Your choice, top of the hill or Ursa Major. I chose the top of the hill.
Why not end the weekend the way I started it and to be honest, the logistics of getting any further elude me for now.
It really is not lost to me how lucky I am to have this wonderful hill literally a stone’s throw from my back door. Okay, it’s no mountain but we all can’t live on the slopes of Ben Nevis and honestly, the wee beasties would bug the hell out of me!
It’s been a great weekend with some great weather and I got lots and lots done. I’m genuinely tired and looking forward to my pit!
Here’s to the week ahead and now that we’ve got Fool’s Spring out the way we can get on with Second Winter, Spring of Deception, Mud Season (my particular favourite) and then actual Spring…
A proper catch up would involve a beer garden, some sun, a cold pint of Thatchers for me and probably some hoppy real ale called Bishops Fidget or something like that for him and as we move through the year that date is getting closer and closer.
I did however have a chat on Telegram this afternoon with me old mate, Michael Beecham and it’s always good to catch up.
A little bit of history, Mike and myself met up back in early 2018 at a small show I had in a local gallery. Mike lives locally and had been shooting a project called The Downs which focused on the local Downlands around Mere. A couple of months later we had a joint show at the same galley with his prints taken from the aforementioned project and also where Michael sold his first print quickly followed by many, many more.
And he’s continued to create some truly beautiful work which you can see on his website michaelbeecham.com and also now, you could pick up one of his prints from his new Picfair site michaelbeecham.picfair.com which we spoke about at length. So much so that I’ve just signed up myself.
It’s going to take me a bit of time to get the site set up but that’s future blog post gold there so, keep an eye out.
Oh, and a little PS, if you haven’t signed up with Telegraph yet, do it! It’s like whatsapp without the FB shenanigans and add me, my numbers on my contact page.
This is an image I made with Michael at the above show with three of his prints from The Downs Project.
Should I have put that bit before the image? I think I should have put that before the image… Oh well, too late now.
Hunky Punk is Somerset dialect for grotesque figures and carvings on old buildings. Many mistake them for Gargoyles but gargoyles have a specific purpose of draining water from the roof through its mouth or other orifices… Look them up, some are hilarious! Hunky punks are just there to look, well, a bit rude really.
The ones pictured are on the tower of St Mary’s church in the small village of West Knoyle in Wiltshire. The place where I grew up. Years ago I was told that the Hunky Punks were placed there by the stonemason involved in the building of the tower in the 15th Century. The vulgarity of the sculptures depended on the reliability of the financer of the build to pay, often a local landowner or lord and the tighter they were the ruder these sculptures became.
This turns out to be one of the many theories there are surrounding these figures and why the adorned so many of our old churches. Pagan influences similar to the Green Man carvings that can also be found on many medieval buildings. Or to represent the evil of the outside world and remind the parishioners that salvation was just a short step away from their terrible gaze.
Personally, I like the tight sponsor theory, a poke in the… um… eye to the lorded gentry from the stonemason, I bet they had a blast thinking them all up over a pint or two of scrumpy!
But I kind of got distracted… We were blessed this afternoon with some phenomenal cloud formations blowing in from the South. Apparently, the jet stream is influencing our weather at the moment and dragging warm, moist air up from North Africa and Spain. Now, I’m no a meteorologist but I do know where we are in relation to the South Coast and it seemed to me that the clouds were forming as they made landfall.
And yes, I do see the face. That’s the thing with pareidolia, once you’ve seen it you can’t ever un-see it but that’ll be a subject for another post. What it is though, is a great segue to what I was originally going to blog about so there might be an additional post later, Maybe…
There is a site on the internet that contains a description of every single second of your life and mine and everyone who’s ever been born. You know that roll of your eyes that you just did when reading this thinking, “bloody hell, here he goes again talking bollocks!” That’s in there too!!!
If you don’t believe me go look! And feel free to cut an paste all of this text and it will be there, written even before I’ve imagined what tripe I’m going to type and somewhere, within the library there’s a much better written blog than this.
There’s the letter you wrote to your first true love that you tore up, scared that you’d make a fool of yourself. That resignation letter where you tell your boss what a complete knob he’s been. Yep, that’s there too.
The thing is, the alphabet and it’s 26 letters is a closed system. If you were to generate completely random combinations of these 26 letters somewhere within the output would be, as proven by the Library of Babel, every combination of those letters including my blog, your love letter and the shitty response from your boss. It’s the infinite monkey cage on acid made real and it lives on your computer and that’s fantastic!
Now, I suppose I should shoehorn something about photography into this…
Capturing light is not a closed system, sure photos can look like other photos but, fundamentally, every single image made by cameras, phones or what ever instrument you want to make images with create a unique, never to be repeated record of the photons that fell upon the sensor at that specific point in time you clicked the shutter. And that, for me is the most beautiful thing about photography.
Image made during some beautiful light upon Mere Down this evening.
One from the archive tonight. I did have visions of a Sahara dust sunset but unfortunately that was defiantly not a thing this evening because of the cloud. I think we’ve got a couple of days of the dust before it’s gone so fingers crossed for some favourable conditions .
But that did get me thinking about what you can see in the sky when the conditions are right though and to be honest, there’s shed loads. I mentioned a couple of blogs ago about Betelgeuse, 650 odd light years away, part of the Orion constellation.
We’re also now, in the northern hemisphere, into into Milky Way season, the galactic core peaks above the horizon for a couple of minutes at stupid o’clock at the moment but as we move into the summer that becomes earlier and longer and well worth finding somewhere dark just to experience it. The south coast in Dorset is perfect, no land for miles so no light pollution and a beautiful coast to explore!
But, for me, the most mind blowing object in the night sky I’ve ever photographed has to be the Andromeda Galaxy. Best seen during the long dark winter nights looking North, just to the left of the Milky Way’s back yard and about the size of the full moon if seen on a dark night. Once you do a bit of number crunching it tends to make your head hurt… Well, it does mine.
It’s 2.5 million light years away that’s 1.47 x1019 Miles that is it’s a f*ck ton of miles away but you can still see it. To add a bit of context, in this image, Andromeda is the large, slightly blurry “star” in the middle left of the image. 99.stupid amount of 9s% of all the other stars in the image belong to our galaxy and are a fraction of the distance from us compared to Andromeda but for us to travel to even our nearest star, Proxima Centauri at the speed of light would take 4.22 years and for the fastest man made object to date, the Parker Solar Probe, top speed of 13,411 km/sec it would still take 100 years… That’s just mental!
Basically, all I’m saying is step outside when you can and look up! It’s phenomenal!
Image made in Borth on the West Wales coast in early January 2020.
That’s a massive positive thing that I’ve always taken from photography. No matter how much you know there is always something else to learn and with some thinking, some practice you get the result that you can actually see, look at and then think, what could I have done better / different?
Take tonight’s shot, just a simple set up of camera, tripod, cheap off camera flash (OCF), some A4 paper and a bowl of water on the table. There are levels of technicality that you could go into but, as I said last night, I’m a lazy photographer so simple is best in my mind.
I was lucky enough to hear a talk a few weeks ago by photographer Janet Miles about her creative work using shutter speeds and OCF and there was one bit that stuck in my mind that I really didn’t know before the talk. I have used flash in the past with varying levels of success but the one thing I did not realise is that when you have the flash set in manual and reduce the power it’s actually the duration of the flash that changes. Now, there are those of you who are going to say “Duh! Yeah!!” and that’s cool but I really didn’t know this. Janet’s revelation and then explanation on how you can use this fact to freeze movement blew my mind so today, I thought I’d actually give it a go and now I’m hooked! So be prepared for dunked strawberries and rubber duckies over the coming months!
Setting were: 1/250th sec, f/9.0, ISO 100 and shot using high speed burst mode. flash et to 1/128th power (because the flash is using minimal power you’ll get a lot of flashes to shots before the flash needs to recharge.) Use manual focus and before introducing the drops put you finger in the scene where you think the drops are going to land in the water and focus on that, once focused make sure you turn AF off so the camera doesn’t try to refocus then, shoot away and have some fun!
You can find a more technical explanation of the power / time effect of modern flashes here
I am, on the whole, a lazy photographer. Lots of my landscape work is shot from about five feet from my car, if not out of the drivers window but every now and then I will put a bit of effort in. This could be going for a walk or even climbing a hill or, like this afternoon, moving furniture.
We don’t live in the largest of houses and making room for a shoot is not the easiest things to do but I thought I’d give it a go and maybe get some still life images of some flowers I bought Sandie yesterday. The light from the large window on the back of the house was soft and defused. It’s been overcast here all day so there was no direct sunlight which was perfect. So cue moving the table across the room and placing a couple of chairs on top to drape the backdrop across. Lesson from this set up, turn the chairs around so the backdrop drops straight down and you don’t get a ridge reflecting the light upwards…. Noted!
Place the flowers that have been perfectly arranged by your loving wife, she’s very good at that. Close the curtains on the other window in the room to make the interior dark to get the fall off of light across the scene and then set up the tripod and have a go!
I did try a couple of shots with the Hassalblad that I’ve very kindly been lent by Jon Edkins at David Wiltshire Photography It’s such a lovely camera but man, the minimum focus distance for that wonderful Carl Zeiss lens is miles, talk about up against the wall! But I managed and I think I’ve finally worked out how the light meter works too! We’ll find that out when I get the film developed.
Then a couple of shots with my trusty Nikon, f/9 to get it tack sharp all the way back, 1/3 sec on a ten second timer so there’ll be no camera shake, ISO 100 so minimal noise in the blacks and then crop the hell out of it because you know, clutter! Like I said, it’s only a small house.
Focal Thingy 