PEOPLE 364 – GOING TO WORK 88 (MONO)

 

 

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Winter morning.  Walking to work, perhaps disconsolately, below the railway bridge.

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 84 85 86 87 .  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: Olympus TG-5 at 40mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film preset; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Full Spectrum preset and adding a light Selenium tone; St Luke’s Road, south Bristol; 29 Jan 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 64 – WALKING HOME

 

 

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This picture is best viewed enlarged – get inside it!!!  To do so, click onto it to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further – recommended.

The walk home, below a bridge that carries the railway.  Loneliness?  Perhaps.  But safety too because, as the pavement rises up beside the road, tastefully green railings keep us all safe from the often roaring road below.

And the wonderfully unkempt, purely functional bridge standing above all, enlivened by fading colour, seeping rust and the various proofs of human presence that I see far more as street art than graffiti.  And heights in feet and inches, and metres too, which perhaps sum up this country’s relationship with the rest of Europe … a hot point just now!  But, after nearly seven decades, I’m far more at home with feet and inches – while thanking the Great Good Common Sense that our road signs still show distances in miles, rather than kilometres, and that we still use the pound sterling rather than the euro.

LOL!!! there are two words fashionable at the moment.  The T-word refers to the individual who holds the title, President of the United States.  And then the B-word refers to Brexit: Europe is a very good idea, but how dreadfully sad it is that the EU was not allowed to remain as a bloc in which the countries just had free trade and mutual defence cooperation agreements with each other.  I have spoken to so many others who share this sadness.

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 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Natural film simulation; south Bristol; 16 Jan 2019.
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ARCHIVE 398 – DRAIN, WITH KERB, DASHED WHITE LINE AND SKID MARKS (MONO)

 

 

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Drain, with kerb, dashed white line and skid marks; Thatcham, Berkshire; 1 June 2016.

Street scene in downtown Thatcham: shapes, textures and (mainly) curving lines.

Color Efex Pro 4 has been used to give the end result the look of black and white infrared film.

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

Technique: D700 with 24-120 Nikkor lens at 24mm; 400 ISO; Color Efex Pro 4.

POSTSCRIPT: to me, someone who admittedly doesn’t get out much, the curving lines are streaming out across the image from sources along its left margin.  The kerb has just missed the drain, and arrows on through the picture’s lower right corner.  The skid marks are spraying out upwards, towards the image’s upper margin.  But the white line is more accurately set, and we have caught the moment in which it first impacts on the drain’s periphery.  And if all this imagined dynamism – seen through a child’s eyes maybe –  is real, then this isn’t a still life at all, it should not have been originally posted in this blog’s Still Life category, and I have, as the phrase so happily puts it, shot myself in the foot …

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OUTER SUBURBS 63 – MAIN ROAD, EARLY MORNING

 

Main road, early morning. 

Emptiness, space; 

loneliness, peace. 

For awhile, at least. 

And, out of shot, a fat, dishevelled and rather improbable figure, standing on a traffic island and pointing a little camera at it all.

I’m a great fan of the film Terminator 2.  I was extremely fortunate in being introduced to it by my kids.  And now, looking at this image, I’m irresistibly reminded of Sarah Connor’s words:

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The future, always so clear to me, had become like a black highway at night.  We were in uncharted territory now, making up history as we went along.

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I’m not sure if her second sentence also applies to my Outer Suburbs pictures, but sometimes it can feel like uncharted territory … 🙂 …

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 .  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); 3200 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Natural film simulation; south Bristol; 5 Jan 2019.
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SOMERSET LEVELS 316 – LOOKING EAST, TOTNEY DROVE 2

 

 

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This image is best viewed enlarged – click onto it to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it – recommended.

Looking eastwards along Totney Drove, a single track, tarmacked lane, as the sun rose through the mists on this autumn morning.

There are other images from this early morning shoot here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 83mm (equiv); 400 ISO; Lightroom, using the Astia/Soft film simulation; Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 19 Oct 2018.
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SOMERSET LEVELS 314 – LOOKING EAST, TOTNEY DROVE (MONO)

 

 

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Looking eastwards along Totney Drove, a single track, tarmac road on Tadham Moor.  Tall Willows are silhouetted by the sunrise, and water-filled rhynes (ditches) flank the road on either side.  The distance is shrouded in fog, but the ghosts of cattle can just be made out in the background on the left.

This image is best viewed enlarged: click onto it to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further – recommended.

There are other images from this early morning shoot here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 .

Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 83mm (equiv); 200 ISO; Lightroom, using the Velvia/Vivid film simulation; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Tin Type preset; Totney Drove, Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 19 Oct 2018.
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OUTER SUBURBS 43 – CHRISTMAS IS HERE

 

 

Christmas is here: 1

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Christmas is here: 2

Christmas.  What does Christmas mean to me, what do I think about it?  Well, four things to mention.

First, as I see Christmas in the UK, its really a time for children.  I can well remember its magic 60 and more years ago and, regardless of how many of the myths children here do or don’t believe now, its still a magical time for them (and an increasingly expensive one for their parents).  I approach every Christmas hoping that the few children that I know, at least, will be happy.

Second, “The Christmas Story” and the other religious sides to Christmas are simply not me.  As Bob Dylan so succinctly put it in The Mighty Quinn: “It ain’t my cup of meat”.

And a common saying here is that Christmas is the Season of Goodwill whereas, being a bit picky perhaps, I’d prefer goodwill to be around during all the other seasons too 😉 .

And finally, I’m amazed by the vast and almost hysterical, materialistic and commercialised juggernaut that Christmas has become in the UK.  The two pictures here are not intended to allude to any connections between Christmas and the gutter, but to me they are symbolic of this vast commercialisation which, in Bristol at least, started making itself apparent around the beginning of September.  And, irreligious as I am, I do feel sorrow for those for whom Christmas has a religious significance: it must be very grim and disheartening to see it so swamped by the various non-spiritual behemoths.

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 .  Each will open in a separate window.

Click twice onto the images to enlarge them in separate windows.

Technique: TG-5; Lightroom; south Bristol; 1 Dec 2018.
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SOMERSET LEVELS 304 – TOTNEY DROVE, TADHAM MOOR

 

 

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Totney Drove, a tarmacked, single track lane, disappears off eastwards across Tadham Moor into fog made golden by the rising sun.  Only a few hundred years ago, this area was all wild marshland, with no roads or farms.  When the marshes and lakes were drained to make agricultural land, the Levels’ droves were a system of tracks made between the newly demarcated  fields, so that farmers could move their animals and produce to and from their land, without having to go through other farmers’ land.  A few of these droves, like this one, have been given a tarmac surface.

The glint of water down to the right is a rhyne (rhymes with seen), a deep, water-filled ditch, which does duty as a field boundary, fence and drainage channel in this very flat and wet countryside.

A very small rise in the lane, to the left of the two posts, shows where it passes over another small waterway that empties into the rhyne.  A thoughtful local authority has painted white lines (faintly seen here) on this tiny bridge’s tarmac – the droves are often very narrow, and pulling off onto the verges to let oncoming vehicles pass is commonplace, but pulling off on this tiny bridge, perhaps in mist and darkness, could be catastrophic.

There are other images from this early morning shoot here: 1 2 .

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

Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 83mm (equiv); 400 ISO; Lightroom, using the Astia/Soft film simulation; Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 19 Oct 2018.
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ARCHIVE 380 – BACK ROAD NEAR AKALA (MONO)

 

 

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Back road through farms near Akala, in the far west of Kenya; April 1979.

The wideangle lens makes the road appear in worse condition than it was – and, in any case, it was dry weather; tackling this in wet conditions would be something else again.

The VW Beetle was wonderful for this sort of thing.  No 4×4, just drive in the two rear wheels, the engine seated over the wheels – which made for very good grip –  and a large metal plate underneath most of the length of the car, to guard against rocks and boulders.

But the car took quite a hammering on this trip and, as I pulled out at the end of my stay for the long drive back to Nairobi, my front wheels had, unbeknown to me, taken such a pounding that they were facing outwards, i.e. away from each other.

This very soon wore both tyres completely bald and, when I came upon a police road block, I had a hard job persuading them to let me through.  Luckily there was an excellent garage specialising in VW repairs in Nairobi, and however badly I damaged the car, they were always able to fix it.

Another thing about this picture is that it was taken in a very fertile, agricultural landscape teeming with people.  I’ve only just stopped for a photo, and already there’s a young lad standing by the car.  If we were really to get stuck or break down, there were always plenty of willing hands to help push and pull us on our way.  They were friendly – and distinctly humorous – people.  Less friendly was the malaria, which initially got its teeth into me during this safari.

Technique: OM-1 with 28mm Zuiko lens; Agfa CT18 colour slide rated at 64 ISO; converted to mono in Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the High Contrast Red preset.

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OUTER SUBURBS 12 – MODERN LIFE 2: SHATTERED COLOUR

 

 

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Something colourful, lying shattered, on the road

There is an earlier Modern Life post here: 1 .

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 .  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 enlarge it further.

Technique: TG-5 at 57mm (equiv); 1,000 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid film simulation; south Bristol; 3 Sept 2018.
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