Easter Gallery

We're back from a couple of weeks away, first in Bristol, then our customary Easter week in mid-Wales. It's amazing how things can pile up during a fortnight's absence – things like unprocessed photographs, unread emails, and unpaid bills – especially when spending time in a couple of photogenic locations without access to my usual computer setup or, in Wales, the internet or even a strong and reliable phone signal. There's a lot to do and catch up with in the first few days back.

As it happens, Easter this year was nearly as late as it's possible for that very moveable feast to be (it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox [1]), pretty much an entire month later than last year, so even in the uplands of Wales most of the trees were already beyond the dormant and blossoming stages and opening leaves in that diversity of bright acid greens that only lasts for a few weeks before they converge on a more general range of subdued shades. Add to that a gentle mix of sunshine and mist, volatile clouds and the occasional heavy downpour, and you have a very characteristic spring palette.

So here are a few of the photographs I took while away, using three very small and portable cameras in parallel, plus my phone. The weather was variable, shall we say, but that's only to be expected at this "sunshine and showers" time of year. My main problem was the strong and blustery wind, which in high exposed spots would thrum the camera so that it felt like clutching a live thing, and which defeated any attempt to keep it steady, as well as shaking and vibrating anything not made of rock, or solidly nailed to something made of rock. I don't mind a certain softness in my images, but at times this was more like an intense form of "intentional camera movement", a photographic "technique" that seems mainly to be used by people who would rather be painters.

iPhone 12 mini:

Panasonic GM1:

Panasonic GM5:

Fuji X20:

You can see the power of the wind in that photo of a recumbent stone blowing away. Sorry, I'm being silly: it's actually floating in mid-air due to some druidic earth magick that has harnessed the power of several ley lines. Very impressive, guys, but I suspect that may be what's interfering with the phone signal.

1. Or possibly the last Sunday before the sell-by date of the Easter eggs that have been in the shops since February...

Easter Break

It's Easter, which means we're heading for mid-Wales tomorrow, where we will have no internet connection, and barely any phone signal, so this is just to say I won't be posting anything further or moderating any comments until we're back in Southampton. I'm sure you'll find something to do in the meantime.

We've actually been in the Bristol flat for the past week, and I've been obsessively photographing the view from the kitchen window, as usual (above), and taking the occasional walk along the Gorge (below). There'll be more where those came from in due course, I'm sure, plus whatever Wales brings my way (rain, mostly, it seems).

That is all. Carry on.

Climbing Trees

I had a trawl back through some photographs I took last month with the Canon Powershot Zoom pocket-monocular-camera-gizmo, and was once again intrigued by the strangely unique files it can (sometimes) deliver. Much of what it gives you is irredeemable rubbish but, once you set aside any conventional criteria for judging the quality of a photograph – you know: sharpness, dynamic range, noise, all that stuff – you realise it is capable of making some very interesting pictures. Which, in the end, is what matters, isn't it?

I mean, just as an example, take that second one above. It may take a closer second look to realise you're not looking at two arched entrances but two gravestones, backed by some kind of twiggy vortex, like a breaking wave. The classic telephoto compression of perspective is what makes this and all the others so compacted, so visually dense, for want of a better word. In particular, I'm increasingly interested in this sort of bird's eye view of tangled tree canopies and thickets: I like the shapes, the colours, and the sense of immersion in a woody world. My tree-climbing days are long gone – I loved climbing trees (thinks: when did I last see a kid climbing a tree?) – but the Zoom is a virtual ladder that can get me up there among the branches again.

Here Comes the Sun

Our house faces east-south-east, so that as the sun's journey starts to swing further north (yes, yes, I do know that it's us moving, not the sun...) the strength and angle of illumination into our rooms increases: front bedroom, bathroom and living room in the morning, back bedrooms and kitchen in the afternoon. It's around this time of year that the novelty of the shapes made by the sunlight on our walls has me constantly reaching for a camera or my phone.

In the picture above I was surprised by that little prefiguration of the swifts that will be arriving in about a month that appeared briefly one afternoon in the kitchen. You have to be quick, though: less than a minute later and such tricks of the light have gone. That faint shadow of a seagull in the picture below (just beneath the picture-rail), for example, is the projection of a sticker on the front bedroom bay window. I saw it, rushed downstairs to get my phone but it was already fading by the time I got back.

If the rooms look a little bare, that's because Adam, the Polish painter-decorator, has been back to finish off some more work for us. Those tiled fireplaces in the bedrooms are an original "feature" that no doubt some future occupant will have removed: the actual grates had already been taken out before we bought the place and – attractive as they are, in an ugly 1930s sort of way – they're now just a source of draughts and the occasional dead pigeon. Hence the duct-taped sheets of card... I dread to think what may lie behind them after all the years they've been in place.

The best sun-trap is the bathroom, though, with its smaller leaded window, blind, and washing lines stretched over the bath-tub. I could probably fill a book with all the pictures I've taken in there on sunny mornings over the past thirty-eight years, although it would be pretty repetitive, and pictures of "smalls", hung out to dry and back-illuminated, is not everybody's idea of a photo-project. Which, I suppose, is exactly why it might be worth doing.

Phew, says Rembrandt. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

Caedmon's Hymn

Writing a blog is in many respects not unlike writing a newspaper column. Although that, admittedly, is rather like saying that cooking dinner at home is in many respects not unlike being a chef. The obvious differences are scale, quality and, above all, consequence. My employment or your enjoyment will not be impacted by the occasional sub-par or self-indulgent blog post; not least because no money has changed hands. But one very real similarity to both professions lies in the way that even the best work is consumed, enjoyed (or not: I want my columns to be entertaining and my food to be served on plates, dammit), and then largely forgotten. Some top columnists do get to publish retrospective collections of their output, but they can only do what they do in the first place by rising to the challenge of delivering top-quality work to a deadline, week in, week out, only for it all to be consigned to the bin labelled "yesterday's papers". [1]

In an attempt to revive interest in former blog highlights (or simply to save the effort of repeating myself) I do often link back to previous posts, but the stats show that hardly anyone ever takes the hint. In an uncharacteristic burst of optimism I did once start a series of "best of" books on Blurb and do still maintain an Idiotic Hat Annual compilation on DVD, but zero sales meant I soon gave up on the idea as anything other than a way of preserving my efforts in the event of Blogger's inevitable eventual demise (or Russia cutting our cables and setting fire to our electricity substations, whichever is the sooner).

However, I still love putting a book together using Blurb's BookWright software. Not in pursuit of sales – as if! – but because it's an excellent way of bringing some coherence to my typically scattershot, amateur approach to photography and digital imaging. So it occurred to me recently that a series of posts I made way back in 2010 on the subject of the Anglo-Saxon poem known as "Caedmon's Hymn" could be combined into a pleasing little publication, using the Blurb "magazine" format. Those posts include some of my better attempts at extracting humour from unpromising source material and, assembled as a four-part text, invite accompaniment by a few of my Ring Hoard pictures, a series of digital images I have never yet got around to compiling into a book sequence in its own right.

So that's what I did, and here is a link to the usual preview on my Blurb "bookstore" page. But as I have also put the PDF version onto Issuu, which gives a better quality viewing experience, here is the "embedded" Issuu flipbook (click on the little four-arrow device to see it full screen): 

This little book (just twenty-four pages) could probably use some further refinement – I've spotted at least one annoying spelling error – but I don't think I'll bother. After all, having tried, like a diligent columnist, to rise to the challenge of delivering top-quality work, week in, week out, since 2008, I'm simply trying to save some of it from being swept away in the digital deluge.

I'm content that a single printed copy will find its way into the archive of Balliol College, Oxford, where – who knows? – posterity may stumble across it, alongside the thirty-three other self-published volumes I have already deposited there. Thirty-three! That's pretty much an entire shelf-full, and hard for any inquisitive posteritoids to overlook.

Did I mention that I love putting books together on Blurb? I reckon they're going to need a second shelf to accommodate me before I'm done.

1. Although in these days of the internet, the bin has been relabelled "Lost in the deluge"...