly wednesday as a theme – the results arising from multiple images taken with random camera movement, chosen for their visceral response, blended together and toned black&white as always. Making it a “Wednesday” thing is a great way to balance exploring the effect regularly with not overdoing it to the point of boredom.
Anyway, this morning I discovered it’s also viable on the mobile phone – in low light of a dull day among the trees its automatic exposures were long enough to let rip and see what happened.
(two frames blended in the Gimp and toned and processed in Darktable).
I did only say this blog would be mostly mobile photography. Time for something a little different.
Thanks to a tip-off from a Facebook page and some friends in Leeds, a couple of nights ago I watched the International Space Station passing overhead for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect; the magnitude (-3.0) hinted at it being “incredibly bright”, and indeed so it was. Bearing in mind I had no idea what to expect, the less said about those attempts at photographing it, the better.
But last night, I investigated further using Heavens Above and saw another passing was scheduled for 2329hrs. Seeing the weather conditions were favourable, I chose a location toward the top of a nearby hill and stood around to wait.
Approaching from the west:
disappearing toward the east:
Some notes on the image processing:
The approach image comes from 6 frames at ISO800, f/4, 14mm, 15s each, taken in quick successsion; the departure image used 12 frames at ISO800, f/5, 29mm, 30s each. The high ISO was chosen partly in order to give me a chance to compose and track, partly to ensure the ISS showed up bright against the background. Both apertures are fairly wide to maximize the light captured yet give a reasonable depth of field in the landscape given the wide-angle focal lengths in use (I had pre-focussed the camera on infinity half an hour before setting out). High-ISO sensor noise is thermal and therefore random; however, long-exposure sensor noise gives a fixed pattern of hot and dead pixels. Therefore, by keeping the exposures short at 15-30s I was able to pan between shots, aiding the composition (the ISS’ path is subject to slight changes at the last minute), meaning all pixels could be calculated from more than one image with spatial offsets – stacking reduces image-noise. Finally, I took a dark frame (with the lens-cap on) to record the actual noise profile.
Initial RAW conversion used RawTherapee in order to subtract the dark-frame; images were stitched together using Hugin and enfuse biassed toward image entropy for high quality landscape and sky tones; because the averaging process reduced the intensity of the ISS’s track, I further blended the intermediate aligned images using ImageMagick and the maximum operator and overlaid the results selectively using the GIMP. Final colour toning and spatial control (high- and low-pass filters) was done in Darktable.
Update 2013-06-18: the approach photo is now available for prints or download at 500px.
Time for a bit of a rant, geek-style.
For about 15 months I’ve used a Samsung Galaxy Note as mobile phone of choice. And truth be told, I’ve hated all bar the first 10 minutes of it. The lack of RAM has made me reconsider what apps I use, favouring Seesmic for combined Facebook+Twitter over separate apps; it still makes it horrendously slow for running anything interactive – as an example, by the time I’d got the thing unlocked and fired-up HDR Camera+, a rainbow had entirely gone! Spontaneity, we do not have it.
What they don’t tell you is that the leverage available when coupling these large screens with tiny thin USB connectors is a recipe for disaster. I’ve bent the pins on more cables than I care to think, trying to wiggle the thing for optimum solid connectivity; just before Christmas last year it finally died and the internal USB connector broke, requiring a repair under warranty – the first time I’ve ever had to send back a phone to be fixed.
Anyway, yesterday evening it threw a hissy-fit and spontaneously discharged the battery all the way down to empty, despite being plugged in (and, given that the wiggly-connector issues seemed to be returning, I made doubly sure that the power icon said charging). I recharged the battery overnight with the phone turned off, and yet this morning it still refused to boot up. It did something like this a while ago, and leaving it overnight was sufficient to reset itself; today, it’s had all day and still isn’t powering on any more.
So this morning I dug out my old HTC Hero, the first Android phone I ever used, and flashed it with CyanogenMod and updated the radio package. After a bit lot of faffing around, hunting and installing SSL root CA certificates to allow it to talk to Google and rebooting, I’m now powered by a custom ROM and sufficiently uptodate that Google Talk has been replaced by Hangouts. Yay, geek-cred!
The Samsung problem might be as simple as a dead battery; however, after the Christmas fiasco I really can’t be bothered trying to fix it any more and will look forward to getting something better later in the year.
Unfortunately it means a few changes on this blog; the camera is down from 8 megapixels to 5MPel and I won’t be shooting with HDR Camera+ or processing images on the phone with Aviary any more. Still, it does work for capturing the odd image and I can achieve some suitably strange processing effects on the notebook with darktable if I want.
Meanwhile I’m back getting my communication and maps on the go again. And the Hero is living up to its name.
Big Sky minimalism strikes again, as is its wont in Galloway. Nothing but blue sky, green grass and leaves and white wispy clouds.
Curves :the road ending away into the distance beneath white fluffy cloud
Well, for small values of infinity, anyway. Can’t beat a brisk roadside walk with the dog in such sunny weather as this 🙂
In the course of this morning’s walkies, Dog & I passed a police van with blue lights flashing, finishing-up at a small scene of wayside destruction.
I’ve been mulling over the nature of interactions with road users for a few months. Every day, we walk along roads (single-lane A- trunk and B- country, such as this), all national speed limit (max 60mph for cars). Being dutiful citizens, we tend to follow the Highway Code and stroll along the right of the road facing into oncoming traffic, as one might expect.
Being logical, I like to think in terms of a table of combinations of possible encounters:
So, what combinations constitute the happiest encounters? To be clear, I don’t find comparatively high speeds inherently worrying – otherwise I wouldn’t walk beside roads with a 60mph limit; within reason, driving briskly only minimizes the encounter time, which is fine – we’ve all got places to go. I do find it horribly rude when drivers slow down so much and stare, as though Dog & I were some kind of roadside exhibition for their tourist pleasure, especially if I’ve paused to let them pass – it’s a presumption on my time. Considering the combinations of possible action and response above, I notice that happiness is maximized, not in simple direct proportion to the magnitude of a gesture (a wave beats a nod, etc), but rather when a gesture is present but middling (pulling out a yard beats overegging it and crossing the white lines to the other side of the road – what kind of an obstacle am I?!).
Those are the minutiae of decisions. Returning to the bigger picture, to reduce encounters to a simple matter of speed and law would be to neglect a vital other dimension: in acknowledging when other parties show consideration, however small, we acknowledge their humanity. We do not exist in islands made of metal boxes, but we live in relationship to a community of all road users; therein enjoyment can be found.
Evening scenery: gently undulating landscape and fluffy white clouds in a big blue sky.
Dratted non-native invasive species, the rhododendron. This one seems to have flown a little too close to the bonfire, unfortunately.
Dog’s favourite position – the maximum bright sunlight for optimum pose factor. Please excuse the garish stripy carpet.