A hell of a hair cut
Some days are better dull – lighting wise – in order to catch colour and shape and cut out reflection. This is the first of a group of brightly coloured/contrasting items in bloom at the moment.
Walk: 25th May 2013
First warm and sunny day
Depart: 10:00-ish GMT
swirls of light and colour
very shy wild goats and max zoom
the flying saucer has landed
the end of an old friend
light and rust
out with the old
in with the new
broom-broom
pathways
wonder plant
logging track
curl of wool or goat possibly
bells and styles
- long shot down into valley bottom
At which point the battery died
Journey’s end: 12:30-ish GMT
Spring’s trying to get it all sorted in one go
Spring had barely started when May arrived and now, just as the month comes towards its end and the longest day is galloping over yon horizon, everything has gone mad in a grand effort to catch up. Almost more green than the eye can cope with. And, of course, so much cleaning and weeding to be done
Round the corners
The photos are in the order of walking around our small cottage garden
- Total white-out of the foreground – where’s the sunglasses?
- Clematis on the ramble
Clarity, perceptions and colourisation
Original photo of late autumn fields and stone wall
Greyscale of original colour with histogram adjustment
Above two layered together with colour layer ‘multiplied’ and reduced
Which one seems clearest to you? Each has a different mood, but in which of the three does the wall and trackway in the foreground seem more ‘immediate’?
BTW, is anyone else finding they can no longer set their images to enlarge as before without having a website address to host them? Or set the order of images in the ‘attachment’ link? What am I missing in this ‘new’ image arrangement?
Late afternoon walk round the walls
We didn’t travel widdershins
Berwick-upon-Tweed has Elizabethan walls which make a handy circular walk. So that is what we did, taking random photos of views both in and out of the circle as we wandered round. It was a clear afternoon, around 15:30, with low, bright sunlight, making shots to the west flare and bringing out amazing colours and shadows all round. We used the Canon Ixus 60 but it was hard to see what we’d captured at the time. All subsequent damage to photos by way of selection, fiddling cropping and adjusting, is down to me.
Let’s not beat about the bush, I’ll start with my favourite shot of the afternoon – out towards the lighthouse, towards the end of the walk.
It’s a fairly long shot, though not the longest of the day, and, although a little grainy, has a lovely colour quality. Couldn’t bring myself to crop the bottom of the image of excess sea as was taken with the shading of the water and the three verticals together travelling up and across the image.
Being fairly high and steep ramparts, there are railings hither and thither to prevent folk tumbling off. Sadly it hasn’t always worked.
Walking up to one of the bastions (gun emplacements) and looking back over the river – made me think of the 1950s - photo taken by Steve
There really is a need for railings – here they’ve gone curly on themselves – photo taken by Steve
The fencing here brings to mind an attack of hiccups in an ironworks.
And then there’s always the serpent bench in the sky – not actually on the very edge of the earthwork
Or it could be an odd pair of spectacles with built-in gum guard – it all depends on your point of view
These benches occasionally congregate looking out to sea.
Talk about a long shot – you can just make out Bamburgh Castle on the horizon to the far left of the commemorative beacon basket
Bamburgh Castle is something like 12-16 miles away I reckon. I cropped a large tree off the left of the image behind the branches of which you might just have been able to make out the vague shape of Holy Island with Lindisfarne Castle some 8 miles away too, but that would have taken even more of the eye of faith.
Late afternoon autumn sun lighting up the upper windows of the Cromwellian Parish Church
Walking the early evening footpath
Berwick’s layer cake of bridges come in to view as we circle back
And then there’s this:
Where once was a cinema/theatre is now waste land – you should always take danger notices seriously …
because …
… you never can tell what you might come across – photo taken by Steve
After the bracing walk, the drive homeward to the hills – shot displayed as taken
Related articles
- Today’s News: Guild of Freemen call on council to mark historic Berwick event (journallive.co.uk)
Dusk on the move – 35-40 mph
Passenger – grainy shots through windscreen
Hackneyed shots/hackneyed collage
Particularly fond of the whole plastic look of the windscreen curve on curve with reflections above/below
Short-term cobweb memory – corny but oh, so true
Where did I put the book to get the camera to take the picture … ?
(Yes, it’s another cobweb picture. And I will clean my windows.)
The alarm went off at 05:30 today, (don’t ask) so I get’s up, have breakfast, and take the last morning beverage to the computer.
Come 8-ish, I’m thinking I should be getting the day wound up and on the move here, probably starting with a general bathroom call: in fact definitely starting with a general bathroom call.
A not so memorable sequence
(please feel free to take notes)
I drop into the bedroom, early morning reading matter in hand, (yuk, I know, already) to gather up a good, scratchy bath towel (I like them that way, not your soft ‘n fluffy sort – but that’s a different problem), and in order to do this the blinds need raising to cast some murky morning light on the towel hunt. Up they go and there, framed against the sky, is the above item.
Camera! Return with camera; take picture; start morning revving-up process once more.
No book.
Where did I put the book to get the camera to take the picture to get the towel to go to the bathroom with?
Hunt the memory cells
- I mean book
Step retracing on a major scale. Twice: thrice.
That general bathroom call becomes more, well more … .
I tell self that I’m not allowed to go to the bathroom until where I put the book is remembered. Can you believe it that I’m actually channelling my mother over when I can go to the bathroom? And I’m older now than she ever reached (bless her heart).
Time to take a breath. It’s a book and it will turn up: and then, headless chicken time passes and there it is.
All I had to do was get hold of the idea of really looking and thinking in a co-ordinated manner. Easily said – rarely the first ‘port of call’ when misplacing the bits and bobs of life. All because I failed to watch what my hands were doing whilst my mind and feet were heading off, with urgent purpose, somewhere else.
Anyway, it was happy and safe and had taken up temporary lodging with the towels.
And the minute I touched the book I remembered putting it there. Honestly.
Now, just where did I put the camera?
It’s about light and shadow
Eye brain interpretation
As some of you may know, I spend a good deal of spare time building a 1/12th scale model set between 1450 and 1616 (theinfill). Attempts at figures have disappointed and been stripped down. I rarely post the same images to this blog, but I was taken by surprise by the subtleties of mood and expression that appeared in these purposely grainy photos and thought it worth the sharing.
These were taken in order to see how messy the detail still was and to try to judge the optimum lighting so as to add a little reality to the poor wee dummy and friend. (Must add dark colour to dog and do something with those horrid hands.)
Related articles – all very different and of interest in their own ways
- Broken Houses, Scale Models of Decaying Buildings by Ofra Lapid (laughingsquid.com)
- The Painted Lady Costume Ball (retailfix52.wordpress.com)
- Scale model of Borodino battle on display in London (english.ruvr.ru)
- One fan’s Giant labor of love: Retired grandfather creates replica of old Giants Stadium (nj.com)
- World’s Smallest Working V8? (foxnews.com)
A different view of the globe
Running against the tide
The Tweed is tidal and last night’s rain storm heads out to sea, as most of us do at one time or another, running against the tide.
Photo through arch of Jacobean stone bridge
The thumb print of the spider
A proper use for railings
A reduction/regression of treatment of shot taken into the sun
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Halloween in the Museum
Bit early with the Halloween around here?
Went away for a few days and took some shots of around and about. Still putting them together, but thought you might enjoy this one in the meantime.
Septembers and a contrast – around and about
Last year
Various experiments with photos at long range with and without zoom using point and click camera
On a gloriously sunny day, we went scrambling up Ros Castle (I mean why take the path, says S? Sheep tracks are fine. Sheesh – that depends on how long your legs are when scraping through the heather).
The colours, however, were wonderful.
Not as clear as it can be, but the soft colouring of the countryside was very comforting as the year turned to autumn.
This year
Heavy rain has filled the streams and rivers. None of them large, but they can still cause endless havoc when they flood. After bad flooding a few year’s back, earth barriers were built to protect the homes within reach of an overflowing river, and the bank edge was designed to give at a particular point further along to allow prevent a bottleneck, and let the water fill the farmland bottom.
This has worked but unfortunately higher up, banks are giving way and taking largish trees with them, causing further blockages and damage lower down. Today, tree clearing went on to prevent more trees trying to sail to the sea causing mayhem on their way.
Meanwhile, the river is ignoring the central span of the stone bridge and building an island for itself.
Related articles
- Weather: floods warning as rain sweeps across Britain (guardian.co.uk)
A moment to pause and breathe clearly in this often hard pressed world
Across from our small cottage garden is a country lane verge. For many years this was long grass and adventitious plants which tended to get used as a loo for every walked dog in the area, which was a ‘swine’ if you happened to be playing ball in the lane or wanted to talk to the neighbour over the wall. So one year we dug it up and I planted it with everything I could get my hands on that would spread and mix interestingly, in a vague hope that -
- the smellier plants would put the dogs off
- the semi-cared for look of it would put the dog owners off
The young fruit trees were eaten one hard winter by the wild goats, but on the whole, though not pretty, it has worked, and gives colour of one sort or another year round. It’s become a survival of the fittest amongst the plantings; is full of amphibians, and its growing chaos brings happiness to my life, blueberries and gooseberries in season and such strong herb smells that, every time I kneel down to see to any tidying up a bit, it makes me think of the line “ I know a bank where the wild time blows“.
Looking up the lane along some of the verge
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And on a different note, whilst I’m at it, another ‘share’
Occasionally we become temporary hosts to racing pigeons who stop off for goodness knows what reason. I suppose over the last 30 odd years we’ve had 10-15 or so.
The data we have for contacting local fanciers’ clubs to come and rescue the hesitant flyer is now out of date, and this pigeon has been here for 3 days and does not have the look of being on the move, more one of eying up the local ‘talent’.
I’m not usually one to share the moving and philosophical moments I come across, preferring them more as an internal experience. But on this somewhat fuzzy headed morning, whilst searching for websites to locate a local fanciers’ club, this link popped up – you may, or may not, have already seen it.
Can’t find a date on it so it may be old news. I hope it helps bring a smile to your day and apologies if you’ve already seen it, but you can’t have too many smiles pass through your life, can you.
Reblog:
Wild Rose Rescue Ranch – Noah and Bunnies
yes, it’s in Texas, but the Scottish pigeon club is spreading the word.
PS: no sooner had I typed this than away the pigeon flew. Hopefully that will soon be one relieved pigeon owner, but I hope the delay won’t bring ‘sadness’ to the life of the pigeon.
Centuries of the old and the new
Blackfriars – Newcastle-upon-Tyne
On the wander on Saturday and stepped into Blackfriars to refresh my memory of some of the old building’s details and keep my brain working on the period model I like to work on – see theinfill for more info. It rained a lot, so this ‘piece’ comes to you from your soggy (and now sneezy) reporter on a day’s escape to the big city.
Parts of the buildings date back to the 1300s and was in almost continuous use, one way and another, which is unusual as most monastic buildings seem to have been left to fall into disrepair after the Reformation in the 1530s. These buildings, and I think there was quite a development of them by the 1500s, were rented by the various trades guilds in the city.
“In the year 1552, the mayor and burgesses demised this house of Black Friars, (fn. 6) with its appurtenances, of orchards, gardens, &c. to nine of the mysteries, or most ancient trades of the town, at the yearly rent of 42s.; a ninth part to be paid by each company, to the respective uses of which were portioned out the several apartments of the monastry, with the adjacent grounds. This grant has saved the monastry from destruction; and though it has undergone many alterations, yet it still retains a considerable share of its ancient monastic character, as will be noticed hereafter.”
The only parts left that are based on some elements of the original buildings are around the cloister area, the entrance being through a long, arched passageway.
What is left is a jumble of the centuries, with sections altered according to the then current need.
Currently it is a restaurant and studios and showroom/outlets for various crafts.
The Dominican Friary Church is now a patch of grass with bits of masonry still in evidence, but, circling round to the right, on the far side of the Church site there are modern buildings designed to echo some aspects of period architecture.
Not so sure the contrasts in the modern arcade do it for me – possibly over-egging the pudding. The pseudo Tudor chimney is pleasant but somehow doesn’t ‘go’ with the roof – is it the shallow angle, possibly?
The theme of staying in tune with what used to be around is carried out in other new building too. Outside the cloister on the site where the Tanners’ building once stood, a modern arcade has been erected, with pleasingly varied arch heights and brickwork.
All this is on the edge of China Town with one of the main shopping and entertainment areas just round the next corner.
The mix and match and huge variety of history, people and place, brought back how much I do miss the city sometimes.
A potted Wikipedia history of Blackfriars Priory
Further elated article
- St. Dominic and the Friars Preachers (insightscoop.typepad.com)
