Light and shade

Sun shadows

One of the fascinations about living in a brand new space is finding out how the light behaves during the days, at different times, in varying weather.

Four adults of a certain age sat watching a shadow theatre on one of the walls of the living room at the Tree House. It immediately took us back in time, to an age of innocence, when fathers and uncles had occasionally made shadow puppets on our bedroom walls, simply to entertain us at bed time. This was before my parents owned even a black and white television set.

The other evening, a bunch of flowers in a vase atop one of the radiator covers, together with some decorative foliage, managed to conjure from our imaginations a North American Indian's head, in profile, complete with feathers, and then, as the sun moved steadily across the sky, a rabbit with large eyes. The final, sun-setting fireworks left us in no doubt that we were looking at a galleon under full sail, just like the one worn as a hat by the giant in Terry Gilliam's surreal Film "Time Bandits".

I will continue to watch what happens.

Three poppies

I'm keeping it simple for now. My local Library offers a really great little Internet café facility, but time tonight time is running out fast.

Sparkly and I went for a walk with friends last night, just around the village. A sunny wall of the old church has been nourishing a fine collection of tall poppies. I'll wait for these seed heads to dry out, then take one or two home for planting, to see what colours they might bring to next season's flowering.

Watch this space.

Public footpath

I got fed up with sorting the contents of boxes yesterday evening. The system is simple, but time consuming and tedious. Stuff is either useful or not. Useful stuff is either useful to me or could be useful to another person. If it’s for me, I have to create a space for it in my new home. If not, it goes to the charity shop, unless it’s too old or worn, in which case it goes to the nearby landfill site, where it could be recycled.

So I needed a walk in the fresh air. Living in the country gives me access to a variety of Public Footpaths. These are historical rights of way running across the land, where, if one abides by the country code, pleasant paths lead one through the pastures of rural England.

At the end of the lane in which I live, the fields and meadows start on acres managed by a dairy farm. It was the longest day of the year when I photographed one of the gates, access control which lets considerate walkers through, while keeping livestock in their proper place. The latch was in need of repair, but a length of knotted bailing twine served both two legs and four.

Cows don’t need to horde stuff. They’re just happy using their several stomachs to turn sweet, green grass into pure, white milk.

The walk cleared my head. I discarded stale thoughts, recycled others, made space for new ideas.

No broadband, no lightroom

Things are settling down now, at The Tree House, but I'm without broadband or a big computer.

But I do have a working phone camera, so here's a view of the hallway lighting, sitting atop the drum-shaped set of drawers into which I throw my keys upon coming home.

The Wrens have flown (and so have we)

This little bumbling ball of brown feathers was cowering from me while under a hail of sharp commands from its mother, who was perched in a nearby bush, screaming at it from the pages of the Wrens' Basic Survival guide, as Sparkly and I were moving yet another car full of stuff from the old home to the new one this week.

It was a very timely maiden flight date, because we've been waiting to shift the chimenera since it was chosen as a nesting site weeks ago.

The top of the chimney pot formed the entrance to the nest. Wise mother Wren had liked its shady aspect, which meant I needed extra light to photograph the detail of what she'd built. In my arms happened to be, among other things, two shaving mirrors I'd just unscrewed from indoors.

I used one of them for the old schoolboy trick of reflecting the sun back into the tiny, dark entrance. Juggling a point and shoot with one hand and a wobbling mirror with the other, I managed to reveal the intricate construction work which this little builder, Britain's tiniest native bird, the one which used to figure on our farthing coins, had woven from nature's free storeroom.

Goodbye birds, goodbye and thanks to the Old Rectory Cottage Garden.

Three stallholders

Cakes, baked by some of the members of Bishops Cleeve Women's Institute were on sale in the High Street during the splendid summer fair on Sunday. The theme was World War II, which explains the dress code for these three stallholders.

I wrote their names on the paper bag containg the tea-time goodies I bought. It got lost in the chaos of the weekend house move, though happily not until after the contents had been consumed. You see here, from left to right, Sandra, Yvonne and Margaret.

The four Enots were out and about too, kindly photographed here by Sparkly's brother Simon.

Flocks of a paradox

Sparkly and I took a trip out on Tuesday evening, escaping from the tiresome, stressful lunacy of trying to complete a very long-overdue house purchase. We went to see one of her niece’s Art Installations at the Art College in Cheltenham.

Ruby had set up her display in a small, darkened room. A data projector was making white clouds drift hazily across a blue sky. One wall and some of ceiling was festooned by two hundred or so origami birds. Each paper construction had been painstakingly created by the young artist, then suspended in its own space.

As soon as I saw the flock, a long buried fact floated up from deep in my memory. I’d read, half a century ago, in the children’s newspaper my father sometimes brought home for me, how Japanese children, victims of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, had been encouraged to make paper swans in their hospital beds. They were told that if they could manage to fold one thousand such tiny tissues of hope, they would survive their obscene injuries and live to tell the tale. I wonder, now, how many of them invoked such a miraculous cure?

I wanted to make a snapshot of Ruby in her element before leaving, so she kindly endured the very bright beam of light, suffering it for the sake of my art.

Thanks for an enjoyable evening, Ruby (and friends).

Three benches

The weather pattern this year seems to be a repeat of last year: a wetter than usual May has left surface water all over the fields which surround my home. The car park at Eckington Bridge was under water again last week.

It’s scary echo: an extremely  wet May preceded the floods last summer, precipitating misery from which many people are still recovering. Repairs to damaged homes are still incomplete. Nerves are frayed.

Summer? That's merely a word, one which appears to be changing its meaning.

Three Mackerel

I don’t often interfere with my pictures in Photoshop, but these three fish on ice were rather poorly lit in the retail side of the smokery where they were on sale.

Mackerel have distinctive, rather graphic markings, so I decided that a posterised image would quite suit them.

And the kitchen sink

The challenge, when knocking a quick still life into shape on location, purely for the fun of it, is to make a simple image without access to a studio full of expensive equipment. In this case I used things from around a kitchen sink.

I borrowed Sparkly’s dark grey fleece jacket to cover up the white draining board, because I wanted to work in red on black, then pressed a plastic chopping board into service as a makeshift reflector. The grey clouds in the sky provided the soft, broad highlights from the caravan’s kitchen window.

Just a few moments later, a tasty ratatouille was simmering in the pot.