Bills Posts

I know that I wrote about the morning walk only a few posts ago, and here we are again, but this is a slightly different focus.

There are things about each walk; some never change, others are never the same. When I stepped out the door for this mornings walk, the chilled are made appreciate that I wore a fleece. A lovely blue sky, streaked with high thin clouds brightly lit by the rising sun promises a warming walk.

Especially the the skies are never the same. Sometimes, as I am walking toward the waterfront, I can lighting and clouds that I know will give a good picture. Of course that will change by the time I water front. Sometimes, you arrive at the waterfront with the clouds just right and that gives you a lovely sky.

Sometimes I see wildlife. Of course, there are the birds. The morning chorus is always different. This morning, there were a couple of crows on a roof shouting at each other, and I can usually hear the magpies shouting to each other. Then you get the more cheerful birds, blackbirds, robins, sparrows and starlings who always appear to be chattering.

Over the last couple of mornings I have had the delight of seeing a vixen with her cubs. Just lovely, and highlight the always changing content of the walk.

The iPhone 12 has an excellent camera. It has three lenses, each with a zoom factor; 0.5 (wide angle), 1 (normal) and 2.5 (zoom). The phone also has the facility for a 12x digital zoom. Now, there are times when I do use the zoom, but it becomes very useful obvious, very quickly that there is no way that the camera at 12x digital zoom can give images anywhere near as sharp as a proper lens. The header picture is taken with my nikon, using the 18-400mm lens at the top end of the zoom,

I bought the nikon at least 6 years ago because I had always wanted to own one, it didn’t matter that it was pretty much bottom of the range, and an entry level camera – it’s a Nikon. I love it. But then the quality of the phone cameras has come on in leaps and bounds, and the phone slips in to the pocket, and doesn’t need an awkward strap to carry a heavy device (that does the strap a major injustice. It makes it a lot more comfortable to carry).

I took this picture this evening, 12 times zoom, actually, it looks pretty good. I’m going to start carrying the D5300 more so that I get the advantage of both.

It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, carrying the DSLR with the 18-400 lens, and a good shoulder strap. There is no doubt that the camera produces a better quality picture than the iphone, but I don’t wish to run the phone down, because the camera is really good.

Todays writing is about this mornings walk. I wanted to do some video so perhaps an little bit stupidly, I got up at 0500 and got out really early. The light was really nice. I like the header picture because if the way it shows the tower blocks receding in to the distance and daylong with the light showing the colours makes for a very pleasing picture. THe picture below appeals to me because of the golden colour of the building contrasting with the blue sky, along with the detail of the brickwork and shadows just gives me a warm glow.

For this next picture, I don’t know what the ball shaped objects is called in the context of being part of the structure (I’m pretty sure it’s not just a ball, actually having just looked at the definition of a finial, which is what I thought went on the top of a building it could be one of those. I must admit I did think about taking our the CIA box and cable. They are distracting, but also add to the character of the picture.

Going out with the SLR was really good today, and one that I am keen to repeat. It may become a regular occurrence. I need to play more with the various modes to refresh myself and become much more comfortable using the camera. The only issue is that for my facebook diary, I won’t be uploading the pictures until tomorrow.

Oh Well, it’ll be worth the wait.

For two days now I haven’t gone for a walk, although I did get out for a brief cycle ride this afternoon to Alverstoke. I’ve spent a bit of time in the garden, clearing up the spilled birdseed and cutting the grass, I’ve done the ironing and last night we went out for a lovely meal, I do like Chinese food, the curry sauce with onions in is just devine.

That I haven’t been outside much for two days means that I am having a little bit of a problem with the writing. One of the YouTube videos I watch regularly is Kim Grant’s visualising Scotland. She is an excellent photographer, and produces a regular video that is always very good to watch.

I have gone on so much about my desire to produce a vlog and have yet to do something about it. I have been shooting some video in the mornings, but it is very much me to the camera, just trying to get used to talking to the lens and they aren’t for publication, but mostly I’m having a problem of thinking about what I want to produce. Perhaps it is a bit like the process I went through with building my confidence to be speaking to camera, or taking strange pictures in public. I barely give it a thought now and I should just get on with it.

One of the books I am reading at the moment is Platform Souls by Nicholas Whittaker. The book describes his life, the part I’m reading at present, as a kid. Some of the antics he got up to were, to be honest outrageous. I had no idea of the depths of devotion that kids had towards spotting trains.

These days, to see a steam train in action is a novelty and if I want to see one I have to travel to somewhere like the Watercress Line which really isn’t too far away, but sufficiently awkward that it isn’t something that I do very often – in fact, at the moment it’s once a year. This is a part of my radio club activities.

What I would really like is easy access to a railway line that that has plenty of train movements, and it looks like Eastleigh might be good. Now, it’s really further away, 20 miles, than I would really like to drive, but it is less than half as far aways as Alton, and because Eastleigh is a mainline station, the selection of train types is bound to be greater than a heritage line, acknowledging the absence of steam.

So, what this is leading up to, is my inclination to say that I may go and spend a little time at Eastleigh, just to watch trains. I’ll think about it and let you know what happens.

I’m a nosey person. I like to know what is going on. I also like to help. I think that’s where my involvement as the Exhibition Secretary at the St Neots Camera Club started it all. I quite enjoyed doing that although it got a bit stressful at exhibition time. So many people wanted a good show. What helped was going to standardised frame size. Initially frames could by any size which made allocating the limited display board much harder.

Volunteering has been something that I want to do, but almost every time it ends unsuccessfully, by me walking away. I’m on two committees at the moment, but I won’t be on any by the end of the year. I think that’s the end of volunteering for me.

That sounds a bit final doesn’t it? I must admit that is how I feel at the moment. Certainly I don’t want a role with too much responsibility. I’ve had enough of that. For the time being at least.

There is a lot of wildlife in town, birds are mostly easy, they are everywhere, there are the really common ones; starlings, pigeons, and I’d say sparrows, and I use the word common in that there appears to be a lot of them.

At the back of Trinity Church there a load of pigeons and squirrels. It’s always nice to see them. I keep on meaning to take food to them, but I never get around to it. Perhaps that’s a good thing – I’d for them to get dependent on me, and I need to recognise that I can’t feed them all.

Then, I get to the car park near to the cockle ponds and I see these two beauties. When I first saw them, they were playing around. They stopped playing as soon as they saw me, and started moving to the far side. Then they just sat there staring at me. For about a minute I did the same. It was lovely to see them.

I took this picture because I wanted to talk about the window, not because I was particularly interested in it as a picture.

But the more I look at it, the more I like it simply because there is so much character in the window. What I wanted to talk about originally was just the shape of the window.

I like the way the birds are caught in the pane of glass, the dilapidation of the window frame, it looks like a full on rot at the bottom of the frame.

This is obviously a very old window. Unfortunately, of the several books I have about the town none of them have a picture or refer to it (there is a similar window further down the high street which is mentioned). I like the way the relatively modern technology of the CCTV camera and the cable intrude in to the picture and that it is above a popular barbers.

One of those pictures that you expect nothing of, which then turns into a bit of a gem (the object that is, not my picture.

Whilst out for my morning walk this morning, I was very aware that over the last few walks I had been thinking about video and to a degree taking photos as quick grab shots that were both dissatisfying and did an injustice to the hobby.

The epiphany (and really it was a realisation rather than a dramatic discovery) was that I was looking at things in a slightly different way. Looking at things like the bricks in the header picture. I took this picture for two reasons; I quite like the squared aspect, and I thought it might be interesting in black and white.

With this next picture, the textures of the path and the bricks appeal to me, and when connected with the slightly blurred background, which acts a slight distraction, all combine for to make for me a picture I like.

I think it’s worth talking briefly about my use of black and white; when I first started photography and started doing my own processing, it’s had to be B&W because of cost and complexity. Unlike the digital world where producing a B&W picture, is almost literally just down to flicking a switch.

This picture appeals to me because of the sweep of the curve, and it’s receding in to the distance. I think that in both this, and the two previous pictures are more suited to B&W mainly because the colour of their alternates would be a distraction, and would lose some of the texture.

I think the epiphany was to realise that I can photograph anything like this because I like it. You might not. This is a bit like my view on art; I think it has changed a lot. I’d even go back as far as Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII – commonly known as the pile of bricks bought by the Tate in 1966. I can remember the fuss that purchase and the piece of art itself caused. When somebody now starts criticising art, my first response is pretty much to ask what is the story behind the art; what is the artist trying to say? Now, I might not understand it myself, and why should the artist provide an explanation? I would try to come up with my explanation. Which the chances are will be rubbish. Getting a bit deep here. Need to think about this.

When I was 9 or 10 years old I spent a lot of my summer holidays in Swanage. I would do a lot of walking, the lighthouse, Durlston and the Globe, Peveril Point, the pier, and very occasionally,, the amusement arcades, when I could con some money out of my Mum.

Up on the Downs, as I think they were called, I would walk out to the Weather station and look longingly through the fence at the various instruments. Just occasionally there might be a band performing in the bandstand, and then of course, there is just a bit of lounging around.

And then I almost forgot the bowling green. Very often there would be a bunch of mature ladies and gentlemen, dressed very formally in whites, pushing little black balls across an immaculately manicured lawn. I would watch this until my attention span lost the plot, which was probably about as long as it took me to walk around two sides of the bowling green.

Today then, for the first time in my life, I picked up a bowl, and rolled it along the green of a bowling club. Actually, I did it quite a few times. Some of the similarities between Golf and Bowls are that stance is everything, the swing is everything, and for every excellent shot, there are several tens of complexity rubbish attempts.

We were invited to an open night at a local bowls club. We have access to four sessions before we walk away or join.

I’ll let you know how we get on.