Tower at sunrise

In a recent dog walk I was lamenting the fact there was no way to take the photograph I wished too of a landmark tower there.

Well I made a special effort to get there by 5:30am to catch the sunrise.  Sunrise always has an element of risk to it, as the day is far to young to know what it is going to be yet.  Still the weather had been settled enough and I was guessing it would hold good for another 24 hours.  The unearthly hour also meant there was a good chance I would have the place to myself.

I was wrong on that count as a couple of people were setting up one of those wind kite things.  They look fun in a “rather you than me” type way.  They were doing their own thing and fortunately were not in my way, the kites flying could have made some interesting images but the transit vans and all the paraphernalia to get them up in the air was not really going too.

The tower was built in 1720 by Trinity House as a navigational aid for seafarers.  Suggestion is it had a lit beacon on the top originally.  It stands 86 feet high.  It is now a Grade II listed building, which has an irony about it given the restrictions on what can be done to it, its future will be lying at the bottom of the cliff, toppled because government is unwilling to save the coastline it sits on.  It was on the buildings at risk register until it was purchased and renovated and opened up to the public for the first time in its history in 2004.

I got the picture and was darn glad to head back to the car, its getting colder in the mornings now, seasons are most certainly changing.

August Images.

Photography is a significant part of my strolling.  It acts as a record of change and a jogger of memory.  I take a great many simple snaps, hundreds adding up to perhaps two thousand a month.  It is fairly mind-bending just keeping the catalogue of the images so they can be searched and sorted in some fashion.

I am a hoarder of memories.

Every so often from the painfully mundane an image that can illustrate a point on the blog can be culled.  A good many photographs just go onto my flickr account, a slideshow runs on the left hand side of the blog if you are interested in seeing the photostream.

As with everything else I hope to be on an upward learning curve when it comes to photography but it is debateable.  I spend a lot of time enjoying other people’s snaps, some of the work is breathtaking.  They are all inspirations.

Here are some of the images which mean something to me in August.

The month itself is far to short in the way that February is much too long.  Winters might be milder, spring might be arriving earlier, but none of this has yet to save us from the misery which is Feb.  The two months August and February are calendar opposites but somehow February always seems closer to hand than August.

The most dramatic early feature of the month were butterflies.  It has been well recorded this was the year for the Painted Lady, it made national news.

By the end of August I seem to have lost sight of the butterflies, perhaps I am just looking in the wrong places.  I miss them.

The farmers have been busy bringing in their crops for us, a process which has escalated as the month has drawn to a close.  Fields that were gold will soon be brown and with the first rains, mud.  The harvesting has obliterated the footpaths across fields in many instances, the three inch of stubble makes walking more difficult for me, it is a serious inconvenience to my dogs who are only 6 or 7 inches off the ground.

Giant circular bales which always look on the point of movement now dominate fields.  They don’t move, I tried it once, even with the strength of ten pints it was not an easy task and not one recommended.  Some fields still have a more traditional square bale, sometimes piled high, echoes of urban skylines, towers 16 bales high, 5 across leaning drunkenly dot the fields.  The effort will have an efficient purpose, the size will be determined by some reasoning that eludes me.  I can guess, but I don’t know.  There is always something to learn.

Again this year I have failed to take a picture of the harvest that matches the one that is in my head, maybe next year.

So the farmers have danced with nature again and brought in the colourful crops for us.  In the meanwhile the plants, left to their own devices have simply got on with it.  Fruit has ripened, seeds are being distributed.

This has brought about another problem for walkers with dogs low to the ground and rough coated, seed heads.  One walk was totally ruined by continually, and literally, having to cut thistle heads out of the dogs coats.  In the end I had to carry them 3 miles.  The accumulation of the heads had become too much, walking became impossible for them.  The dogs coats were beginning to look moth eaten with my continuing ministrations.  Cutting thistle heads out of wriggling dogs with a 1 inch pair of scissors does not make my top ten list of things to do.

This combined with the issues created by harvesting has meant field walking has been somewhat curtailed the last few weeks.

Before the seed head problem a recent walk took me past Langham Church.  It was staging a wedding ceremony, so it did not seem like the appropriate time to go wandering in.  Unfortunately for most churches, there is no longer a good time to wander in.  The idea of the open church has long gone in many areas now.  The population has retreated from church and the churches make themselves less approachable.  The only church I have found open was no longer a church.

This was a great shame as Langham Church is reputed to have the oldest church chest in Essex.  An oak dug-out dating from the 12th century.  The venture to augment my walks with some fine historical church interiors is only going to be possible if I can solve the problem of the locked church.

The chest shown is from West Bergholt Old Church (the church that isn’t any longer) and dates from the 15th or 16th century.  I am hoping to add to this image collection but the modern world may have put paid to that.

August was a month of small pilgrimage for me, the visit to the first Augustinian Priory in England.  I did not capture the building that I saw, my snaps were workman-like, they are on flickr if you wish to see them.

The days are growing shorter now, noticeably so, sunsets are currently at the 20:00 mark, sunrise just before 06:00.  Good news for the lazy photographer.  No longer is there a need to get up desperately early to capture a sunrise and it is not so late that it affects the needs created by a working day.  Likewise a sunset has been and gone and I am back home at an hour which means there is almost enough hours to sleep in.

August is a time of sunrise and sunset, the hint that autumnal colour is on its way and the next great season will soon be upon us.  I am very much looking forward to this, even if the shorter days will start to impact on the available free time I have outdoors.  I have my plans for September, if I am lucky half of it will get done.

Technorati Tags: August,Autumn,Church,sunset,sunrise,harvest,fields,walking,butterfly,insects,Priory,Summer,photography

Butterflies July – Aug 2009

Here is my collection of butterflies July – Aug 2009 that were slow enough to be photographed.

The idea of this was just to shift my focus somewhat from “what’s coming up next?” mentality.  I considered a number of potential projects.  Birds were just too Bill Oddie, I did not want that to happen to me.  Birds also have a nasty habit of being brown and moving at high speed in the middle distance.  My best hope is to try and identify the various alarm squawks emanating from them.  It did not seem to fit what I was looking for at this juncture.

Flowers were a real possibility.  I have tried it before, too much variety, too mind-boggling and rather too “girlie”.  So they were ruled out.  Tree identification was ruled out because it had the limiting factor there had to be trees and that was not always a possibility.  Also the vast majority of them can be described as “brown and sticky” as per the schoolboy joke.

Flowers and trees had the significant advantage, they did not move, or at least had limited and fairly predictable patterns of movement.

Eventually though, butterflies, quintessential insects of warmth, were going to be in the frame.

Hopefully the days of huge collections of butterflies pinned to boards are over.  My grandfather had plenty, dusty and broken, their brief lives brought to a premature end.  It was a sad collection in so many ways.  Physical evidence of a grandad’s youth falling apart behind glass.  Time eats everything.

Photographing them is more of a challenge, the killing jar replaced by microchip.  So many eluded me, many photographed were unfocused blurs.  Others that did stick around and focused were brown blobs of considerable disinterest to anything but experts.

Some ruled themselves out by just being too small.  This was a shame, but with my skillset the Skipper family looked like escapees from a roll of woodchip.  It soon was obvious this was going to be about the strutting superstars that happened to float my way and pose.

This was the year of the Painted Lady.

It made headlines, a colourful invasion, every flower and hedge was carnival.  Certainly the most beautiful and striking profusion they were ever present on walks.  Now they are flying on faded wings, worn out from the sheer exuberance of flight.  It is a melancholy sight too see them on dusty fading wings, youth gone.  I have many pictures to remind me of their myriad beauty this year, this one is my favourite.

The Peacock butterfly is a true beauty and possibly the longest lived of UK butterflies.  A potential lifespan of 11months, although 5 are spent in hibernation, seems possible.

The Red Admiral is the defining butterfly of my youth.  Everything largeish and reddish was a Red Admiral.  This year though I found it rather tricky to find one, so I was pleased to see this fellow on my birthday.  An interesting day for it to appear given its association with a youth I am now observing through the wrong end of the telescope.

The large white cannot really be missed, strong fliers, they are everywhere.  Probably more commonly known as cabbage white, a name they share with the small white.  The larva like a bit of cabbage.  Suits me if they ate every cabbage on earth, they seem to make much better use of them than we do.

The Speckled Wood.  Wonderfully marked, just a shame its so darn brown.  Where there was one, there were many.  Most certainly an insect of those shaded wooded areas.

The Comma, a very distinctive butterfly with its ragged wing shape.

The Gatekeeper, a wonderfully colourful butterfly.  I might have a tendency to muddle these with the Meadow Brown, they look quite similar with just a casual glance to me.  Consequently not many of these have been seen, but a great many Meadow Brown’s have been seen.  The distribution might not be as one sided as I imagine.

Tortoiseshell butterfly.

I had a real job getting a half decent picture of one of these.  I did not see that many and those were too quick to capture.  The markings are beautiful and that blue piping is so eye catching, it is wonderful.

Brown Argus.

I dont think it is the Common Blue, but its not easy to tell.

I have only seen these on a meadow near Fordstreet while walking The Essex Way this year.  Very fortunate to get this picture as mostly they are too small and quick to get any sort of picture at all.

Clouded Yellow Helice Form.

I followed this butterfly for a quarter of a mile or so down the banks of the River Stour.  When it first went past me I thought it was going to be a Brimstone and really wanted a photograph of it.  As I got closer, there was a possibility of it being a Pale Clouded Yellow.  These are very rare in England and would have been quite a find.  Anyway after consultation with an expert on things butterfly assigning it as the Helice form seems the sensible thing to do.

I also have images of the Meadow Brown and the Ringlet, but these are poor images, but good enough for me to claim them.

The rest of my flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40131473@N06/

 

Technorati Tags: butterflies,photography,summer

Travels with my camera

I enjoy photography, which is very different to actually being any good at it.  What I lack in talent is made up for in volume.  This is a particularly harsh blow for those that get inflicted with it.  Not only is it mediocre, but there is tons of it.

“Practice makes perfect”, is such a well worn adage it has somehow become true.  A simple experiment will illustrate the point.  Stand in the middle of the room and start flapping your arms, first one of us to fly to the ceiling should write to the Smithsonian.

Practice will improve your arm flapping, but it is not going to enable you to fly.  I will get better at taking pictures but the images will still be mundane.  Interesting in itself.

I dabbled with photography in the days of film and darkrooms.  For a while I was a studio based photographer on the high street taking portraits.  Odd for someone that does not really like people, a dislike which grows as the age of the person reduces.  Being inside is also rather tedious.  Being in a windowless, airless room trying to make brattish kids smile may not be an inner circle of hell, but it is on the periphery.

Also it was for a photographic chain, no self-expression or experimentation allowed.  The classic poses you see in a thousand publicity shots of TV personalities taken 30 years ago which they fondly imagine fools everyone was the norm.

“Oh, how young he looks”, followed by “Who is that wrinkly old fool on stage now?”  Forget airbrushing, much cheaper to have a picture published when you had your own hair and teeth, shame about the flares and the kipper tie, but they will come back into fashion one day.

The days of gunslingers posing in Wild West towns and buttoned up Victorian gentleman with massive beards were long gone.  Photography had lost its allure, for most there was no great sense of occasion, most were their on sufferance to appease a not particularly favourite aunt.

Thankfully those days are behind me and well forgotten, mention it and “cheap wedding photographer” instantly pops into people’s heads.

My love of photography never really left me though, as long as people are not cluttering up the scene, unless they are humorously obese, in shell suits or dressed as cowboys in charity shops.  Admit it, who can resist.

Then digital photography hit, a revelation.  I was not an early adopter of the technology, way to expensive, way to useless, but for the last few years it has been more than fine for my happy snaps.

Now some form of digital camera is with me all the time.

Getting an image is a powerful motivator for me.  I find myself going to places I have very little interest in, because there is a style of picture I wish to experiment with or a subject I want to try out.

One of the great advantages of a year wearing down is sunrises and sunsets become within the reach of almost normal people.  I got up at 04.30 to catch a sunrise over the sea.  It was rubbish, but the dogs got a walk somewhere else, it was warm enough.  It is within the bounds of normality.

When I get home the images are carefully filed away for some future reference point.  With the ever increasing disk sizes and lowering costs there is never any reason to delete even the most terrible of image.  Blurry pictures of blurry objects are lovingly catalogued, another picture of my thumb goes on record.

Over the next 7 days there is an airshow to go to, a classic car event to see, a funfair to witness and a carnival to stare at.  I have no great interest in any of them beyond there is an image of them in my head and I want to capture it on film.

For the longest while I have wondered am I walking or taking photographs, what is my primary motivation for the trip.  There is no real answer to it, seeing things is the reason I go walking, extending the lifespan of the memory by taking a photograph is important too me.  Eventually the image is the walk.