Category: Photography

My Little Brother

Bill at Smeath House

Like the semi-fictional teenage Steven Spielberg in his movie The Fabelmans, in 1964 my brother Bill and I spent hours planning and making the props for mini Standard-8 cine movies. I would have liked to have made a King Kong-style movie of some giant beast lurking over our house but it was beyond the resources we had available at the time.

I tried it out in this shot from my Ilford Sprite 127 but it didn’t work because – in the original – Bill’s hand didn’t quite rest on the corner of the house because the view from the camera’s viewfinder didn’t quite match the view through the lens.

Thanks to Photoshop I’ve been able to nudge Bill into position. And the Photoshop Neural Filter has done a great job of colourising Smeath House.

Hill Country

landscape

Another colourised dip into the envelope of my negatives from 1964 and this one is a mystery. As I develop the other photographs I’ll get a better clue to the locations that I visited during that year. I still have a Letts’ Schoolboy’s Diary from that year which should give me some clues.

Fox, Sparrow, Wood Pigeon

Thanks to Browning, I’m back in business with a replacement Strike Force Pro XD trail cam, so I’ve been catching up with the soap opera that is the wild side of our back garden.

As you can see, a male house sparrow has laid claim to the sparrow terrace nestbox, ousting the blue tits, who nested in hole 1 on the left last year. I love the puzzled expression on the blue tit’s face.

A persistent pigeon is waddling past the daffodils in pursuit of – he hopes – a mate.

Night visitors have included a cat and a vixen. I wonder if I’ll succeed in catching the cubs on camera this year?

Trail Cam Troubles

trail cam in action

A rainswept night by the pond proved too much for my trusty trail cam, the Browning Strike Force Pro XD.

Despite the rugged rubber armour the damp appears to have got into it.

Let’s hope that Browning can help me get it into action again.

Mobile Microscope

microscope

I spotted this mobile microscope in a sale at the RSPB Shop at Fairburn Ings and decided to give it a try.

sea mat on crab shell

This sea mat colony on a crab shell was photographed at the lowest magnification, which ranges from 20-200x. With the unaided eye, I can see it only as a stipple. There’s part of a barnacle shell in the bottom left corner.

hornwrack
hornwrack

Hornwrack is another colonial animal, which looks like dried up seaweed when you find it on the strandline. This 20x view shows the individual cells that the bryozoan filter-feeding occupants lived in.

slate
Intrusion of country rock in Lake District slate from a drinks mat on my desk.

Archer Hill

As we walked across the deer park at Wentworth Castle, two fallow bucks looked up then decided we were harmless and went on grazing as we passed them. The does and fawns were more wary. One made a show by ‘stotting’: prancing off stiff-legged, alternately putting the two front legs, then the two back legs down. This behaviour is thought to be a signal to predators that the deer is so fit, with its fancy footwork, that it won’t be worth the trouble of attempting to catch it.

Archer Hill Gate (all three arches of it: I’ve framed it with the tree to show only one of them) stands half way up the slope between Wentworth Castle, a Georgian mansion, and the ruins of Stainborough Castle.

Wentworth Castle

Meadow vetchling, heath bedstraw and cocksfoot grass in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle, artichoke, a grass-head, a multi-stemmed cypress trunk and a dead hedge in the gardens around the house.

Taken using the macro lens on my Olympus OM10-D E-10 MarkII DSLR except for the cypress, taken on my iPhone 11, as I couldn’t get the angle that I was after with the macro.

Sunny South Ossett

  • weathercock
  • palm
  • palm
  • sycamore
  • lichen
  • allotment
  • manhole cover
  • gatepost
  • Willow Hair and Beauty
  • Station Road
  • Ossett Town Hall

We’re set to have snow tomorrow, so I thought that I’d make the most of a sunny morning walk around Illingworth Park, Ossett, by taking Instagram-friendly square format colour photographs on my iPhone.

  • allotment
  • Willow Hair and Beauty
  • gatepost
  • lichen
  • manhole cover
  • palm
  • Station Road
  • Ossett Town Hall
  • sycamore
  • weathercock
  • palm