Jam your Hands into your Armpits

In which our hero finds himself suddenly inspired following a chance discovery and decided to stop messing about and just sit down to pen this in one go. Well, keyboard this in one go, ah you get the idea…

I have certain times where I’ve got my photography head on and I’m determined to take a good photograph, or two, ideally more. The majority of the time it doesn’t really come off, I’ll end up with a couple of (in my humble opinion) above average shots and a sore finger from clicking through the rest. More than once I’ve bundled everything into the car, just driven off and looked into the rear view mirror and seen the perfect picture behind me when it’s too late to do anything about it (mainly because there’s usually an Audi riding my back bumper).

Anyway, this morning, thanks to reasons too tedious to go into, I had the opportunity to take the camera and tripod out first thing. The weather over the past few days has been amazing, fiercely cold but accompanied by clear blue skies and wonderful sunrises so I was determined to take advantage of it rather than my usual trick of waiting for the period of weather to pass and thinking ‘I reckon I could’ve got some really nice pictures from that’.

Crunching through the frost-covered grass the cold began to bite even as I started getting the tripod sorted but I managed to get set up just in time to catch the sun peep over the horizon and grabbed as many shutter clicks as I could before I lost feeling in my fingers. Seriously, they went past the stage of being numb and into the state of flat-out refusing to move, which really doesn’t help when you’ve half unscrewed your camera from the tripod so have to lean it against your chest and pray it doesn’t fall off whilst you jam your hands into your armpits to get them going again. Still, having packed the kit away (if such a phrase can be accurately used to mean ‘put a tripod and camera into a car boot without breaking the tripod, camera or car boot’) and got some circulation going again in my hands I drove off and, again saw a wonderful orange sky behind me in the mirror, before it got blocked by a grille with four interlocking rings on it…

On my way home though a feeling of missed opportunity settled on my shoulders, yes I’d got some shots I was happy with but, meh, I just thought I could’ve stuck the cold out a bit longer and see what happened, scouted a bigger area, bumped into an award-winning photographer and pinched their camera etc.As I pulled onto the drive I saw we had a visitor in the shape of a stray black cat that hangs around occasionally in the knowledge that I’m enough of a sucker to give it some food from time to time.

I swear this story is actually going somewhere by the way, I’m not just rambling. Much.

Once I’ve got in the house, unpacked my kit (if such a phrase yadda yadda yadda…) and given my own cats some attention I grab a handful of food and give the stray something to chow down on and a bit of fuss too. Checking the water bowl for them to have a slurp at I find that, unsurprisingly, it’s frozen solid. I manage to get the ice out in one lump and re-fill it with slightly warm water with a bit of sugar in it (which a) means the water doesn’t freeze quite as easily and b) also is a few free calories for the cats). Just as I’m about to throw out the lump of frozen water I notice that trapped in it are a couple of leaves surrounded by a scattering of bubbles. As I turn it the bubbles catch the light like, well, like bubbles in sunlight.

Hmm, that gives me an idea.

I’ve had enough of being outside for one day so I bring it in and slap a macro filter onto the camera before clicking away and giving me the following photographs which personally I feel are an unexpected bonus that trump any old sunrise.

The moral of the story: Always be nice to stray cats.

P.S. If you’re looking for a few cold-weather tips to help strays there’s some here, or tips to build a shelter here.

Click click click

In which our hero, realising he forgot to start the last entry with that phrase returns to form and continues with a tale of suspicious hashtags, monstrously missed deadlines, badly realised ideas, horticulture and possibly the odd bit of photography. Please be aware that the following missive contains the word ‘juices’.

Inspiration often strikes when you least expect it and, as mentioned previously, usually when you can’t do anything about it. As such jcwoody (you should probably look at his blog, it’s better than mine) and myself in the middle of a bit of Twitter banter came up with the idea of giving creativity a kick up the behind by challenging each other to shoot, write and post a blog entry within a limited time based on a theme to be chosen by the other person.

And lo, the hashtag #30daydeadline was born, though not without a small amount of trepidation that using it would bring us under investigation as part of a social-media aware kidnapping ring. Unless the observation we’re under is incredibly subtle, or they’re waiting for us to issue some kind of ransom demand, I think we’re fine. The theme I was given was ‘Time and/or Clocks’ and immediately the creative juices dried up, ran away and hid in a disused corner of my mind behind some cardboard boxes full of Queen lyrics and childhood memories of a trip to the beach. Eventually though I managed to tempt them out and get the cogs whirring.

Idea No.1

Clocks have hands yeah? And time affects everything yeah? So how about getting some clock hands and put them on seemingly random non-clock things? A few interesting angles? Try and light it to get the shadows going?

Click click click. Bish bash bosh.

27 days left.

Job done.

Boomshanka!

Right then, best get some clock hands. As I’m a man on a (pitifully small) budget I headed to everyone’s favourite: eBay where I hit upon a stumbling block. It turns out clock hands are in demand. Every bid I made was trumped, and trumped royally by people who actually needed them for y’actual clocks and actually needed them so badly they were actually willing to actually pay a decent price for them. Actually.

As such, sadly Idea No:1 had to be set to one side, possibly for future use, more likely just for me to stare blindly at the inky scrawl in my Big Book O’Ideas and wonder what the planet of hell I was blathering on about.

Back to square one.

Idea No.2

Create some kind of social-media aware kidnapping ring.

No.

Idea No.3

Behold the ravages of time!

A slightly depressing idea was to venture down Entropy Alley and capture an image demonstrating the passage of time. Being as once I get an idea I usually get impatient to get it sorted (mainly before it falls out of my head) I needed something that a) shrivelled/decayed quite quickly and b) still looked fairly picturesque once shrivelled/decayed. After all, no-one ever won an award for a photo of some off milk did they? Flowers were an obvious choice, so obvious that I was too lazy to consider anything else. We have a couple of rose plants in the back garden of LG&E Towers and they needed dead-heading anyway so…

Snip snip snip. Bish bash bosh.

As I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for the blooms to fade it struck me that maybe a few dead flowers was a little too simplistic so thought I’d bulk the idea out by including the ‘clocks’ aspect of the subject given. A quick leap back onto eBay and a winning (huzzah!) bid of 99p on a slightly battered clock face gave me a suitable background. A close focus, bordering on me getting the macro out.

Click click click. Et voila…

So, job done, time for a bath?

Nope, ideas, like buses are large, usually diesel-powered, vehicles used for… wait, I’ll start again.

Nope, ideas, like buses never come on their own.

Bonus Idea

Showing time passing without any movement.

I’ve got a bit of a thing for old coins, I’m not sure why exactly, but it does mean that I have a small stack of pre-decimal pennies in various states of wear from fingers of the past, despite that varying quality they all have their year of minting on them and, as as rule, the older they are the more worn the coin is. In a few minutes a suitably angled stack had been arranged by my fat fingers.

Click cl… ah, you get the idea.

So there we are, a mere [insert fairly large number] days overdue, not one but two photographs on the subject of ‘Time and/or Clocks’. Having spoken to jcwoody in the meantime it’s been decided that when/if (hopefully when) we do this again the subjects will be slightly more specific, the original ones giving a little too much freedom of interpretation.

Onwards and upwards!

One Sunday Morning

An admission: From time to time I can become quite focused on one thing, become slightly obsessive only for it to be discarded when it loses its sparkle. (I’m pretty sure there’s a specific word for this but, slightly worryingly for a word-based medium, I can’t think of it at the moment.) Hopefully I don’t do the same with this blog but if it does suddenly stop mid-sentence you’ll know what’s happe…

Only joking.

It’s the same with my photographs too, quite often I’ll be chuffed to bits with an image only to come back to it a few weeks/day/hours later and suddenly realise it’s a dull, lifeless, poorly shot waste of pixels.

Not always though, there’s a hardcore, only a handful mind, of photographs which have stayed in my mental folder called ‘Not too bad actually’. This is one of them.

It was taken completely at random one Sunday morning and I think that’s partly its appeal. The eye belonged (well, still belongs) to my wife (at the time girlfriend) I don’t have the exact date it was taken but it’s at least five years old and was during that early, exciting, yet still quite fragile, part of the relationship. We were in bed, she was reading a book and, in a childish attention seeking moment I grabbed my camera and fired off a shot. I don’t think I even bothered to look at the picture until a little while later but when I did I was rather surprised to find the above image instead of the expected blurry mess.

I normally try not to break down exactly what I like about an image too much in case the act of taking it apart causes it to loses the magic leaving me with a handful of coloured dots, no idea how to put it back together and, inexplicably, two Ikea screws and a washer. That said, if I just put ‘I just like it cos I do.’ then it’s not going to be the most insightful bit of blog ever.

There’s a few things that seem to make it so appealing, all of which are wrong.

The lighting was just from the only source available, the bedroom window, and is wrong.  Nowhere near perfect and far too harsh the left-hand side is burnt-out and pure white whilst the background on the right-hand side is virtually black.

The (wrong) lighting has washed out most of the colour, meaning that’s not right either. There’s not a huge amount of colour to start with, mainly skin & hair, leaning towards the red end of the spectrum so the swipe of almost-neon green on the glasses, just the faintest hint balances it out. I would get my colour wheel out at this point and start wittering about radial direction but it has a puncture.

There’s the composition, which is completely wrong. Never, ever have the focal point bang in the middle of the picture. Ever.

On top of this there’s the resolution, which admittedly is not wrong as such, just rubbish. In those days the 3mp point’n’shoot was, if not the weapon of choice, more like the weapon I could afford. As such the size above is the biggest this image will ever get without going all blocky, pixelated and generally wrong.

Thinking about it there’s only one thing right with the above image, and that’s the focus which to be honest is pretty bang on. I’m not sure whether it’s something to be proud of that on a random click of a shutter the pupil is perfectly sharp or annoyed that it happened by pure fluke, unlike so many other planned photos which have looked fine but I’ve zoomed in to find that the focus is juuuuuuuuust out.

Despite the flaws, in fact probably in no small part because of them, this is one of my favourites. It’s a snapshot, almost accidental, less than a second in time yet it’s better than something I could’ve spent hours setting up, shooting frame after frame after frame until by the end I’m left with a pile of near-as-dammit identical but all equally unsatisfying images and no option but to choose the one I unlike the least. I guess, for me at least, this photo has a certain ‘I don’t know what’, or as the French would say: ‘I don’t know what’ (but in French).

To put it another way, I just like it cos I do.