Bills Posts

I’ve just had a quick look back at the posts I’ve made over the last week. Of the seven posts three are about reasonable topics and four are slightly more than just marking time. Well, that’s how I feel.

The trip to Salisbury, the Camera Club and what we did on Sunday are reasonable posts.

The trouble is, there are things (well, to be honest, mostly one thing) that I want to write about, and I know that there are a number of you out there who read my posts (thank you for that by the way). What I don’t want to do is bore you by droning on about talk to the camera or vlogging. they are the focus of my mind at the moment.

Even last night, when I really should have been able to do a good post The Thursday Night Net, which was an hour and a half of fun chat, education and yes, entertainment. I’m making excuses but part of the reason for the OK, but not really good post was my being a bit tired.. Bit of a feeble excuse really.

One good thing has come out of the week, is that I managed to get out for four walks, admittedly, one of them was an afternoon rather than morning and I didn’t go this morning because it was raining.

I’ve been preparing for the council meeting next week. I’ve had a read through the agenda pack – not every word. There was a long attachment about council tax, the implementation more than the regulations. I don’t know what the implications are for Gosport. i’ve downlooaded the pack to the ipad, I am going to try and keep up in the meeting. I have a plan for when the meeting closes. I’m going to take the tripod and set ujp and talk about interesting points. just get my views on video close to the event. One thing I will be looking for are points and barbs (is that two things)?

I’d like to say that I will do better next week. Will I though?

Thursday Night is TNN Time. TNN is the Thursday Night Net. Conducted via a repeater on the Isle of Wight. Tonight, there were 12 people on the net. The question asked tonight was an interesting one; how do you explain Amateur Radio (AR) to the public. That isn’t meant to imply that “the public” is stupid, it definitely isn’t.

I started writing about how the repeater worked, but realised as I was typing that what I was saying really wouldn’t make sense. But I realised as I started to explain how a repeater worked that I was still leaving out a level of information. After I got four paragraphs down, I deleted them all, because they really didn’t. make sense.

Beyond saying it is very educational and quite simply fun, it’s not as easy as you might think. I’ll think about it and have another go, another night.

I managed to get out for a walk this morning. I know the title of tonight’s post says between the rain, and although it had rained at one point, I couldn’t tell you how big the gap was between the two rainy periods.

I’m reading the Agenda Reports Pack for the upcoming Gosport Borough Council meeting due for 5 Feb. I thought I would go, and hopefully make some notes commenting on how it went. That should be interesting.

The walk this morning went OK, I have to say not particularly exciting, no ships coming in, just the Gosport Ferry doing its thing between us and Portsmouth. At least the sky is brightening in the east. That’ll be adding some light to the morning photos.

I went out for a walk this afternoon, when I’d finished for the day. I thought I would have dinner out as we were going to the camera club this evening.

One the “You Tubers” I watch is a lady called Kim Grant, she’s a photographer from Scotland, and does videos that a kind of mix of photography and mindfulness. Anyhow, last week, she was just chatting away and mentioned something called “Sunset Snacking” as it sounds, having a snack watching the sunset. I thought that sounded quite nice. I thought I’d give it a go, so I bought sausage & chips from our favourite chippy, and sat on the waterfront eating them and doing a talk to the camera at the same time.

There are in my store 17 minutes of video of me stuffing my face and talking about talking to the camera and my plans for vlogging. Don’t worry – it will never see the light of day on YouTube, but it is the most relaxed I have been in front of the camera in a public space.

We had an interesting evening at the club, three of the members gave us brief talks on their journey towards gaining certifications from The Photographic Association of Great Britain (PAGB) and the Royal Photographic Society. We saw some amazing pictures and learned a lot about the process of gaining a certification, and the quality of the work needed. It also brought home how totally subjective judging photographs is. All good, interesting stuff though.

The Sun set snacking? A nice idea, but I’m not very good at it. By the time I had sat down to eat, the sun had already set and even worse, I was facing due east, I wouldn’t have seen it anyway. I guess I’ll just have to have another go.

If you are able to have a closer look at the fronds of the palm trees you’ll see that they are a bit blurry. That’s not my shaking the camera. The walk was a bit windy. A very brisk south westerly. There was quite a nip in the air.

I was down for lunch when the heavens opened, hail – I haven’t seen a storm like that for a very long time, The house literally shook with the thunder, I caught the lightning and counted 8 seconds before the clap.

The ground was covered in hail. I went out a bit later and checked the rain gauge. 20mm since yesterday morning.

After all that it was quite a pleasant walk.

We went to the Sailmaker for lunnch. I think it was a case of rebellion against cooking and I never complain about having a nice carvery, so that was OK.

Afterwards, we drove down to the waterfront to see what was going on in the Solent, The wind was blowing a bit of a breese, so there was some white water about. We noticed that the Solent appeared to be divided in two, with the water on this side having a distinct brown tint and over towards the Isle of Wight it had a distinct blue colouring, I’m assuming that the colouring on our side was due either to sediment that was being stirred up be the weather – or something much worse.

Either way, it was very nice to just sit there and watch what waas going on. I did check and was surprised to see that there are no cruise liners expected in to Southampton until the end of the month, there’s usually at least one in most days.

We moved around to the sea wall by Haslar, there’s a lot of work being done to the detention centre, it’s covered in scaffolding. The sea was kicking up some real splashes along the wall, I tried to photograph it, but it didn’t work well – timing the main issue.

Nice though to see the Normandie going out, although I think they were probably in for a bit of a bouncy ride once they are in open water.

We went to Salisbury today. Our first port of call was the South Coast Photographic Federation Exhibition. The members of the federation comprise the 66 clubs. For the exhibition, each club selects 6 prints from its members for the display.

I can’t really do justice here to the quality of the pictures on display. they were all lovely, some were special, the remainder were just mindblowing. If I can ever take a picture that compares with any of those, I will be very happy. It was well worth going just for that.

After the exhibition, we had a bit of a wander around the market. I resisted the tempation of trying some of the delicious smelling food on offer as I knew we were going for lunch afterwards. That was at The Bishops Mill, Good pub food, with a very nice Steak and Ale pie with mash (although I did finish of Elayne’s chips).

Once we had managed to rouse ourselves from the lunch table, we headed across to the Catrhedral. I hadn’t thought that we were planning to go in, but Elayne wanted to, and luckily we were able to join a guided tour that was about to begin. Ruth, the tour guide was very good, giving us the rundown on The Magna Carta and Lady Jane Gray’s tome (Catherine Seymour) whom I had just been reading about in my Queen Elizabeth book.

That added a pinch of excitement to the day, we were looking at something that was really quite historic (apart from the cathedral itself of course. An absolutely delightful and fascinating day.

Quite a while ago, I paid a visit to the Motte & Bailey near the Apple Dumpling Bridge in The Alver Valley. It went because I wanted to make a video of the site, but to be honest it was so feeble that I ditched it.

I want to go back and try again to see if I can do it better. with the bridge nearby, it would be a useful opportunity to practice some filming techniques, and of course, talking to the camera.

I might see if I have an opportunity to do something tomorrow.

Being Thursday, tonight was the Thursday Night Net held over the repeater on the Isle of Wight, with it’s connection to the internet, the turnout was pretty good including regulars Bill from Corona, California and Bob from Tennessee.

Dave, G7EPE the Net Controller usually gives a topic for us to ponder and tonight was no exception, and boy, did it spark some memories. The question was basically; when you were growing up were you a leggo (bricks) or Meccano (metal) kid. There was a fair mix of both on the net.

The thing was I can remember a toy I had that involved bricks, but definitely wasn’t Leggo. A little bit of googling soon brought out that it was Airfix Betta Bilda – I knew the toy began with an A, but wasn’t expecting it to be Airfix. Leggo was introduced in the 1930’s Airfix BB was in the early 60’s.

I can remember building a house with it, which fell over with just a bit of a push, because I had build it with bricks as vertical columns, somebody, it may have been Dad, or perhaps one of my sisters showed me how to stagger the bricks making it much stronger.

It really brought back some memories.

In Post 1530 https://localitystories.com/2025/01/07/1515-the-mad-rush/ I wrote about pictures we were putting together for a print competition at the Camera Club. The topic for our group was abstract. 1515 showed one for the two images that I had submitted.

The header picture was the second one I entered. This one, I entitled uplift. I think with hindsight, I could have called the other “Pressure” as it was a very distorted picture of a barometer. Heavily manipulated in Photoshop. This one one the other hand, is a very distorted picture of a leaf floating in the cockle pond. Here’s the original;

Anyhow, my first picture. Entitled UIY1139 (a play on the 1970’s cult science fiction – one on from THX1138 wasn’t massively well received by the judge, who gave it (in my opinion) a rather paltry 7.5.

Today’s picture though was a bit different. For some reason the judge quite liked Uplift and had it held back from giving it an immediate score. Being held back means the judge wants to have another look at the picture at the end of the round. That’s because it may have been in the running for a 1st, 2nd, 3rd or Highly Commended – Not that I expected any of those, let’s be honest, it’s not that good.

As it happens it didn’t get any those instead receiving a more respectable 9 – I was happy with that.

I think I probably need to say something about the judges at these competitions. I’ll save that for a future camera club post.