OUTER SUBURBS 131 – MAN AND BUS SHELTER AT SUNRISE, BESIDE GRASS AND NEW FENCE

 

 

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The year grows older, the sun rises later and – quite suddenly it seems – “the light” is starting to make very welcome appearances again during my early morning walks in Bristol’s suburbs.  From here on in, for quite a few months to come, I can look forward to sunrises, colours, mists and the wonderful remnants of night. 

One project that I have in mind is to look at autumn colour and bleakness up on the Mendip Hills; another is to take the Nikon Z 6 and the 70-300 lens down into the glare, noise, bustle, turmoil and winter darkness of Bristol’s early morning rush hours – well the spirit is willing anyway, although the willingness and fortitude of the flesh is perhaps another matter >>> but the lure of Harts Bakery might just tip the scales!!!

Anyway >>> in this image, a man stands in a bus shelter that, being struck by the sunrise’s first, intense rays, throws shadows across a new and as yet unpainted fence.  Reflected light washes over the grass in the foreground.

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 53mm (equiv); 250 ISO; spot metering on the fence; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; south Bristol; 28 Aug 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 121 – STREET ART

 

 

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Street art: functional and freshly painted.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 250 ISO; Lightroom; south Bristol; 25 July 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 115 – BUS STOP, WET MORNING

 

 

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A cool, wet morning in May: waiting for the bus.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further.

Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 1250 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 8 May 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 112 – SCHOOL BUS

 

 

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Grey, damp morning, with empty bus, wet road, wet pavement and puddle.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 8 May 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 88 – STREET SCENE 6: TWO WORLDS

 

 

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Looking at two worlds and, starting in from the left as we westerners do, first is the brash, colourful, in your face, psychological manipulation of the advertising agencies and consumerism – “EAT THIS AND YOU’LL BE HAPPY!!!“.  Backed up, of course, with the wonderful news that you don’t even have to budge from your sofa to get it, since this alluring chunk of high vitamin, high fibre (sic), instant gratification will be delivered straight to your door. 

But on getting across to the other side of the image, well, this is another world indeed – two standing, one slumped, waiting for the bus to work on a cold, dull morning; this is reality, dull, repetitive, prosaic; this is not the multicoloured fantasy of the advertising world, this is actual life.

There are earlier Street Scene posts here: 1 2 3 4 5 .  Each will open in a separate window.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further – recommended.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 29 Jan 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 81 – A GOOD NIGHT OUT 2 (POSTSCRIPT)

 

 

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Awhile back, I posted about “Good Nights Out” in south Bristol.  A Good Night Out 2 looked at vandalism of bus shelters, which drew condemnation.  Well, just to keep you in the loop(!), one of the damaged bus shelters that I photographed then has been vandalised again, and here it is – the fragment of paving slab used to inflict  the damage can be seen in the foreground.  The earlier damage to this shelter is shown in the lowest image on the earlier post.

OH DEAR!!! >>> and walking past this bus stop this morning (2 March), I’ve found it vandalised yet again – with what looks suspiciously like the original piece of paving stone.  Such is our world or, at least, some parts of it.  And for those of you considering south Bristol for your holidays this year, be warned that Bristol City Council is considering operating a Zero Tolerance Paving Stone Policy so that, if you’re into this sort of thing, you may have to bring your own boulder.

And at top right, another recent feature of UK life.  All Motor Vehicle Tax, which is notionally paid to build/mend roads, is now paid online, which has of course resulted in some non-payments – and so to clamping of offenders’ cars.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it yet again.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 21 Feb 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 77 – METROBUS (MONO)

 

 

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Three things to talk about today.  First, Bristol has serious traffic congestion, and the new Metrobuses are aimed at helping to ease this.  These are new and very modern, double decker buses with long routes right across the city, and they are cashless, which means that you can only buy tickets online, or via your mobile phone, etc etc – you can’t actually put your hand in your pocket and pull out the filthy lucre.  This is aimed at having these buses hanging around less at their stops while the drivers give each passenger their ticket and change, and so speeding up the journeys – something which is also helped by bus only lanes on some main roads.

And because payment is digital, each bus stop must have one of these illuminated columns – looking rather like something out of the Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey – from which you can buy tickets via debit/credit cards; and where the buses are satellite tracked, so that accurate arrival times plus other info is also available.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further – definitely recommended.

Technique: secondly, this image comes from a source I haven’t used before, its derived from using the TG-5’s RAW Data Edit facility to process a RAW image in-camera.  This uses the TG-5’s large array of ART BKT filters, or art filters – this one being the Dramatic Tone II filter.  I like the effect, but have to say that this in-camera RAW processing is far less intuitive and useful than that found on Fujifilm’s X-T2 mirrorless camera, where it is really is a significant creative tool.  Still, yet another aspect of the TG-5, a camera which I’m increasingly impressed with.

Technique: another aspect of this photo is the deep depth of focus (= depth of field), which results from the TG-5’s very small sensor – for the most part, this is a camera for those liking front to back sharpness.  This was taken at f2, where depths of field on larger sensors are very small – the TG-5 does of course have smaller apertures, up to f11 I think, but I read somewhere that these smaller apertures do NOT give increased depth of focus on the TG-5, which is an interesting phenomenon I’ve not come across before.

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 320 ISO; in-camera processing of a RAW file, using the Dramatic Tone II art filter; followed by further processing of the resulting jpeg in Lightroom; south Bristol; 15 Feb 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 61 – BUS SHELTER, WET MORNING

 

 

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I walked in the suburbs, far from home and without coat or umbrella, and there came a cloudburst.  Across the road was a bus shelter – one of those enclosed on nearly all sides – and I dived inside to escape the falling water.  There was no one else there – and so to a post that might have been entitled 10 Minutes in a Bus Shelter.  Well, you know, I was standing there, with interesting things to look at all around – the misty windows, the gleaming streets outside, the patterns on the floor, the metal struts framing the translucent perspex, the bright red seat, you name it – and I had a camera burning a hole in my pocket.

That’s one thing about photography really, if you get right into it, nowhere is visually boring, there are always things to stare at – and in this case, unless I fancied a drenching, I had the leisure to stare.

So, what to stare at?  Two worlds.  First, the confined, almost claustrophobic world of the shelter, distorted slightly by the TG-5’s wide lens – misted windows, patterned floor and red seating: bland, functional modernity, purposely designed for the have’s in our society who catch the buses, and equally purposely designed to offer little comfort for the have-not’s who have nowhere else to go and would like somewhere other than the shelter’s cold floor to sleep on.  And here we all were, at the start of November, gearing up for The Season of Goodwill.  But then, the bus shelter is in the real world, whereas The Season of Goodwill is only in our minds.

And the second world, the outside world, the view out through the shelter’s ever-open doorway: a view to wet pavements, a passing car and, in the background, an equally passing factory.  But, you say, how can a factory possibly be passing?   Well, I’m a geologist and to me everything is passing, but it is apparently the case that this old factory is on a site earmarked for hundreds of new houses; we shall see.

So I loitered there, looking at anything and everything, taking it all in.  And two women passed, better equipped for the weather than I.  And, whispering together, they gave me a long, suspicious look.  I imagined their conversation: “Here, what’s that strange old man doing in that bus shelter?  Do you think he’s a prevert?” (she’d been watching a Dr Strangelove rerun).  “Well, I expect he’d say its artistic, but I’m not so sure …”.  Actually I’ve got that quote wrong, because the most used words in our new, Politically Correct society are appropriate and inappropriate, and I have a feeling that, in their eyes, I’d have merited the latter.

But, nobody expects the unexpected, I do think. And, as Bob Dylan might put it, “”You can be in my bus shelter if I can be in your’s …” .

The first image in the Outer Suburbs series, with context, is here: 1 .  Subsequent images are here: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 53a 55 56 57 58 59 60 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it – recommended.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 1 Nov 2018.
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SOMERSET LEVELS 311 – SCHOOL BUS OUTSIDE GODNEY

 

 

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The images in this short series from the Somerset Levels were taken on an absolutely beautiful morning, when the sunrise coincided with banks of thick fog.  Most if not all of the other images celebrate the natural beauty of that early morning, but here is one that simply looks at a facet of Levels life.

There is no school in the village of Godney, and so those who are not taken to their schools by other means go via the school bus, which is seen here waiting on the outskirts of the village early in the morning, prior to going into the village to pick up the children.

What can we see in this picture?  Well, obviously, the bus waiting amidst open farmland – it’ll be in a place where it does not block the single track road.  And the red triangle of the road sign to the right of the bus warns drivers that this narrow road is about to enter a series of sharp corners: the road is following the bends of the little River Sheppey – the raised river bank can be seen immediately behind the bus.  Then there is a telegraph poll, carrying landline phone cables.  And right of the road sign, part of the inverted umbrella shape of a pollarded willow tree.

A short while ago, my blogging colleague Harrie Nijland was talking to me about two distinct types of photography.  The first type of photo is simply a straight, factual representation of something, a record shot perhaps, or documentary photography.  This is such a shot, showing an everyday facet of Levels life, without any artistic ambitions or endeavour whatsoever.  But the second type of photo Harrie mentioned does use artistic / compositional / etc devices in an attempt to make images more attractive to the eye: and, for better or worse, the other images in this short series are all of this type.

There are other images from this early morning shoot here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 .

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it.

Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 83mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Provia/Standard film simulation; Godney, on the Somerset Levels; 19 Oct 2018.
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PEOPLE 357 – GOING TO WORK 84 (MONO)

 

 

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An old and very dear friend of mine is a professional psychologist and avid people-watcher.  Her insights into everyday human behaviour never cease to fascinate and amaze me.  I had the idea sometime back of giving her a photobook of the Going To Work images (produced via Blurb) for her birthday, and that project is moving ahead.  In the course of assembling these pictures for use in her book, I have found six images that have not been posted in the Going To Work series but which really belong there, and so I am incorporating them into this series here.  This is the fourth of the six.  You can find the other images here: 1 2 3 .

Waiting for the morning bus.

Composition: the two men in the foreground make this image, and there are at least two ways of viewing the resulting composition.  I first thought that the man on the right, the one peering around the edge of the shelter, makes this image – probably because he’s sharp and not obscured by the sunlit grime of the shelter’s transparent side.  My eyes seemed first to go to him, and then to the fully exposed face of the older man on the left, and thence on to the other two, half-seen men further back in the shelter.  But now I wonder if the older man on the left is not the attention grabber and, if that is the case, then there is a dynamic – do I go from him to look at the man on the right (which I probably do), or go to look at the men at the back – and thence find my eyes going back and fore along this “human chain”?  What do you think?  Who do you look at first?

With superhuman patience I might have been able to further reduce the amounts of grime visible on the shelter’s side, but I don’t have that patience and, anyway, this is unprettified city life.

Earlier images from this series can be found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,  29, 30,  31,  32, 33  34  35  36 37  38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45  46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and then click again on this larger version.

Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 305mm (equiv); 200 ISO; Lightroom; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Strong Infrared High Contrast preset and adding a light coffee tone; Victoria Street, central Bristol; 24 Feb 2017.

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