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…
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.
We both came to a conclusion a fair few years ago that we were not going to waste money on little platitudes and trinkets simply because that was the expected thing to do. We wake up every morning and tell each other that we love us. We know it’s not all puff pastry and strawberries and we are comfortable with the gristly bits because that’s what life is.
I knew full well when I set the camera and flash up earlier that the “portrait” session that I imagined wasn’t going to be and I’m glad because this, is the real us. Random, chaotic, silly, unexpected and, for me, perfect… Apart from the belly, that belly needs to be dealt with.
And, just a side note regarding the tree, it’s our Lockdown Tree. It sits in our front window and the lights are turned on every morning and it will remain there until lockdown is over and things start getting back to normal and Sandie’s got a message to anyone who thinks it’s silly…
I love stumbling across little nuggets of beauty like this. It’s a tiny waterfall in a small, non descript brook not a million miles away from home. The icicles caused by the drops of water landing on blades of grass or twigs close to the babbling brook. We’ve one more day of these conditions before it warms up on Sunday and the drizzle returns.
That said, tonight is looking clear and there’s no moon so I think a trip up the hill is on the cards. time to crack out the bear suit methinks…
There are those who think February is the darkest of months, everything dead, grey and cold. Alright, it is bloody freezing here at the moment but dead and grey, never!
From the copper orange of last years Beech Tree leaves (technically dead but definitely not grey) to the vibrant green of the moss that covers the woodland floor and here and there shoots of new growth poking through the leaf litter, ready to embrace the warmth when it finally arrives. Add a little smidgen of snow and there you go, three seasons in one day.
“Hello All!” He yells into the dark void that is the internet. “How’s the last few years been for you guys?
Been a bit of a ride for all of us yes?
I know I’m a bit late to the WordPress party with this one but I’ve decided to start on another 365 challenge for 2021. Just a simple task of posing one image a day that has a positive effect on my life. That could well be an image taken that day or maybe one from the archive that brings back good memories or thoughts.
So far I have managed everyday but have been publishing the posts on my Website, focalthingy.com and then sharing the image to my Instagram feed and Facebook page with limited success and then as I was editing todays image I thought about my WordPress page, the original go to for my first 365 challenge in 2016 and I though, what the hell. Let’s give it another go. So, here I am and here I’ll be for the next nearly 11 months and knowing me, probably more. I will leave the old archives up but there may be a few missing images as I make space for the new. I am sooo bad at housekeeping, you should see my image files…
In the meantime, I’ll post a few of the images I have blogged to date on this post and start afresh tomorrow. It’s great to be back!
Focal Thingy 