Bills Posts

I’m not really sure what the problem is. I certainly have more than enough equipment. I know it isn’t just a matter of setting up and starting recording. Whilst I could do that, with no preparation, and no real subject, it would be an incoherent production.

There are then, two issues preparation and subject. Preparation means scripting – what am I going to say, and where am I going to say it. More importantly, what am I going to talk about? Whilst I never talk about it here, I am interested in politics. I thought I would get hold of the minutes of council meetings of the 1970’s and talk about them, and how things have changed. I then thought that it would be awkward as there would be people involved that would still be in the area. I don’t want that.

There is a period during the 1880’s – 1900 when it was quite interesting here. It was the incorporation into a borough of Gosport and Alverstoke. I don’t think I am understating things to say that it caused a bit of strife. Now I do want to research that, so I’m wondering if there are council minutes from then. Also, there is a Hampshire paper, I think it is the Hampshire telegraph -you have to pay a subscription to get that, but that’s OK.

Well, as you can see, I have been thinking about it. I just actually need to get up and do something.

I don’t know how many pictures I’ve taken this week. I’m willing to bet that it’s not far short of 100. That equates to three rolls of film. The last time I shot a roll of film would have been the early nineties. Between 1992 when I left Berlin and when I acquired my first digital camera – way before I got my first mobile phone with a camera. I don’t even recall having a camera, but I must have done.

I was out for my walk and just as I turned on to the High street a small car pulled up outside a shop. I hadn’t noticed that there was a person sleeping in the doorway. The driver of the car is the owner of the shop. He shouted at the rough sleeper “Hey You.” Of course, the sleeper had to move. I didn’t stay to see if there was any kind of confrontation. But I felt for both the sleeper and the shop owner. Who would have either of their problems sets in these times?

I have this feeling that none of my writings this week have been difficult to commit. No sense of Writers Block. This is obviously a good thing. But at the same time I don’t feel that any of my writings have any kind of sense of adventure about them. This coming Monday’s article will delve in to that a little bit, I have been thinking about the book of the week since I read the introduction. It isn’t really a book, more of a pamphlet. I’m not going to say any more about it at the moment.

In the meantime, I want to briefly talk about a film; The Monuments Men. Hugh Bonneville plays an officer on the British Army, whilst searching for a piece of religious art he gets shot. There is then a breakaway to read a letter he wrote to his father. i will try and find the words, but I thought the letter was beautiful. I know it was only theatre, but it really did quite move me.

The picture is absolutely nothing at all to do with the weather. I took it this morning, and with a little bit of cropping, I thought I wonder what that looks like In B&W? I have to say I quite like it,

OK, perhaps I should give you one which does bear a passing resemblance as to how things were this morning. Rascal, my elderly cat decided that he wanted a bit of attention at around 3AM this morning, so he plonked himself on my chest. I say that because the disruption to my sleeping pattern meant that I awoke at 0533, and had great difficulty in rousing myself two minutes later to get out of bed. Looking out the window, seeing a clear sky with the sun rising and some rather nice colours meant that the best of thee dawn would be past me by the time I reached the waterfront.

They were, but that didn’t matter. There was a slight chill in the air. I always look at;

http://www.Gosportweather.co.uk

I have no idea who runs it, but it seems like a very professionally run site. Anyhow, it was telling me that it was 3.8C outside at 0550, cold – balaclava weather, especially if there’s a breeze. Which as it happens, there wasn’t. By the time I arrived at the water front my handheld anemometer was telling me it was 7.5C, so it had warmed up quite a bit, but there was still a chill in the air. Lucky, there was no wind. I think the windchill would have been biting.

This unfortunate squirrel had a bit of an accident. I heard a crack, and then the sound of something soft hitting the ground. This squirrel had fallen with a branch out of the tree from at least 15 feet off the ground. I was concerned for it, but luckily it picked itself up and ran off, so I guess it was OK.

Once again, a lovely walk, that I am glad I made the effort to go on.

Two photographs for you;

Same Camera, same time, same picture. The first picture taken with the iPhone in Live mode. Those brief few seconds of movement that are Live don’t translate across to WordPress, so you can’t see the movement.

Live mode on the iPhones camera has always annoyed me, I’ve never seen the point of it. Until last night that is.

https://secure.iphonephotographyschool.com/iphone-photo-academy

There was a clip on FaceBook how to do long exposures with the iPhone. The iPhone can’t really do long exposures. There are two basic things I didn’t know; 1. In live mode, if you keep your finger on the button it records video – I didn’t know that. When you take a live video and pull it up, it displays adaptations that can be done to the picture, repeat, round and long exposure.

Whilst the iPhone can’t really do long exposures, it is a very clever piece of kit and can merge the multiple frames of a Live Photo into a long exposure. The first picture is the original Live Photo showing the ripples. The second is the long exposure where the ripples have been smoothed out. I just did not know it could do that. To be honest, I’m quite impressed.

I am now looking for opportunities to explore Live Mode.

Not a picture of the waterfront, about halfway down the half of the High Street on the left hand side as you are walking towards the waterfront is St Mary’s church this is where the Magnolia tree is growing. A Magnolia in mono seems just about right.

Without driving anywhere, there are only a couple of walks that I can reasonably do that end up somewhere interesting. Obviously, the one I do is the most obvious with what realistic the most interesting visiting point; the waterfront.

Then I could do down to the “Iron Bridge”. Down the footpath that used to be the railway track to Stokes Bay. Getting to the Iron Bridge offers a couple of photographic opportunities, but not very interesting from a shipping point of view, well non-existent really. Still, if the sun is right, pictures can really be quite nice.

Another route would be go to Weevil Lane. The first few hundred yards have only St Georges Barracks which in their own way quite photogenic, and you end up on the bridge at Forton Creek. Its’ a bridge can be raised to allow small boats through – I’ve never seen the bridge in its raised state. I’d quite like to see that.

There are a few routes that don’t go anywhere near water, I could explore some of those from a historic point of view. There’s quite a lot of history just on the Waterfront. I’m not sure I’ve finished exploring that yet.

It’s Magazine Time again, issue 250 of B&W Photography turned up last week, and I have spent the last few days reading it with pleasure – I must admit I didn’t enjoy No. 249 as much as this one. Don’t know why.

There were several pieces, apart from the news and the general articles that I enjoyed reading this month. It’s interesting to discover how professional photographers have coped with the lockdown. Understandably some have not enjoyed it, but others have engaged in projects. Starting on Page 8, Alys Tomlinson describes the project “All Dressed up and nowhere to go” produced a series of pictures of students who would be missing out on their Prom, and demonstrating their strength and resilience as individuals.

It’s not often that B&W photography does not feature an article on Street Photography, this month’s is no different; Daydream Believer by Luc Korea’s takes us through the streets of New York. Whilst I am glad that Gosport is not as busy as that great city in the current circumstance, I really must look for more opportunities for street photography, I am sure they are there.

The article by Tim Daly “Forgotten Icons” is a walk through the sculptures and scenes of different locations. Politically sensitive; statues portraying literary giants, forgotten propaganda and a colonial past now mired in controversy – I really am not going to go there.

All of it made for a fascinating read.

I’m not going to leave today;’s piece without a comment on the iPhone. It has a feature called live on it’s camera, this takes a sequence of shots when you press the button, that makes the picture move very briefly when you view it. To be honest, I’ve never had much time for the feature, and the first thing I normally do is turn it off. Whoooo, how wrong am I? this feature has massive potential. Which I will try to use, and talk about in this weeks piece on Photography.

I managed to get out for a walk yesterday and today. Only a total of five miles, but that takes my total walked since the beginning of the year to over 250 miles, so I am on target for Walk1000, which is good.

It’s been a very successful walking week, I managed to get my three runs for C25K Week 7 – I count them in my in my miles, I don’t think that is cheating – is it? The weather has been kind, enabling me to get out for my morning walk all five days of the week.

In 2016 I started playing Pokemon Go whilst out on my morning walk. I quite enjoyed playing the game for about a year, and did reasonably well. But I decided that I was a bit fed up with it. So stopped it. Last week, I thought I’d have a look and see how the game has progressed. It’s stil there obviously, some aspects of it have changed. Anyhow, I was getting close to the waterfront, and was focussed on the game so the neighbours had to call out to me otherwise I would have missed them completely.

Many times over the last 220 days I have written about the difficulties I sometimes have in getting up for my morning walk. Understandable really, who would want to get out of a very nice, warm, extremely comfortable bed to go for a walk on a cold morning? I have found that having another incentive to get up really does help. Last week I followed the development of the Magnolia Tree outside St Mary’s Church on the high street. It was very interesting to see, and I will check it out again tomorrow. I wonder what other incentives I could give myself to get up? I’ll have to think about that.

I must as well be up front, I have done absolutely nothing in respect of the the Vlogg. Not good enough at all, but time just seems to go so quickly. I should do a time analysis thing, because I’m sure that I waste a lot of time. The leads me in to the whole being organised thing. Which I am really not very good at. At least, I think I’m not very good.

I can’t remember the last time I went into a bookshop, Waterstones or something similar. When I do, I usually head for the self help / self improvement section, I’m looking for that book which says This book was written specifically for YOU. This will help you sort yourself out. Of course I never find that book.

We almost had to drag our selves out for a walk today. It would have been very easy to just doss down and watch TV all afternoon. We are slowly working our way through the 15 series of Frost starring David Jason. We’ve just finished Season 12, and now have five episodes left to go. Anyhow back to the walk. We managed to get down to the waterfront and walk along the promenade. We passed a few people that we know, so we stopped and had a bit of a chat with them. That was nice. We decided that it would be quite pleasant to go for a pub crawl on Spice Island (the old town of Portsmouth) but not yet. We carried on the walk, ending it with a cup of tea and the last episode of Season 13 of Frost (actually, Seasons 12 & 13 are only two episodes anyway).

I’ve just spent about three hours sat at the computer, doing various things – it’s been a reasonably productive evening so perhaps not such a waste of time today.

My writing week starts on a Monday. This week, I had a solid story for the book of the week. I’m not going to replay the article. It’s there for you to read if you wish (hopefully, you have already done so. I was able to write several paragraphs on the topic. I think it was probably because I had the book I had been reading with me and was able to refer to it to support the article.

Why the Magnolia tree? I missed it on Monday, but caught it on Tuesday and decided to start tracking it.

Tuesday writing activity was supplemented by several what I thought were quite reasonable pictures. That probably wasn’t one my best pieces of writing, but the pictures certainly helped. The Magnolia tree is coming along well. I suddenly started thinking about the Creative Writing course I did at St Vincents, it must be a couple of years ago now. The course ran each turn, the teacher was a quite published author of light romantic books. There were probably about 10 people on the course, but not not that, they returned, as I did for the course a second time, indeed some had been regulars for quite a while. We were encouraged to read a piece out each week, and I have to admit mine were rubbish, but there were a few people who were good, really good.

I’m trying to start looking at my writing. I don’t think it is very good, it certainly not very good for fiction on those courses, I must admit, I don’t stress so much over my writings today, which is very good, I just don’t think i am very good with words. I tell a story obviously, but it’s not dramatic. I am in my monthly magazine spot this Monday’s article will probably be about the current magazine, but I do have my next book lined up and will probably comment upon it the week after next.

I’ve been able to get out every day this week, and have been able to produce some writing. It’s not always easy, but I think it has been a while since I have had to resort to writing about writers block, because I have writers block.

Tonight’s review of the weeks writing has been quite interesting. I shall have to look at doing it again.

I have been fortunate this week, I have been able to get out for a walk every morning so far, and there is only one day to go. This mornings weather was a good example. As you can see from the picture, the sky wasn’t very dramatic. It’s been a bit nippy, but being wrapped up meant I was quite comfortable.

The temperature was around 5C, but there was a little bit of a breeze and that meant there was a bit of windchill making the 5C feel more like 3C. Whilst we don’t really notice air pressure (well, I don’t perhaps more people than I might expect do feel sensitivity – I was about to make a generalisation, but that may not be correct).

Admittedly cold, but not as cold as it has been. This points to another thing that bothers me; homeless people sleeping rough. This morning I was walking through town at probably around 0610, going along the high street was a block pushing (and pulling) two shopping trolleys full of what I gather are his worldly possessions. I alway speak to them, he said good morning, and I asked if he was OK, then feeling a bit like an idiot, I said of course you aren’t really are you? To which he replied no, we then went on. It was cold, and the thought of sleeping rough really does distress me. The thing is that all of the rough sleepers in Gosport are offered accommodation, there’ll usually be a problem, drugs, alcohol or a pet – in this case no dog was evident, but if the offer is blocked because of pets, I think I disagree with that. It’s not an easy life.

I also think about the pilots having to transfer to the ships out in the channel, I can imagine in rough weather that is a hair raising experience, but they are used to it I suppose. The weather promises to be dry tomorrow, there’s always something about it that adds a bit of a variation.