Category: images

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Pondering

I went to the canal this afternoon, the usual little walk we’ve done so many times before. I wondered dolefully whether there would be anything interesting to take a picture of. I’ve managed to maintain my picture-a-day discipline, even if some are very poor, and I can’t stop now. (I’ve temporarily mislaid Thursday 18 January – it’s inside a camera I left behind somewhere by mistake and still haven’t retrieved.)

There were of course many interesting things to photograph along the canal. Now the dilemma is which to put here… should it be the weeping eye? too miserable, and we’ve had more than enough of that around here. Besides I’m still coming to terms with the fact that the best tree face ever has been enhanced with artifice. And my picture is out of focus.

Should it be daisy daisy (give me your answer do)? Also not entirely cheerful since there’s drowning involved.

There’s one man and his dogs which has the virtue of some spots of brightness. But I think I’ll make that the official picture of the day. The man in question was delightful, and his dogs even more so. One had, so he said, had won at Crufts. I asked if their coats were hand-knitted, he said he’d bought them on the Kings Road in Chelsea. Maizy looked disgusted during the entire exchange. She also smelt disgusting since she’d rolled vigourously in the copious Canada goose excrement to be found along the towpath.

So, back to the pictures, we’re left with the bushy bush and its reflections. There are two, but they’re pleasant and light and bright so here they are:

canal grass

reflection

I think I utterly lack discrimination when it comes to my own pictures, I just like all of them, even when they’re clearly no good.

And in other news, this blog was four recently. Still having tantrums though.

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Oh you pretty things

Look through my camera what do I see

A crack in the sky
A crack in the sky

and a hand reaching down to me
and a hand reaching down to me

All the nightmares came today
All the nightmares came today

And it looks as though they're here to stay
And it looks as though they’re here to stay

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The sick bed

the sickbed

They’ve been doing the nursing. I merely provide the fruit juice, aspirin, iPod and light meals. Oh, and the bed.

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Cats and offal

In view of the previous discussion on the dining habits of cats versus dogs I was interested to hear, entirely coincidentally, the story of Thomas Hardy’s heart.

In the course of a delightful weekend away with merely my faithful hound for company in the gorgeous cottage of generous friends in Cromer (photos here) I broke the habit of several years and watched the television. From which I learnt the story of the cat and the biscuit tin. Which goes something like this.

Thomas Hardy wanted to be buried in his local churchyard in Dorset. The authorities wanted him to be interred in poets’ corner in Westminster Abbey. A compromise was reached – his heart was removed by a doctor, for local burial; his body was cremated and the ashes despatched to London.

The story goes that the removed organ was stored overnight before the burial ceremony wrapped in a tea towel and placed in a biscuit tin. The next day the doctor returned to find an open tin, a bloody towel and a fat cat.

Sadly the internet reveals a huge number of variants on this tail tale. The cat was his own beloved Cobby, a blue persian given to him late in his life. Cobby disappeared when Hardy died. Alternatively it was another moggy belonging either to his housekeeper, his sister or the doctor himself. The cat may have just snatched the organ from the kitchen table without having to open a biscuit tin. The consumed organ may have been replaced, for purposes of the burial, with either a pig’s heart, a calf’s heart or, best of all, the slaughtered body of the offending feline. There’s poetic justice!

That’s more than enough about cats. Here’s a picture of Maizy the salty sea dog to redress the balance. While we were away she licked the sky and reports that it tastes remarkably similar to the sea.

Maizy licks the sky

What do you mean, a dog would also eat a heart if it found it lying about, regardless of whose chest it had been removed from? Prove it!

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Heaven in water

heaven in water

I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water.

John Clare, quoted by Iain Sinclair in Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s “Journey Out of Essex”

I wrote my thesis on the bird poems of John Clare for no better reason than that John Clare was my brother’s favourite poet and after his death a year or so earlier I had inherited many of his books including John Clare: Bird Poems published by the Folio Society with illustrations by Thomas Bewick. Oh, and I also liked birds.

I ended up liking John Clare very much indeed too. He was mad of course.

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Twisting and turning

Have you ever, in an idle moment, thought to yourself “I must find out what the tallest isolated stone column in the world is”? No? Neither have I. But today I went up it. It’s a monument. In fact it’s The Monument, which was built to commemorate the Great Fire which destroyed much of the City of London in the seventeenth century. Inscribed in Latin at the bottom is:

In the year of Christ 1666, on 2 September, at a distance eastward from this place of 202 ft, which is the height of this column, a fire broke out in the dead of night which, the wind blowing, devoured even distant buildings, and rushed devastating through every quarter with astonishing swiftness and noise … On the third day … at the bidding, we may well believe, of heaven, the fire stayed its course and everywhere died out.

Inside the column are 311 steps illuminated by some rather sickly florescent light and stabs of sunlight through the original slit windows. They circle up to a caged viewing platform just below the extraordinary golden spiky mutant pineapple thing (apparently a “flaming urn”) perched on the top.

It was surprisingly crowded and whenever I stopped to attempt to take a picture in these less than ideal circumstance someone walked into the shot. Here is a rather anxious-looking young man coming down as we went up.

descent

And here is a valiant mother carrying her daughter up as we went down.

ascent

Continue reading “Twisting and turning”

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Diamonds

And some triangles.

diamonds

I spent much of the day rushing round with the firstborn sorting out stuff for his return to school tomorrow. I don’t remember having to have such huge amounts of clothes and bits and bobs when I was his age, but that’s probably more a product of advancing age and memory loss than objective reality.

Further evidence of the general mental disintegration is the fact that I mentioned experimenting with the camera’s ISO and white balance settings two posts in a row. I shan’t mention them this time. I shall mention, for the first and I hope only time, that I’m shooting RAW files and dipping the very end of my smallest toe into the wonder that is RAW conversion. It’s all very complicated.

Apart from the difficulties of a degenerating brain grappling with complexity the other drawback to RAW is that it takes more than 10 seconds for the camera to save the file. The shutter speed may be snippy-snappy but then the apparatus chunters away processing the information and during this time is unable to take another shot.

In the case of the above shot, however, this turned out to be an advantage because it was the time of the process rather than my timing decision which dictated the moment of the shutter firing and the result seems pleasing, to me at least. The crown-like crenelations are the edges of a particularly doleful multi-story car park which I’ve always previously considered quite outstandingly ugly.

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But is it art?

tate britain

This man was so, well, artfully arranged on this bench that I suspect it might have been a “performance” of some sort. Even if not I had no compunction in photographing him because he appeared to be deeply asleep (not unconscious or dead because one of the gallery attendants checked) and he’s not recognisable from this picture.

I was at the Tate Britain to see the Holbein exhibition with my lovely friend C. It was spectacular but, because it was the last day, hideously crowded. Perhaps the man on the bench had found it all too much and retreated to a larger, cooler, more comfortable space to lie down and recover.

I’m finding the discipline of forcing myself to take a picture every day very rewarding so far. It means investigating how to use far more features of the camera than I usually employ. Basic technical things like adjusting the white balance and ISO setting (“film” speed). I bought a book on digital photography yesterday and am working my way through it doggedly.

Circumstances on the domestic front are becoming clearer and easier too, albeit still requiring some technical expertise. A new love for him (which seems to be making him very happy) will, I hope, ease his transition from one space to another. I’m so glad that one of us has found tenderness, and I hope that I too will be able to move on soon with my life.

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Cat’s paw

This isn’t just an excuse for cat blogging you know.

cat's paw

It’s also an unfortunate consequence of the weather. I’ve resolved to try to take and post to flickr a picture a day but at the moment the weather’s vile, it gets dark at four in the afternoon and about the only thing that stays still long enough for me to take a picture of it is the cat.

It does mean that I’m having to grapple with things like ISO speed and white balance though, so it’s all a good learning experience.