Bills Posts

Here’s the thing that I am about to do, is kind of blame other people for my rubbish photography, not the equipment, it’s the location. Invariably, the book or magazine you are reading will contain superb pictures, taken in spectacular locations at absolutely the right time of the day. They just make my pictures look utterly feeble. It’s not my fault that I don’t have access to the same wonderful locations that these famous photographers do.

Of course, it is all absolute bunkum. A bad picture is a bad picture, regardless of location, equipment or photographer, and I would be the first to say that the header picture is not a good picture – in my eyes anyway, exposure, lines, composition are all really not very good.

I would be very curious to know what potential a good photographer would see in something like this. Perhaps a different time of day, a different point of view may all offer potential for a better image. What about editing? That may allow us to do something with the location.

There is a whole range of videos on YouTube relating to photography in a small town. Mostly American of course, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, there isn’t (at least from a photography perspective) any difference between UK or US concrete, except perhaps scale. I have a habit of looking at the wide scene, perhaps if I focussed down on things and got in a bit closer, I would find scenes that are perfectly acceptable. It’s all down to the eye, isn’t? What you see.

There, it isn’t their fault at all is it? It’s me needing to get my seeing eye sorted.

Don’t look for a link between Portsdown Hill and the picture. There isn’t one. I don’t have a picture of the escarpment to the north of Portsmouth (at least, I think it is an escarpment – I’ll have to check on that). Anyhow, this hill; Portsdown is about 400 feet high. From the top of it you get an absolutely magnificent view of Portsmouth, Gosport & the Solent. There are several places for viewing, one in particular has a burger stand. The food they sell is excellent, every time I drive past, there is an large queue. Sometimes, I’ve even stopped to partake. Not tonight though. Tonight I was enroute to the radio club.

But, it being the 5th of November, I had not taken in to account just how popular this area was going to be for bonfire night. It was heaving. Traffic jams, people all over the place. It easily added 10-15 minutes to my journey.

But, I can entirely understand why it was like this. I reckon that the viewing point was not that far above the point where the rockets from organised shows, and especially peoples gardens would detonate. I can only think that the view must have been quite out of this world. To the point where I am considering joining the chaotic throng for next years event. Things had calmed down for my return journey about two hours later. But there were still fireworks going off. Best though to be there Early evening. That’s when things are really active. Interesting evening.

It’s been 84 days since I finished the project. Apart from one night where I got things a bit wrong (I think it was around 119/366, I am now well in to my second year of continuous blogging. Almost three months into it. I must admit some of these last 80 odd days have been difficult. It’s not so much writers block, and it’s definitely not – not wanting to do it. Sometimes a topic for the night just doesn’t come to mind.

Every Thursday night for the last few years – three to four I think it is, it might be less, I do the Isle of Wight Radio Society Thursday Night Net. It’s a radio net run over the IoWRS repeater at Ventor. Built & looked after by one of the club members it’s a lovely piece of kit. Going by the designation GB3IW. It has magnificent reach and that not withstanding the connection to a service called echolink, which allows licensed radio amateurs all over the world to link in and talk to anybody connected to the repeater.

It’s thursdasytoday, as I write this. The net is about 40 minutes to go before the net starts I think I have a topic. sometimes I can get to just as the net is starting before I think of something, and sometimes, it ends up as a “natter night” – anything goes. It doesn’t always have to be radio related. I’ll let you know how tonight’s net goes.

Let’s see;

• Black & White Photography
• Country Walking
• The Railway observer (RTCS)
• Dorset Life

These are the magazines that I subscribe to. Currently, I am reading the Railway Observer from the Railway Transport & Communication Society and Dorset Life.

With some degree of bias, I am happy to say that Dorset is a beautiful County, and I like to keep up with what is going on there. Ken Ayres is a regular contributor to the magazine. He is a very talented photographer. He and I used to be members of the same camera club, back in the 70’s. Apparently he still asks after me. The thing about the magazine is that it contains some seriously lovely pictures. I also especially like that in the front of each edition is a small map that marks each place mentioned in the magazine.

This months edition mentions places that I know very well. It’s really nice to be able to read about and see pictures of places that you know, but haven’t visited for quite a while. Some places I see several times a year, others I haven’t been to in literally decades.

This months issue in particular talks about Creech Barrow. I’ve lived pretty much in the shadow of this hill for many years. It always made me think of a volcano, of course it is isn’t. I think when I next go back, and I have the time, I would like to go up there again. One fact mentioned is around the clay that I knew was mined from under the hill, I hadn’t appreciated that the mining had caused the summit to drop by 4 metres.

The magazine also introduces me to new places and sights that I haven’t seen before. Some of them I most definitely want to visit.

OK, so I did this with as free iPhone app called Snapseed. It is Brilliant, I’ve been wanting yo do this for ages. OK it’s not perfect and it is a little bit fiddley, but I am very pleased with the result.

Tuesday Morning, I wake up, the heating hasn’t kicked in yet, so it’s quite cold in the room, but having put the winter quilt on the bed, that is very snug. Looking at the clock I have about 5 minutes before I normally get up for a walk, not really enough time to look at the news, it’s just a matter of laying there and watching the minutes flick across, and then it is 0535, at this point I usually have a little bit of an internal struggle, between my body, which really wants to stay in bed, and my brain which is quite keen to go for a walk. By now I’ve been able to hear if it’s been raining, so I am running out of excuses and i decide to get up.

Stepping out the front door, it’s the coldest it’s been for quite a while, but I look up, and have a beautiful view of Orion, that sets me off. It’s a bit of a brisk walk, and probably about 3/4 of a mile to the high street by the route I take, I have a look at my watch there to see how I’m doing time-wise. Getting on to the street any time between 0600 and 0605 is good, I don’t think I’ve ever done it before 0600, but that isn’t a problem. Unless I pause somewhere looking for photo opportunities, it probably takes me 7-10 minutes to get down to the waterfront. I’ll loiter here for a bit, there are usually two or three people whom I see on a regular basis and say good morning, and sometimes stop for a chat. Occasionally soembody will stop and ask me what I’m doing – I like that.

From there I will walk past Trinity Church up to the Cockle ponds, I pause there sometimes for a picture – the header picture was taken very near there. Usually there is some wildlife along these bits, typically squirrels. I’m waiting to see if the jelly fish come back to the ponds, but I don’t think that will be until spring.

Heading up South Street, I turn on to Stokes Road and start heading back towards home. All in, it’s a distance of about 3 miles, and is usually a very nice start to the day.

It’s a lovely blue sky in the picture isn’t it? Even the water looks. Relatively calm. Actually, it was quite breezy, the closest flag doesn’t look like it’s not that windy, but the flags a bit further down a really flying.

Yesterday, it was windy with heavy rain, it was really rough. I really love watching it rain and the wind blow. Sometimes, if it is not too bad, I even like to go for a walk in the rough weather, as mad as it seems.

Of course, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy the rough weather, forgetting that it doesn’t mean the same thing to other people. It appears that yesterday was one of those special days. Watching the forecast the forecaster gave a quick review of yesterday’s weather. We had our very own Tornado Alley. A wide corridor running north north east-ish of, for the UK, extreme weather. Looking at the map, the eastern edge of the bad weather corridor (and it must haves been bad, we were miles away, and it was rough here) is very close to my friend, another radio amateur.

90 mile an hour winds were recorded. This was sufficient to demolish Dave’s antenna setup. Now, that is something that we all dread, but to actually have it happen is very distressing. I just hope he is able to get it fixed quickly.

When we moved to Gosport, there was an excellent model shop on Stokes Road. It catered for every flavour of modeller that you might care to list. Sadly, it closed down a couple of years ago.

There is another model shop on Stokes Road, this owner doesn’t give the same impression as the first shop. That was brightly lit and well laid out and very well stocked.

The second shop is different, I have to admit that I have avoided the shop on the assumption that it was a gamers shop, and that there would be little of interest to me. The shop has a run down look to its window display second hand models, scratched and in poor condition.

Yesterday, I went in to the shop. I reckon I spent about twenty minutes browsing. I think a lot of it is second hand – that doesn’t bother me at all. I will go back. He has three boxes of matchbox toys (see the header picture), he’s selling them for 50p each. I could easily have spent a couple of pounds on each at Amazon, I bought a few of them – it was an easy win as far as I am concerned. Now the photo above isn’t veery good, there’s no context to the model. I need to build a diorama, it can be part of the railway layout. That is as work in progress. I have the N-Gauge figures I’m going see if they fit in.

This picture was taken from a part of Gosport that I have never visited before. I knew it was there but had just never managed to get around to visiting it.

Back in the 1800’s this used to be a very posh part of the city, it was very cultivated with lovely pathways for people to go for an afternoon stroll. Nowadays, it’s a very large open field nowadays with a couple of rugby fields and a play area, and is very popular with dog walkers and runners,

This is just around the corner from the park. I do know these and walk past these, they always strike me as being very Scandinavian in design, and a little bit unusual for the area.

Not a lot happening at the water front. Not even many people on the promenade. Still at just under five miles it was a very pleasant walk.

When I started doing the 366 exercise, things went OK for a bit, but I realised that I needed a routine for the writing. I’ve become very aware over the last couple of weeks that some of writings are quite meandering, and really not that good (well, worse than usual).

After 366, I said that I wanted to get to 500, not quite there yet, not far really. I’m thinking that I need to regenerate that habit. I know I laid out quite a few topics that I wanted to write about, and I’ve even added a couple, but I am only very loosely following it. I need to find that commitment again. I’m gong to put a bit of effort in to that over the weekend.

I didn’t go for a walk this morning. It was chucking it down. I didn’t feel guilty, and it was very pleasant to be able to get up a casual time and make a cup of tea. I did manage to get out at lunchtime I had a job I needed to do, and managed it so that was good. Luckily, as I was passing the ferry port I could see that there was a ship coming in, which at first I thought might have been the Commodore Clipper, but was mildly confused by the orange stripe over the bridge. This is where Marine Traffic would normally become useful, but strangely enough she wasn’t beaconing on AIS (it’s worth doing an article on AIS). Turns out to be the Arrow.

Now, I had originally got the Arrow down as a Reefer, turns out I should have looked at Marine Traffic a bit closer. It’s a Roll-on, Roll-off cargo ferry.

I have a bit of a dilemma, the Forton Bridge work should have finished by now, so I can start walking that way again. I could find out if the bridge is raised at specific times. I’d like to see it open. But, I also like waking along the waterfront in daylight, which my morning walks aren’t at this time of year. I shall take in turns.

I’ve just been looking back through my diary for 2021. It’s an A5 Day per page. I didn’t start it until later on in January, and initially I was putting a lot of information in it about the book that I was reading at the time, this was because during the 366 times I was fairly rigid in what I was going to write on any particular day, Books I am reading were written about on Mondays, making notes about what I’ve read.

This enthusiasm didn’t last long. By the middle of April things had tailed off significantly, and I was using the diary mainly to record my daily mileage for the walk1000. On the 19th of May, I recorded that wee had bought an electric car. Probably about a month ago now, we got the charge point installed, and today it was the turn of the smart meter. So, we are fully set up and running.

I’ve bought another A5 diary, I’ll probably carry on recording the mileage in the same way. It would probably be less wasteful to use a spreadsheet, I’ve done that before and it worked very well. I could do it again, I still have the spreadsheet, I could continue using it. But, I like the book form.

We went to a firework show tonight. It was busy. I dropped the family off so they could get in, and I parked the car. I arrived at the display just in time to see it end. I did have a good view of most of the fireworks in the air. It was amusing.