Watch It

This is an image of my maternal grandfather's pocket watch. It turned up whilst I was clearing stuff in my father's house.

I don't know much about antique watches, but I think I'm safe in my assumption that this one isn't worth anything. It doesn't even work anymore.

My grandfather was not a wealthy man - he kept a small grocer's shop in the south end of Liverpool for many years. He was deadly rivals with "Old Man Tushie" - Rita Tushingham's father, who had a shop on the other side of Whitehedge Road.

The shop belonged to my grandfather's adoptive father and on his death, my grandfather was forced to leave, buying a house nearby, which eventually passed to my father, and is the one that I'm now clearing.

Despite the fact that the house was completely renovated before we moved there, stuff that belonged to my grandfather keeps turning up. For example: I can remember that he had great bundles of pencils advertising brands which have long since ceased to exist, which he brought from the shop and kept in the understairs cupboard. That cupboard was cleared so that we could add a cloakroom sometime around 1980.

Yet there, in my father's desk tidy, the other day I came across a "Golden Stream" pencil. 

[It was a brand of tea, in case you're wondering. I would quite like to know when it disappeared as that would give me a minimum age for these pencils - there are a few of them knocking about.]

This is all part of the spooky afterlife of stuff that I've alluded to before. Things that we own gather round us, then escape, elude and outlive us to fetch up who knows where and when in contexts that we could not conceive of when we had the use of them.

My grandfather could not have imagined that one day I would photograph his watch and post the image on this blog - he passed away long before the Internet age dawned.

So that's my contribution to the Halloween festivities - the image of our future ghosts lurking around our possessions to see where they end up. 

Arty Artichokes

Yet another image from the archives. This time, its the spikes on an ornamental artichoke.
This image was made during the summer of 2011, which feels roughly like a million years ago at the moment. At the time we had several of these plants in a bed in the centre of our lawn. Subsequently, we moved them into one of the side beds and allowed the centre bed to grass over, although our son keeps on searching for treasure there and delaying the process. Most of the plants survived the transplant and one of them is flowering at the moment.

Like the previous image, this one graced my desktop, this time on my work computer. My previous employer had somewhat more lax cyber-security arrangements than the current outfit that I work for, and it was relatively easy to upload images onto their system and turn them into wallpaper.

Hopefully, I'll have some new images to post soon.

Hyacinth Bucket

I'm afraid that the image pipeline has dried up a bit recently. This is largely to do with the fact that my spare time isn't my own at the moment - I'm having to spend most of it sorting out my father's estate.

Another reason is the decision that I mentioned a few weeks ago, which involved swapping out my A100 for my A550 for landscape photography. The simple truth is that I haven't taken a decent landscape photograph since.

So, I've decided to present an image that I made several months ago - back in march in fact - whilst the hyacinths in are garden were in bloom. At the time, I'd decided to experiment with alternative tonings - other than my usual sepia tone, that is. The image itself was taken with a really shallow depth of field and overexposed to blow out the background and simplify the composition.

Unusually for me, I added a border. I had some intention to get the thing printed to fill a large green picture frame that we've have sitting empty for a while. The events took and unexpected turn and the idea was forgotten.

I still have the image as my desktop wallpaper, however. So maybe the idea will come to fruition sometime soon.

The Last of the Marigolds

Okay, honestly, this will be the last image of this summer's marigolds that I post. And I've managed to use an even weaker pun than last time, invoking J Fenimore Cooper's 'classic' novel.

I say 'classic' because my wife has read it and reckons it's really dull. She was expecting Daniel Day Lewis, however.

But I digress, although I'm not sure from what.

Anyway, yet again my pretensions have led me to desaturate the image, which is a shame when you consider that the flower is a beautiful, flaming orange. But needs must and all that.

So, with that, summer is over and it will be autumn when I post next.

A Pair of Marigolds

Can you believe that I created an image just so that I could use a really bad pun? And after I wrote that I wouldn't use any more punning titles.

Actually, I've been trying to find 'interesting' ways of using the many images that I've made of marigolds this summer. Generally, I keep a fairly strong distinction between my photography and any composited images that I may make. So this image blurs that line and it makes me feel uncomfortable. 

In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I delete this post fairly soon for that very reason...

Of Marigolds and the Moor

We've had some marigolds - one of which is pictured above - growing a troughs either side of our front door all summer.

Now, the environment at the front of house is surprisingly harsh. The area is open to the south, so when the sun shines, everything bakes. And when it rains, it is lashed in by the winds blowing off Mark Moor.

But these plants have survived and flowered all summer long.

In previous years, I've spent a fair amount of time making images in the garden. But this year time has been more limited and the marigolds have really been the only flowers that I've managed to photograph.

So here it is - the photographic evidence of summer, 2012 as experienced in our Somerset garden.

PS: I recently had an email from Ian Dart - link to his flickr feed above, do pay a visit - whose opinions I value on photographic matters. Ian was good enough to say some kind words about the image in my previous post, but he did take me task on the title, which is fair enough.

So, no more punning titles. Ever. Promise.

Plane Sailing

This is an image of a Record No 77A bullnose rabbet plane.

This type of plane was manufactured continuously between 1933 and 1994, although the example above was probably made in the late 1950s or early 1960s. However, the basic layout must have been in use for hundreds of years. As a piece of industrial design, it is flawless. It fits in the hand perfectly - being about four inches in length and just over a pound in weight.

The nose of the plane is removable - by releasing the screw that can be seen towards the top of the front elevation. This is to enable the user to work right into rebates or other awkward places.


The construction is of cast iron, with a tungsten blade. The cold, hard surface focuses your complete attention on the hand in which you are holding the tool. Your entire being is reduced to your mind, your hand and whatever lies in between, connecting the two.



The Record trademark - shown in the image to the left - is printed into the leaver cap. This adds to the tactile experience of using the tool, as the letters press against the palm of your hand.

The fact that this particular plane has been used is evident from the image - you can see sawdust gathered in various nooks and crannies.


In fact, it belonged to my father. After his death, I found it in the house rather than his workshop. It is likely that he used it in the days just before he died. The man is gone, but the object endures and it falls to me to decide what to do with it.

As you my gather from the above, I have a certain affection for it. But if I keep it, I won't use it and it will rust in a draw. But getting rid of it feels like some sort of dereliction. He spent time and money and took care to assemble his toolkit. Now I have it and I don't need it but I can't free myself from the associations that it holds.

Goodbye to the Gardens of Wales

OK, this is the final image that I'm going to post from the session at the National Botanical Gardens of Wales. This is because there aren't any more images that are good enough to post.

Its a dahlia - that much I know. In the flesh, it was deep orange, but I've done away with that using the channel mixer, for the purposes of servicing my pretensions.

Something different next time, then.

Visit to the Great Glasshouse Part II

Ah, the joys of having 24 Mega-pixels to play with.

This is another image from my visit to the National Botanical Gardens of Wales and specifically the "Great Glasshouse". Within, the plants are arranged into beds of varying depth and width. I had my 50mm prime with me so shooting flowers in the centre of the beds was a challenge.

But high pixel count saved the day!

The image is the result of a rather severe crop of the original photograph, but I still have plenty of resolution left, so hurray for Sony and their mighty Exmor sensor! 

Visit to the Great Glasshouse

As promised, an image from my visit to the Great Glasshouse at the National Botanical Garden of Wales.

This is obviously of some sort of succulent - I've no idea what. I should say that I've no real interest in the plants that I photograph beyond their sculptural or other photogenic properties.

Plants, especially flowers, are also very useful for highlighting transience as a central subject of photography. When you look at a photograph of a person who is unknown to you, you speculate as to when the image was made and where that person is now. Their mortality is a central issue here - you're trying to judge, for one thing, if that person is likely to be still in the land of the living. However, unless there is strong internal evidence in the photograph, speculation is all you have.

With a flower there is no room for doubt. That organism will have inevitably perished and the image that you are looking at is the only record of the short period when the bloom was at its best. The epitome of transience, captured forever(-ish) by the power of photography.

Bank Holiday Boar-dom

On August Bank Holiday Sunday, we visited the National Botanical Gardens of Wales. This was supposed to be the answer to the question "what activity would suit a five year old and a seventy-eight year old?". In the event, my mother-in-law chose not to accompany us, so it had to suit a five year old and two grumpy forty-somethings - which it did, to an acceptable level.

The image above is of the gardens' wicker figure of Twrch Trwyth, the mythical great boar hunted by King Arthur, which is probably emblematic of the Saxons. Its about seven feet tall at the shoulder and stands at the top of a slope above the ice house, which my son was investigating whilst I was photographing.

I took my Alpha 77 along for the trip, with my 50mm lens attached, as I was expecting to do some macro work - which I did, later in the afternoon - rather than landscapes. So, getting this image involved some pratting about on the slope to get the composition that I wanted.

The weather was good, but a bit windy for making images of the planting and, yet again, I'd left my tripod at home. However, the place boasts a "Great Glasshouse" and I spent some time in there, the results of which I'll post shortly.

Pensford Revisited

Another image from the Pensford session described in my previous post.

The viaduct itself runs more or less due north-south and I was there in mid afternoon with the sun in the south-west. I approached from the east and captured this image as I passed through one of the arches, moving on to make the image that I posted previously.

The ground beneath the structure is boggy in places and heavily overgrown with nettles and thistles. As I'd been in work earlier in the day, I was wearing a light linen suit which proved no protection, so I was stung and scratched incessantly - suffering for my art, for a change. 

Synchronicity

I've intimated before that, in my view, landscape photography and a paying, nine-to-five job don't mix. This is for the simple reason that, when the right conditions for the image that you have in mind occur, you're generally sat at a desk. And if not, you're doing one of the many other things that your job displaces to those times of the day that are best suited to photographic pursuits.

Recently, however, circumstances conspired in a way that enabled me to make the image above, which is of the railway viaduct at Pensford. I had a couple of hours free on a Friday afternoon and the weather was - almost - perfect. Bright, with broken cloud, which was sufficient to diffuse the sunshine, although the wind was slightly too strong.

So, having found somewhere to park in the village - not easy - I made my way along the footpath that leads into the valley beneath the viaduct and spent about thirty minutes photographing the structure and getting stung to death in the process, before my phone rang and my life reasserted itself.

There are a number of good images that resulted from this jaunt. To be fair, if you can't get something with this sort of raw material then you may as well hang up your camera. This one is my favorite. Its a sort of poor man's HDR, which uses a single image processed as two or more layers. I'm rather pleased with the method that I used to generate the layer mask, which involves making a threshold copy of the image, leaving a black outline of the ground and the viaduct on a white field. Creating a mask from this is then a matter of a couple of minutes work.

This image - and the others that I post from this trip - will probably be the swan-song of the Alpha 100. The Alpha 550 is - all sentiment aside - a much better camera. Apart from the additional 4 Megapixels, it has much improved viewfinder coverage. So today, I swapped the Tamron super zoom to the 550 and that will now go with me on my expeditions, such as they are. 

The Pathetic Fallacy

Oh dear, here comes the obligatory sunset photo.

Recently, I found myself at a loose end in Liverpool. The family had been safely packed off back to Somerset and I didn't feel like hanging round my father's house. So, I set off with my camera and followed my nose to the river.

I have a strong sense of connection between my family and the Mersey. My grandfather sailed down it and away to travel the world. My father was a diver in it, then he worked in the shipyard on it. So there was some sense that the images that I was capturing were in his memory, hence the title of this post.

The camera in question was the new Alpha 77. My memory is that I had my 50mm lens with me - which is not the best for landscape - but that's not what the EXIF data on the RAW file says. Again, no tripod. Sometimes, I wonder why I bought the damn thing.

As you might expect in these circumstances, most of the images where useless, but I quite like this one. I've tried to make a mono image out of it but it looses something, so here I am again, presenting a colour image for your consideration. Normal service will be resumed soon.

A Study In Imperfection

Still going through the holiday snaps. This is another from the National Wildflower Centre.

Unfortunately the petals at the bottom of the image have drifted out of focus. Such is life. As I've already written, I wasn't carrying my tripod.

However, I can't resist the colours and the light in this image - I don't normally post colour images, but I had to make an exception in this case. The bokeh is quite nice as well.

Karate Smarties

I've been promising myself that I'd write a post about karate, so I've decided to hang it round the image above. I am the model for the foreground figure, by the way. It's a heavily processed photograph that I took with my father acting as photographer's assistant. The background was generated from vectors and images of a Shotokan tiger and some Japanese characters that I had lying around. Compositing was performed in GIMP.

And, to be clear, the whole thing was conceived as a joke - Che Guevara meets Bruce Lee.

I joined Speke SKC on the 12th July 1984. This club was run by Jimmy Poynton - Bob's younger brother - and met at the community centre behind the Austin Rawlinson swimming baths. From there I went to Poynton SKC when I started work in Stockport. I'm afraid to say that I can only remember the instructor's first name as being Tim. This was a satellite of the Manchester University club run by Gary Harford.

In 1992 I moved to Stoke-on-Trent and – after a short and best forgotten stint at Staffordshire Uni with Ray Garside - started training at the Newcastle Under Lyme club with Steve Hulson. Whilst I was there, I passed Shodan, which was awarded to me in March 1996 by Sensei Keinosuke Enoeda.

In 1997, I moved to the South West and joined Glastonbury SKC, where I still train. (Despite being one of the longest serving club members you won't find me mentioned on their website for reasons of intra-club politics and my own refusal to engage.)

All of the clubs mentioned above were affiliated to the KUGB. In 2003 Sensei Enoeda, who had led the organisation since 1967, died and the KUGB split. The Glastonbury club went with JKA England, under Sensei Enoida’s assistant Sensei Yoshinobu Ohta.

Unfortunately for me, all of these changes coincided with my attempt to pass Nidan. I can't say that this is the only – or even the main - reason why I struggled to pass. But suffice to say that I finally scraped through in March 2008 after several unsuccessful attempts and a couple of years of sulking during which I refused to attempt the test at all.

Even allowing for this, I was sorry to leave the KUGB. As an organisation which numbered world champions amongst its members, it was remarkably tolerant of those of us who just wanted to potter away at club level. Generally speaking, you could ignore the wider organisation and they would respond by treating you with benign neglect.

Not so JKA England. As a much smaller organisation – at the point of the split around a third of the KUGB’s original membership found themselves in JKA England – money is much more of an issue. This means that members get chivvied into attending courses, taking grades and so on, when some of them would rather be left alone.

This is especially true when you consider that the teaching at some courses – national and international – can be perfunctory or even whimsical. I once spent half an hour watching a senior Japanese instructor organise a class into rows to his own satisfaction, whilst the students all got cold and bored. I don't remember much of the rest of the session, but I have the distinct impression that I didn't learn much.

And there is no room for any martial arts organisation to be complacent. With so many different martial arts to choose from these days, there is strong competition for students. Off the top of my head, I can think of karate, taekwondo, kickboxing, kung fu, judo, jujitsu, and aikido all available in the local area. And that doesn't count the different styles of each art and the various organisations within each style. For instance, there are at least four organisations that I know of representing the Shotokan style of karate in the South West.

I find it very hard to explain to those outside the martial arts community why this is the case – although the underlying causes are those old culprits, money and ego - and how it is that my grade isn't recognised by any of these organisations other than the JKA. Strangely, we don't advertise this balkanisation to new students.

I think that Shotokan – and, by extension, traditional karate in general - is a tough sell these days anyway. Its not hardcore enough for the MMA and full contact nutters but too challenging for the gentrified/hippyish, tai chi types. That doesn't mean to say that it has nothing to offer, I just don't know who it offers it to.

Consequently, I find it hard to feel positive about JKA England, the future of Shotokan or my place in it.

So, If you're considering taking up karate, I would have to say “Don't bother!” If you want to learn to defend yourself, take a self defence class - you'll find it much more directly applicable anyway. If you want to get fit, go to the gym - karate is too anaerobic to burn fat. And I'm sure that there are many other approaches to personal improvement that don't involve pratting about in your pajamas.

Here endeth the rant.

PS: Rob Redmond has a website which offers an alternative perspective to all the hagiographic material on some of the other sites that I've linked to in this post. For example, at the time of the KUGB schism he wrote some very solid analysis of events which is worth reading if you're curious. BUT I would advise against reading any of his posts on other subjects – especially politics – as they're risible in the extreme.

Happy Holidays

I've been on holiday with the family, hence the recent lack of posts.

Whilst we were away, we spent a happy afternoon at the National Wildflower Centre. And I bet you can't guess - unless you've just followed that link, of course - where it is.

No, its not the most obvious place, is it?

Anyway, the place is rather overgrown and unkempt and I still can't decide if that's because of a deliberate decision to cultivate windblown flora, or if they've just let the place go a bit in the current economic slowdown.

This post represents a couple of firsts. For one thing, the image above was captured with my Alpha 77. All images posted previously have been taken with my Alpha 100. Tell me you can spot the difference. Please.

And its also the first of my macro work which I've posted.

Given the constraints, the results aren't bad. I wasn't carrying my tripod - a mean you don't on a family day out, do you? - so I was shooting handheld, and the sunlight was very bright. But I managed to get a few images when the sun went in. I was probably the only person there hoping for a few clouds. Then, I ran out of space on my memory card and I'd made the beginners mistake of leaving my spare in my other camera bag.

Never mind, time for tea and cake in the cafe!

Early One Morning Part II

Cheddar Moor and the Mendips, July 2012

Some of the images that I've posted previously had been hanging around for several years, but this one was made last week.

There have been a series of gorgeous, misty, summer mornings here lately and I promised myself that I'd take my camera with me on my journey to work. However, I made the mistake of waiting until I had enough time on the clock to allow for the required delay. So inevitably, on the appointed morning, instead of the picturesque mist we had a dull, gray fog. Crossing Mark Moor, visibility was low, with the sky invisible. As I passed Wedmore Low Grounds, Nyland Hill was totally obscured and I'd pretty much lost all hope of getting anything worthwhile and had decided that I wasn't going to bother stopping.

However, just after Cocklake the fog started to clear and as I came down onto Cheddar Moor, the Mendips could be seen as a faint horizon line to the north. So I stopped at the end of Canal Drove and made a number of images, of which this is one.

This demonstrates why I'm not cut out to be a landscape photographer. I'm just not dedicated enough to get up early on my days off, so I'm always going somewhere else in a hurry when these images present themselves.

As an aside; In processing the image, I discovered that the sensor on this camera - my old Alpha 100 - really needs cleaning. I had to spend an inordinate amount of time with the clone tool to make the sky and hillside presentable. I must admit that I've had this camera five years or so and I've not cleaned the sensor once in all that time. But then I don't have a large number of lenses so I very rarely change them, I just pick up the camera with appropriate lens already attached.

Blast From The Past

The Mersey, looking downriver from Otterspool,

Christmas Day, 2005

This post brings together a couple of subjects already mentioned in other posts - namely, What I Did On My Christmas Holidays and Liverpool.

In 2005, in a break from our usual routine, we decided to spend Christmas in Liverpool. I should say that this was a couple of years before our son was born. The need to get out of the house hit earlier than usual - Christmas afternoon, to be precise - and we ended up at Otterspool Promenade. Obviously, we'd had to get through dinner first, so it was approaching sunset when we got down there.

When we arrived, the river was completely still - no tide, no wind, nothing. My father, who spent many years working on the Mersey - or more accurately under, as a young man he was a diver - said that he'd never seen it like that.

Fortunately, I had my camera with me. At that time, I was still using my first digital camera, a Fuji bridge model. Its traditional to report that this was a great little camera and that I wish I still had it. But that's not quite true. Yet again, a technology company had modified one of its products to make it less functional than it might have been. 

But no matter. I got a couple of nice images, of which this is one.

In another link to my father, the building that you can see on the skyline is Camell Laird's shipyard, where he also worked for a number of years as a cabinet maker. I can't imagine it being possible to have such a varied working life these days, but maybe that's just me and my blinkered view of the world.

Hey, That's My Home Town...

Liverpool from the Mersey, May 2011

I may have mentioned that I come from Liverpool.

I made the images that became this panorama during a visit to see my father at the end of May 2011. We took a trip on the Mersey ferry (and yes, they do play that song - constantly), had a ride on the Liverpool 360 and did all the touristy things, ostensibly for the benefit of our son.

I like the fact that the Three Graces aren't front and centre as in every other photo of the waterfront. The newer build has more prominence and you can just about make out the Albert Dock on the far right.

I know that panorama creation is getting to be a standard feature of many digital cameras. However, like many technologists, I'm a Luddite at heart (and a bit of a freetard) so I used Hugin to create this. It's based on the Panotools library, which was originated by a bunch of heavyweight German mathematicians, so it must be good.

I have very early memories of traveling on the ferry with my maternal grandfather, who would take me out and about during the summer holidays. I can remember the old wooden landing stage, with the massive tires lashed to the side. This was replaced some years later with a concrete platform, which had an alarming propensity to sink in rough weather.

The concrete stage is still there, but the whole of the Pier Head has been redeveloped and you'd have to be blind to say that its not an improvement. I haven't made it to the new museum or the Open Eye Gallery yet, but I guess I will one day.

Cameraphone Capers

Wells Cathedral, 7th April 2012

Several months ago, I was agonising about buying a compact camera. I tend to find that a DSLR is just too big, noisy and downright intrusive in certain situations, so I was seriously considering the purchase of something more discrete. However, I'm really attached to using a viewfinder, which very few compacts have. And to add to my indecision, I was tempted by the various mirrorless systems that are around at the moment, especially the Olympus Pen.

[Despite the fact that my all DSLRs are Sony, I didn't like the look of the NEX system cameras, which shows you just how much of a fashion victim I can be when it comes to technology. To be fair, if Sony had decided to use the A-mount on its NEX cameras, that might have swung things back in their favour with me. However, I'm sure that there are good, technical reasons for going with E-mount. But I digress.]

Anyway, when I changed jobs recently, I had to return my company mobile phone. So, after many years of pay-and-go making do and a few years without any phone of my own, I went out and bought a contract. Again, I used my heart rather than my head when making a purchasing decision and came back with a Nokia Lumia 800.

The Lumia has a fairly decent 8 mega-pixel camera built in and I've found myself using it quite a lot for happy snaps of my family. Controls are limited and the shutter lag is horrendous, but it does the job and I always have it with me. It has, in fact, filled the need that was driving me to consider a compact camera. I've tried presenting this to my wife as an overall cost saving, but I don't think she's convinced.

Over the Easter holiday, we went to the Bishop's Palace in Wells and I managed to leave my camera bag at home. Wandering about after our son, who was absorbed in the Easter egg hunt, it occurred to me to try my camera phone on other subjects. Whilst he was busy with the dragon's nest in the orchard, I made the image above.

I'm not going to pretend that this is how it came off the phone. I colourised the image and adjusted the brightness of the sky in GIMP. But the phone made a good job of the exposure without any help from me. The finished result isn't the best photo I've ever made, but I find it quite pleasing.

This tends to support the hypothesis that the compact camera market will be eroded by camera phones until, in a few years time, we will be left with a three tier market: camera phones at the low end; mirrorless systems in the mid range; and full frame DSLRs and medium format at the top end.

Actually, my view is that the DSLR is a dead end in design terms which will be obsolete in a few years time, but that's a subject for another post.

Early One Morning

Tuesday Morning

I get up early. No, whatever you're thinking, its earlier than that. God knows what I do with my time, cos I don't get into work all that early. 

There is an upside, however. Twice a year - March and September, say - I get to see the sunrise on my way to work. Flexi-time means that, if you stop and get your camera out, you do so on your own time and haste is never conducive to good photography, but at least you're there and it's always an option.

Earlier this year, I started a new job, which meant a new commute and a whole new set of scenery to take in. My new journey is longer - about 30 miles as opposed to 15 - and more varied - the levels, the Mendips, the Bristol conurbation - than the old.

The image above is my attempt to capture some of that variety in a single shot. 

Our Broken Workflow

My digital workflow is broken. I can still process photos, but only just. How this happened is a salutary story regarding the pitfalls of relying on free software.

A few years ago, I got fed up with Adobe and their business practices. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a freetard. I fully accept that Adobe has every right to make a profit on it's intellectual property. But…

I shoot in RAW format because I've read all the magazine articles telling me that it's the Right Thing To Do. I used to use Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) as a Photoshop plugin, to perform the conversion. This worked fine until I upgraded my camera. Then, I needed a later version of ACR and guess what? To run the new version of ACR I needed a later version of Photoshop.

Now, there is no technical reason for this; Adobe has hardcoded a check to stop later versions of ACR running with earlier versions of Photoshop simply to force users to upgrade. And that was a big ask when I'd just spent all my hard-earned cash on a new camera. This is especially true because, as a photographer, I don't get much out of the newer versions of Photoshop. The version I was running was fine for my needs, but I was being made to buy a costly upgrade.

But what could I do?

Well, what I did was to opt out of the Adobe consensus and adopt GIMP as my photo editor.

For those of you who don't know, GIMP is a fully featured photo editor which is free to download. If you haven't tried it, I recommend that you do, and then try to justify your next overpriced Photoshop upgrade to yourself.

But what about RAW conversion? Wasn't that the deal breaker with Adobe in the first place? Fortunately, there is a GIMP plugin called UFRaw, which works much like ACR with Photoshop.

So, for a couple of years Ive been happily working away using freeware throughout my photographic workflow. All the images that I've posted on this blog have been processed in this way.

However, two things happened recently that disturbed this halcyon situation. Firstly, I bought a new camera. Then I upgraded to GIMP 2.8.

The second of these issues bit me first. As soon as I'd taken the upgrade, UFRaw stopped working. I was without my usual RAW conversion facilities for a couple of weeks until I had chance to surf for a solution. Happily, the GIMP user community came up trumps and a quick reinstall of UFRaw later, I was up and running again.

But not for long. When I imported a file created on my new camera, I realized that it had a nasty colour cast and was actually unusable.

To be fair, I had an idea that this might happen before I bought the camera. UFRaw hasn't been updated since April 2011 and uses an old version dcraw, so I wasn't all that surprised, really.

OK, I thought, I'll install RAWTherapee. I'd auditioned it a few years ago before choosing UFRaw on the basis of its integration with GIMP and I knew it was a good piece of software.

But no! RAWTherapee won't install if you have less than 2Gb of RAM on your PC. I'm using a five year old machine, and only have 1Gb, so no joy there. I have to say, as an ex software developer, I find this to be a very strange choice. Normally, you state the minimum system requirements for a piece of software and then let the user take the consequences of ignoring them.

So, I've been forced back on the conversion software that comes in the box with the camera, which is a bit of a let-down to say the least.

I'm left waiting for an upgrade to UFRaw (come on, guys!) to solve the installation issues and incorporate the latest version of dcraw. In the meantime, I'll probably audition some other freeware converters, Scarab Darkroon being the most obvious choice. If anyone has any other suggestions, they'd be most welcome.

PS: the title for this post is a weak pun around the name of Icelandic miserable-ist beat combo Our Broken Garden. Check them out if you're in need of a wallow. 

Other Voices

Recently, friend and former work colleague Ian Dart got in touch. Ian is an accomplished photographer - despite the fact that he's gone over to the Dark Side (i.e. he shoots with a Nikon) - with his own style and an eye for the shots that I always miss.


Ian's partner, Kate Rattray is a very fine mosaic artist who has contributed many pieces of public art, one of which is currently on display in Wells - its the swan outside the solicitors office in the market square, if you happen to be visiting.


There's a link to Ian's flickr feed and Kate's website in the new "Other Places to Visit" section of this blog and I recommend that you give both look.

Kilve at Christmas

Kilve, Boxing Day 2011

Another landscape that I've struggled with for a number of years. Just to prove that I'm versatile, its a coastal landscape this time, although we're still in Somerset, at Kilve. The beach there boasts exposed rock strata not dissimilar to those found on the more famous Jurassic Coast.

Over many years, we've fallen into a Boxing Day routine, verging on becoming a tradition. Desperate to get out of the house, in the afternoon we drive down the coast, park by the tea rooms and walk along to the beach.

There, its always cold, usually raining and generally a bit bleak. I fiddle with my camera, everyone else gets bored and fed up, so we walk back the car and drive home in time to continue the sedentary pursuits and overeating that we'd ventured out to get away from.

Boxing Day 2011 was no different. Myself, my wife, son and father drove down there and behaved much as described above. Unlike previous years, when we'd taken the coastal path, we decided to make our way down the beach. This was a foolish undertaking, given that the "beach" is strewn with large boulders and we were trying to negotiate them with a four year old and an octogenarian in tow.

So we gave up as it started to rain, but not before I made the image above, which is the only halfway decent shot that I've ever taken of the place in our many years of going there. If you use your imagination, you can see the above mentioned rock strata in the foreground.

On the way back up the beach - which took a while - I made this image of my father, which now seems significant and prophetic. 

At the time though, he was just getting a bit fed up with the three of us prating about risking broken limbs on a public holiday and decided to set off back to car as soon as he saw us returning.

I suspect that our Boxing Day tradition may fall by the wayside -  for a year or two at least.

Winter Sun on Shapwick Heath

Winter Sunshine on Shapwick Heath, 22nd January 2012

I've been trying to photograph the landscape of Somerset for a number of years now, without much success. I've come to the conclusion that this is because, at some fundamental level, I don't understand this countryside.

I should say that Somerset is very different to the landscape that I grew up with and the ideas that I received about what constitutes natural beauty.

I come from Liverpool and spent my childhood and youth living in an urban environment. Family holidays were spent in North Wales, Scotland and the Lake District. Grandeur - at least the British version of it - was the aesthetic that I was taught.

Those landscapes still speak to me. I hadn't been in any of those environments for a number of years until I visited Cumbria late last year whilst working and I was surprised at the strength of my emotional reaction. This was underlined when I found old holiday snaps in my Dad's house, recently.

Back to Somerset and a walk in the Shapwick nature reserve on a sunny day in January, during which I captured the photograph above. Perhaps it was just a fluke or maybe I'm beginning to get the place, but I think that this image is different to my previous efforts and signposts the way forwards when I come to point a camera at the flat, open spaces around here.

Munari Schunari

Recently, I read "Design as Art" by Bruno Munari. Now, one of the things that I find really irritating is when I buy a book which purports to be an original work by the author, and it turns out to be reprinted journalism or other "collected writings". And so this volume turned out to be. My chagrin wasn't lessened when I found out that Munari stated his central premise (that form should follow function) in the first few pages, then proceeded to reiterate ad nausiem.
Munari was also a terrible futurologist. I soon realised that any sentence that started "The home of the future will have..." would end badly. If he had been correct, we would all be living in traditional Japanese style houses, projecting coloured patterns onto our walls for entertainment. Thank God we invented the interweb.
However, tucked away in one of later chapters was a description of how to create Moire patterns using grids of squares or other geometric shapes. Munari wrote about using transparent slides and an overhead projector, but the thought struck me that these patterns would be very easy to creat digitally using an image editor.
So I had a go and the process turned out to be quite addictive. Three of the best patterns are shown above. They're not very original - there are probably countless hotel lobbies with floors tiled just like these, but experimenting is fun and distracts me from some of the other stuff that's going on in my life.
I'll continue with this until I get bored and/or run out of inspiration and I may post some more patterns if they're presentable.

The Lesson of Landscape

Burnham-on-Sea, February 2010

Photography has taught me that the same moment never happens twice. This may be self evident to most people, but it was in attempting to photograph the landscape that I understood it at an intuitive level.

You may think that the scene that you're photographing is pretty prosaic and that, if you don't get the shot this time, you can return and take it again.

Wrong.

The photograph above works because of the way the clouds mirror the curve of the beach. That won't happen again, and if it does, I won't be there to see it.

The name of this blog is a corruption of the saying that "you can't step into the same river twice". You can't capture the same light twice.

I find this thought comforting when I'm following my usual routine and one day feels much like another.

Dad

Charles Edward Williams

1930 - 2012

RIP