Picture of The Day

Interior design

There's not much you can do, structurally, with the interior of a Grade 2 listed building such as the Georgian emporium called Beau Nash House. It's currently in service as an Italian restaurant called Strada in Sawclose, Bath. Such classically high ceilings, wood panelling, sash windows and huge doors must all be left alone, or, if needing repairs, be fully restored to their original condition.
I thought this modern, decorative approach was clever: pleasingly minimalist, the circles and curved cylinders softening the ubiquitous rectangular features, with strong reds splashing a vibrant warmth in contrast to the almost neutral paintwork.
The service was prompt and friendly, with copious quantities of bottled water, provided free of charge, without the need to ask for refills. The food was excellent too: the chef was an Italian who quite obviously knew exactly when his insalata was verde, his spaghetti al dente.

Nodding to Stephen Gill

 

There’s only so much languishing in bed I am capable of, when getting over the after-effects of a heavy whack from the old, grimly familiar migraine night stick.

Even with only one fully functioning, reluctant eye, I was driven to respond to the powerful surge of creative energy that accompanies each recovery. Maybe that’s just my odd physiological system making up for lost time, but whatever it is, it insists on being satisfied, causing me to fret until completed. Only after the work is finished can I can sleep soundly again. Hey ho: I have such weird brain chemistry!

Carl, a colleague of mine, brought an edition of the Guardian weekend magazine in to work this week,  to show me some of the Hackney Flowers portfolio by photographer Stephen Gill.
I liked Gill's approach to making a print, then using it as a background for something of the subject again, producing a new picture from the resulting recursive combination.

Thanking my camera for offering an auto-everything mode, and switching Photoshop to a gentle, greyscale palette,  I had a go with a sprig of  dried Honesty, temporarily borrowed from a vase on the mantlepiece.

Window display

Well, we're still in Milsom Street, Bath, folks.
Many of the ground-floor shop windows have retained their original curved glass frontages, dating from the first half of this century. They act as positive mirrors, distorting the buildings opposite into the kind of impossibly thin architectural curves I've only ever seen in reality on Manhattan's Flatiron building. A kind of reflection too on what fashion dictates to the kind of tall, thin people who must buy clothes like these.

Milsom Street, Bath (again)

Another view of the classic Georgian façades in Milsom Street, Bath. It was made seconds after yesterday's offering.

I like reflection shots. Cars, water and plate glass windows all serve as ways of extending an image when I’m in the mood for filling the frame. It’s like creating a wide angle or panoramic shot, without the right lens. These tiny digital cameras don’t offer much in the way of large zoom ranges, so I tend to adopt this approach to augment what limited angles of view they do give.

Milsom Street, Bath

Bath is on a mental list of good 'splorin' venues kept by Sparkly and me. It has been famous for being a Spa town since it was a major Roman healing shrine called Aquae Sulis in ancient Britain.
I like the classic Georgian architecture. I marvel at the way it was thrown up rapidly, in about a twenty year period. The only builders fast enough to keep up with that economic boom were Germans, specially shipped in for the job. This later gave rise to the expression "Jerry built", synonimous with poor quality resulting from haste. Well, the buildings have lasted a great deal longer than expected.
Milsom Street was, until quite recently, also home to The Royal Photographic Society. I consider myself fortunate to have printed, using traditional materials, in their basement darkrooms, which were practically hallowed ground for British photographers.

Tulip leaves

This week I read Bluesmama on the subject of combining blue and green. I remembered this in a Mall café in Bath, looking at a real tulip standing in a vase on the table in front of me.
Yesterday I wrote about pushing the limits of small, automatic digital cameras earlier this week. As I studied the shapes and spaces the curved green leaves, a PoD moment formed.
The glass atrium above me was flooding the surrounding dining area with soft, cloudy skylight. My brain told me this was white, but I knew the camera would see it as blue if I deliberately forced the "wrong" colour blance. Selecting the "tungsten" bulb icon from the menu (an incandescent bulb, not the tulip's; the camera's menu, not the café's. Are you following me here?) I made blue appear from nowhere, simply through the magic of photography.

Self portrait

When you know how, controlling depth of field in a picture with a camera which allows an independent choice of aperture and shutter speed becomes second nature.
My pocket digital does not allow this, so I wanted to force the kind of sharp foreground, blurred background image that I like. I set the macro feature on, then got up close to the subject, which was the camera lens itself, reflected in a mirror. The end result was pretty much what I’d visualised. I wish I’d been able to play like this, at zero running cost, when I was burning film on the steep part of my learning curve. Then there was all that wondering, waiting for processing, before I got to see the results. This new technology is so liberating.

The Bicycles of Ferrara book

For those of you who have waited patiently, I am pleased to announce my very first published anthology of contemporary black and white photographs.

Here's what the Press release says:

"Peter Bryenton is an award-winning photographer, with over four decades of experience as a skilled and passionate craftsman in the art of producing black and white images. He has a particular fascination with the graphic qualities of shadows.

In the Po Valley region of Italy, on a breathtakingly cold and clear winter solstice, he was presented with the ideal opportunity to capture, in camera, the essence of the details and textures assaulting his senses, and thus a body of work called “The Bicycles of Ferrara” was born.

“The Bicycles of Ferrara” is a creative study in chiaroscuro. It is a carefully selected sequence of 39 monochrome images, made in the Italian city of Ferrara, which is as famous for its pedal cycles as Amsterdam or Cambridge. It documents, artfully and pictorially, the function of the bicycle as a vehicle of transport and social interaction in an urban setting. The introduction is written in both English and Italian.

This softback book is 210 mm square (8” x 8”), contains over forty pages of pure white matte paper and is spiral bound to open flat. It has been produced using the latest digital technology."

Own one

You may purchase a copy, for £19-99 plus postage, by e-mailing me.

Use this spam-hostile address, replacing "AT" with the proper symbol and "DOT" with a dot: peterbryentonATyahooDOTcom

S Z V

I think it was Pasteur who said that chance favours the prepared mind. Having opened up a hole in my head to look at letters of the alphabet in Tuesday's post, stuff was leaping out in front of me all day long at work today. Here are three of 'em for you. It was one of those mad computer days in the classroom, so I was kept much too busy to capture any more examples.

As for PCs, why, oh why would one of eight brand new, identical desktop machines, all running the exactly the same copy of the same operating system, steadfastly refuse to recognise a simple USB device when it was plugged in? Why did the other seven blink not a pixel? Do any of you have hopeless monologues with suppliers' technical support staff? "Have I tried switching it off and on again?" You must be joking! I teach IT all day long: I'm forever switching the damn things off and on again. My switch finger is all but worn to the bone.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Schools should buy Macs.

Horny beetles

These two beetles were blundering about in the undergrowth, until I introduced them to each other. They were on the right lines, but it was a very blustery day and I decided they’d appreciate a little help.

I suppose I have now changed the whole course of the planet’s future, interfering with their species' genetic programming as I did so chaotically. Well, a butterfly may have flapped it’s wings in a steaming South American jungle, but on the windswept Devon coast, things seemed to be in need of a slightly bigger boost.