Gertsamtkunstwerk

Safety Starts Here

For several months, Streatham Hill station has been undergoing building or renovation works. I think it's to do with the sidings/loco sheds but it also affects the passenger parts of the station, such as a temporary exit and entrance.

This sign bugs me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's because it seems inadvertently to imply that 'Safety' is of no concern on the platforms or even the actual rail track.

Autumn Desolation

I had this all to myself last Saturday. It's alongside Sinderland Brook, which separates Sale and Altrincham.

I walked from the A56 main road (near the Pelican) up to Woodheys Park and did not pass a soul. It did cross my mind - if I were to be attacked it might be days before anyone found me.  Meanwhile, of course, the A56 was bumper-to-bumper with traffic going nowhere fast.

Given that I wasn't attacked, but did get mud on my shoes and the bottom of my trousers, who do you think was better off?

Some more holiday photos

I am slowly editing my holiday photos in my preferred unrandom-unsequential way.

Difficult to explain. These houses are built over-looking what appears to be a dried-up river bed. I assume it's long term dried up from my cursory examination of the ground. The houses seem to cling precariously to a crumbling cliff, with many cracks and much evidence of subsidence. Villajoyosa.

We didn't much like Alicante, although we enjoyed the castle and the panoramic views it afforded. Editing this photo inspired me to ask the question, on Twitter and Facebook:

Do any of you own yachts. Or dinghys. Or launches. Or any sea-going vessels?

People offered answers of 'lilo' 'blow up boat', 'score to HMS Pinafore' and 'that reminds me, I must check my lottery'. Oh, god, they're wits these people. One person did offer a father who has a yacht that he's pouring money into (tr. 'my inheritance').

The thing is, often when I go on holiday, away for a weekend, or just out for a day trip, I see lots and lots of boats. Many are working boats: for fishing, ferrying goods or people, dredging etc. Many more are commercial pleasure boats, for excursions, or for hire by the week.

But that doesn't go anyway to explain why there are so many sea-going boats that are apparently privately owned - and, by definition, not actually at sea. I recognise that there is a whole section of society outside my direct experience who are very seriously rich. But they are only a tiny number, and surely can't possibly own all the leisure boats in the world. I suppose the celebs who generally fall out of nightclubs, or the greedy city sharks who are ever-present at their desks could own some of them; their desire for ostentatious status symbols would explain why so many are tied up in docks.

But there are just too many boats around for that to be an explanation. I reckon there must be large numbers of people who are keen on sailing and have bought a boat -  a modest sized thing, with a small cabin, capable of being crewed by one or two people.

They don't have to be seriously rich, just comfortable/prosperous. I just don't know (hardly anyone) like this. I think of a friend-of-a-friend, a solicitor with no dependants, a modest flat, no car, no 'lifestyle' expenses. She had a yacht, and most summer weekends she took to sea, gradually sailing round the coast of Britain. I can understand that. But she is the only person of my enormous social 'circle' that I know who actually owns a yacht.

And another thing: I have just noticed that one building in that picture appears to have solar panels. It's only when it's pointed out starkly in that way that you suddenly realise that none of the others do. I have read that Spain generates a far greater proportion of power from the wind than Britain does, even though Britain is better situated to do so. So it's surprising that they aren't using more of what comes more naturally, the sun.

Some holiday photos

Lifeguards' chairs

When the lifeguards were on duty they built a tent city out of umbrellas and stayed inside, possibly smoking ganja.

Boatyard

Benidorm station café

Daily Photo fail

The more observant among you will have noticed that a couple of weeks ago I announced, with a grand flourish that I was going to take a photo every day and publish it.

And then, after a couple of days, I missed a day.

And then another day.

I realised that it is actually quite difficult to do. If I go somewhere specific, I take lots of photos as things appear to me, but then, back home, I reject large numbers of them.

The point of this is to go around my everyday routine, to and from work, to the shops, the odd evening out, and be looking for something out of the ordinary to photo. Having the courage to take out my camera in unexpected places, and then frame the shot to make it worthwhile.

I decided that as I still have lots of photos to be edited from summer outings, and in a couple of weeks I shall be on holiday, I shall start again in earnest.

Specifically on 1 October, which is a pretty random day but means that the first few months will be resolutely autumn and winter. I take more photos in Spring/Summer than Autumn/Winter and I guess most people are the same.

But, in fact, some of the more interesting light is in Autumn and Winter, and it should act as spur to take photos of small objects of details in often gloomy or miserable weather

Just because I haven't been publishing doesn't mean I have been entirely camera shy. For example, I took this last week as I walked from South Kensington station to the Royal Albert Hall - it's a bit of detail on the wall of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Photo 365/3 Fail 1 - Dolly Likes Beer

I know it's only 10 pm and I could go out and hunt for photo-shooting ops, but I'm really not in the mood. I have been fairly busy all day, attending to domestic minutiae and researching the area where we are going on holiday. Having thought we have booked a beach holiday, we are now planning on taking walking boots - and using them.

But rather than not publish a photo at all, I thought I would publish one I took at a wedding I attended a few weeks ago. I constructed the scenario especially for the taking of the photo.  It wasn't that I was drunk, as such, although, clearly I was under the influence. We were Bride's Family, I think the doll belonged to Groom's Family.

 

365/3 Kensington Gardens

I went to a Prom tonight - I'll write it up tomorrow - so I thought that I would take a photo of something that caught my eye near the Albert Hall. I did take a few that I hoped would have turned out quirky, or something, but I was disappointed. I could see that I could have taken a much better photo on a different aperture setting, so I shall try again another day. Sadly I won't get the light I got this evening, which was pretty gorgeous.

It seems a cop put to take a picture of the Albert Memorial - too predictable, too touristy. It's a bit sad to publish a picture of the Albert Memorial with its top chopped off, but, for a day where the weather forecast was heavy showers, and not a drop did fall (to my knowledge), I think this is delightfully summery

I was standing outside in the second interval, when it was pretty much dark, and some people standing near me were looking for Tinkerbell flying past old Bertie (there's a production of Peter Pan on in the gardens at the moment)

365/2 - Yuppie Flats

I already see a possible stumbling block in this project: if I force myself to publish a photo everyday, inevitably, there will be some that just don't attract the eye. I hope that when such things happen, I will, at least, have a story to tell!

This is not far from where I work. A few years ago, I was working in another building that overlooked this site, which was then derelict and being demolished from within. I assume that it is listed, and therefore they could not alter the façade.

Many years previous to that, I remember there being a furore about the closure of this, the Westminster hospital merging with several others to form what was originally going to be called the Westminster and Chelsea, until someone realised that the acronym was unfortunate*. 

In the late 90s I worked in Hammersmith, and occasionally passed the Chelsea and Westminster, which is massive, huge. Like the Lanesborough Hotel at Hyde Park Corner, which was once St George's, which is now based in Tooting, I simply cannot understand there being opposition to Victorian hospitals leaving the city centre for residential areas, still in Inner London, with capacity for expansion. It was not as if it left that area of London without a hospital, with the large St Thomas's almost visible from there, and Guys not much further up river.

Years before I worked in Horseferry House, a current colleague was also stationed there. At the time, he had a colleague, who used to arrive early to work. One morning he looked out the window (this was in the days when such activities were permissible in the Service), and saw, to his horror and disgust, dead bodies being wheeled out of the mortuary. Needless to say he never looked out of a window again.

I have been puzzled for a long time what the building is. It seems in some ways to resemble a hotel, but lacks the hustle and bustle and obvious catering facilities of a hotel. It also resembles a block of yuppie flats, but that doesn't really explain why the concierge has a  luggage trolley like posh hotels or the manner in which people come and go. It seems that some, at least,  of the apartments are available for short-term let, for business or tourist purposes.  I am not sure I would wish to stay in an apartment block which so blatantly omits the vital apostrophe in St John's (sic). Lowers the tone, somewhat, don't you think?

* urban myth, possibly

This project is not an attempt to emulate the London Daily Photo, but nevertheless I commend the site to you.

A new 'project' - 365/1

Quite a lot of people seem to be doing this: the idea is to force yourself to take photos every day, and I have decided I will do so.

I have set myself a few rules and excuses.

Photos from the phone don't count (in any case, I'm having 'issues' with my internet connection from my phone at the moment, which means I can't email photos to the blog; I need to take it into a Carphone Warehouse to see if they can sort it)

I will try to avoid taking photos of my house or garden: part of the challenge is to take a look at the wider world; however, if I get laid up with swine 'flu, or when it's cold, wet and windy in winter, I might break this rule.

On the whole, I shall be aiming to photograph everyday objects and sights; there may be exceptions.

I will try and post a photograph on the actual day of taking it, or before breakfast the next day; this won't happen when late nights are followed by early-ish mornings.

When I'm away eg on holiday, I will continue to take daily photos (of course) but I may not upload them until after the return home. If, however, I fail to take a single (usable?) photo in a day, that will be a 'fail'.

I might take and publish pictures of people in the public eye, but I won't publish photos of friends or relatives without their specific permission.

There will be no cat photographs.

Failure won't be a catastrophe, there will always be another day.

So, today's photo: berries on a tree in Millbank Gardens behind Tate Britain

Abundant berries are traditionally a prediction of a cold winter. Both Jimmy and my manager kept telling me this six years ago; it didn't happen.

But doesn't that look autumnal?

Photo

A few months ago some so-called professional photographer visited Jimmy' spub to take photos of staff, customers and premises. He supplied Jimmy with a CD and I have to say, I was not impressed. He was an amateur. Either he had a good camera, or else he had the chutzpah to say 'I'm a professional photographer' which, somehow, makes people more co-operative.

A few weeks ago Jimmy's niece got married. We noticed the two photographers roaming around the reception and assumed they were getting candid shots without people being particularly aware. Claire sent out a message today linking to a site where, with a password, we could access 360 photos of the day, which is an excellent idea. Of course, they are fairly low resolution, good enough for the web, but not for prints. Clever!

Even though I don't like this photo because it's not flattering to me, I can really appreciate what the photographer has done. Or could, if it wasn't me.

Also, Jimmy gets absolved from not having taken one of me full length, even though, of course, any attempts at elegance on my part are ruined by:

• posture
• already perspiring in the heat
• as always, having my bloody camera in my hand!

Twenty-five years of angst

In 1984 I did something very stupid. I got my photos back from the developers and wrote neatly the details on the back of them - using a pink felt-tip pen. As  I finished writing, I neatly put the photo to the bottom of the stack, before the felt tip had dried, thus ruinign several photos from our hols in Devon and the Liverpool Garden Festival.

A typical result is this:

I have desaturated on purple and magenta, but the stains remain. How would you get rid of them. Cloning's a possibility especially in the sky and sea; not so sure about the promontory.

(It's not a bad picture considering it was shot on a 126 Instamatic).

I suppose I could search for the negative and re-scan.

Photographs

I haven't been writing much on the blog because I have been focusing quite a lot on editing photos. When I am at the PC, every hour or so I add a photo to my collections of Paris and London

I feel quite pleased, especially at the Paris set. Photography gives me so much pleasure. What you see the is the end of a journey, sometimes literally.

Why I take photos, I don't really know. Perhaps a silly question, just about everybody does. I suppose for most of us, it's to tell a story. Photography is an artform, but I see myself as a craftswoman rather than an artist. I don't like artifice. (But nor do I believe the camera never lies). What you see is what you get. All of those photos have benefited from crafts, such as zooming in, and cropping out; the stained glass window is a triumph of colour management in the editing software. But anyone could take any one of the last three photos by being in the same place (in the same weather conditions for the bollards in particular); the Arc de Trimphe could be easily replicated but for a different configuration of traffic (I suspect there will be a lime green open top bus, though!).

It's only in the past couple of months that I have been using my camera properly. I bought it six years ago and have been using it as a glorified point-and-shoot. I have finally been taking photos in RAW, which meant splashing out on an editor which can handle RAW photos. I had baulked at the cost, but I've been using my 'entry level' software for so many years. If I get the same service out of the new one I'm using, it will have cost me a penny a photo, nothing compared to the cost of film-based photography! The combination of the two factors have left me feeling a bit warm inside.

Talking of old-fashioned photography, last year I combined watching the Olympics with scanning my old photographs into digital form. Having saved them as jpegs, I am wondering whether I should repeat the process but save them in a different form (Advice please).

I am going through them slowly editing them and selecting the best to publish, here or on Facebook, depending on the subject matter. A normal person would have started in 1984 and got stuck at about 1991, but I'm not normal, so I do a few from each year before moving onto the next year!

             
USA and Canada 99                        1990                            1989                        Me myself I

1996

I feel that the best photos have lost something in the scanning process. However, it's been nice to give some new life to a few by fiddling with the lighting, or colour, or cropping out extraneous rubbish.

Favourite photos

On the right, at the top is an album of my choice of my 98 favourite photos taken by me (or with my camera in my presence). I rotate them from time to time to highlight a different photo as 'top' - ie the most easily accessible.

Today I changed it from

Cottage Garden

to

Waterloo

Experimenting

The single biggest advantage of Digital photography is the minuscule marginal costs involved, which allows for a high attrition rate on 'important' occasions, and for plenty of 'messing around', perhaps just in the house or garden.

I am beginning to learn to have multiple  attempts at the same photo. What am I less good at is being brutal at deleting them. I have a a mindset which says - if I just play around in the editing software, it will be all right. Obviously, if there is a photo that's badly exposed or composed but captures an unrepeatable fleeting moment, it can be worth the effort.

I have a silly way of going through editing my photos. I find if I do them in strict chronological order boredom quickly sets in, especially when there are great similarities between the photos.

The special place on the autistic spectrum which enables me to be an accountant/auditor dictates that I do them in a particular order, using the unique reference number.  I know it's silly, I know it's trainspottery, I know it leads to severe delays while I wait for a set to be complete.

However, the advantage is that when I have similar shots, I approach them differently on different occasions, rather than slavishly following the 'inspiration' of the edit done two weeks ago.

A few weeks ago I took a few snaps in the back garden; as it happens of some wallflowers. I set the camera to Focus bracket, so basically took the same photo three times with near, middle and far exposure. I edited them on different days.

A few days later I read in a photography book that it's a good learning exercise to pick a colour and take photos of anything you see in that colour. So I rushed round the house taking indifferent  pictures of orange things.

I am not yet sure what I am supposed to learn from this, and in the meantime I have, and will be, distracted by other things photographic. Nevertheless, it is an exercise I may repeat in the future with another colour. And I did manage to get one more orange thing the next day on a lunchtime perambulation.

 

 

Overexposed

I decided, after all these years, it's about time I learned to use my camera.

I took the following photo, deliberately over-exposed, in RAW format (although saved as jpeg for web publishing. Obviously)

I edited the jpeg in my usual photo editing software, MGI Photosuite

Separately, I also converted it to an 8 bit TIFF and edited that in Photoshop (although Photosuite also handles TIFFs). Obviously,I had to then convert it to jpeg for uploading

An apology

I think I owe this couple an apology. There I was on Tooting Common yesterday afternoon, relearning how to use my camera. I thought I would have an attempt at hi-speed continuous shooting. To test this out one needs something that moves. Just their luck that they happened to walk into shot just at the "right" moment. I took fifteen shots of them. I think they had noticed by shot ten.

Sorry, it wasn't anything personal. I wasn't attempting to do good photos or even use you in any sort of documentary or
commentary way. You were just there, at that time! And I certainly didn't do close-ups, although I could have done.

Guess what

Can anyone guess where and when this photo was taken - ie what is it of?

No prizes for guessing, just a feeling of smug satisfaction at being right

Snow photos

I have published a bundle, more than doubling the size of my 'Winter' Album. Obviously, this album would have been bigger if I had got out my camera when taking a horse-drawn carriage ride round a snow-covered Central Park, NY last winter. But I didn't.

Perfumery - studies in small objects of desire

It's funny, I was never that much into perfume. Nevertheless a few years ago I was very grateful for a 'travel set' of four perfumes received as a present. Ideal for me, because I just waste big bottles - they evaporate or go off.

Going through Heathrow just over a year ago, I happened to notice that they had some of these travel sets on display, and I bought a Yves St Laurent one; then, again at Heathrow, en route to Barcelona, I spotted a Christian Dior set. Bought. At Valencia, heading home, I found a Givenchy set. Sold to the woman who suddenly has a collection of mini perfumes.

I decided to mess around with my camera. My initial objective was to photograph them as some sort of easy documentary. Then I realised it was silly using a red background - although I didn't grasp the silliness until I put them through the PC.

So I re-shot them again, rigging up a more neutral background and using the (fading) daylight coming through the bedroom window. Then I messed around with the editing software and came up with something...interesting. I am very very poor at capturing tiny images at close distance, so these sorts of things are ideal to practice with.

There are several more that simply haven't photographed well and I might revisit, but below is just a snapshot of "The Collection"

Photo update

I have now finished uploading my photos from Valencia, both the touristy ones and those from the curtain call of Iphigénie. All I can say is that they are what they are.

Having thought aloud in a previous post about whether to buy a DSLR camera, I have decided not. I currently own a Canon G3 which I bought nearly six years ago. Canon have updated the series several times since and I was nearly tempted to get a G10, which has more advanced technology that the G3. I have decided instead to learn actually how to  use the camera I have. This includes finding out about functions such as Exposure Compensation, ND filter and manual focus, and also understanding more about what techniques to use in what conditions, and shooting more in RAW format. I am disappointed in the quality of the photos from Iphigénie, especially if compared to Tamerlano. Some of that is down to the fact that for Tamerlano I was in the second row, centre, and for Iphigénie I wasn't, and that the set for Tamerlano was brightly lit and Iphigénie's wasn't,but a large part of it is down to my inability to get the max from my camera.

I have also discovered that models such as the G9 or G10 have a fixed screen, whereas the G3 has a screen that can be unfolded from the camera and rotated to face backwards or forwards or any angle in between. That is such a brilliant feature, and I don't really understand why it was discontinued.