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.