Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
There’s still some mid-autumn colour in our flower but it’s not quite as punchy as my photographs suggest: today I’ve had the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II set to Pop Art. All taken with the macro lens. I’m especially pleased with the detail on fly; as it was quite a cool day, the fly allowed me to push the lens towards it without buzzing off.
A perfect morning for an autumn walk around St Aidan’s RSPB reserve. I set the Art Filter my Olympus E-M10 II to Pin Hole. All of these were taken with the Zuiko 60mm macro lens. It wasn’t until I crouched down and focussed on the buttercup that I noticed the hoverfly. There are also a couple of green aphids at the top of the stem.
Buttonweed, Cotula coronopifolia, is a native of temperate South Africa, introduced to Britain.
On a rainy mid-autumn morning I set the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II to Key Line, to give a solid-colour pop art look to my photographs. I like the reflections on the wet roads but Blackburn’s Florists and Darling Reads’ bookshop provide some welcome bursts of colour on the High Street, as do the Handyman Supplies and The Green Berry on Queen Street.
The phone box has been converted to an art gallery but currently, due to restrictions, there’s no show in there. Social distancing is impossible in a phone box.
In the swinging sixties film Blow-Up, photographer David Hemmings goes into his local park with his SLR and encounters some suspicious characters. So very like my visit to Illingworth Park, Ossett, this morning.
I set the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II to ‘grainy film’ and it really has got the look that I remember from my photography course at Batley School of Art in the 1960s.
Since lockdown began I’ve taken hundreds of photographs on my new iPhone, which has got me back into photography, but I’ve neglected my regular camera, an Olympus E-M10 Mark II DSLR, so I thought I’d make a point going back to learning a bit more about it. Since I last used it there’s been a software update, so I experimented with the filters in Olympus Workspace. This is the Key Line art filter with an added blue cast. I like the effect; it reminds me of my experiments in photography on my Foundation Course at Batley School of Art. In the print studio someone put the four Richard Avedon portraits of The Beatles on the wall. The psychedelic pop-art effects Avedon used were similar to this Key Line filter, but he must have achieved the effect without the help of computers.
I’ve been making a start on archiving a collection of colour slides taken by Richard Brook (1943-2017), for many years the Conservation Officer of the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society. He photographed the East Ash Lagoon at Leventhorpe from the lagoon’s northwest corner on Sunday, 2 September, 1973. Pulverised fly ash was pumped from power stations into lagoons and left to settle out.
Richard could see the potential of these lagoons as nature reserves and he documented every one of them – along with subsidence flashes and sand quarries -within five or six miles radius of Wakefield, so his collection of slides form a unique record of post-industrial West Yorkshire.
I’m gradually learning my way around the slide scanning option of my SilverFast scanning program and also learning easier ways to remove specks of dust and other blemishes from the slides.
In Photoshop CS5, I’ve just discovered the Dust & Scratches filter, which is hidden away in the Photoshop Filter Menu under the heading Noise.
It’s a lot quicker than using the Spot Healing Brush to individually remove blemishes, although that has it’s part to play too: Dust & Scratch Filter for the whole sky, Spot Healing Brush for getting into more detailed parts of the image.
Distant memories can be seen through a golden glow or, in the case of my earliest recollections of the 1950s, a somewhat muted and bluey grey – although I think that the 50s probably were muted and bluey grey thanks to the tail end of rationing and all that coal smoke – so it’s been a real memory-jogger to revisit familiar domestic scenes of 1964 in live action in colour-soaked Kodachrome.
We’ve just had our family cine films from the 1960s and 70s transcribed to digital format and I’m impressed with the quality, considering that this was all Standard 8 film with a frame size, allowing for the sprockets, of just 5 mm, less than quarter of an inch.
We’re lucky to have plenty of family photographs from that time but, for me, browsing through the old cine films brings back the era more vividly than any photograph album.
I’m intrigued by this shot of me, aged 13, taken by my Dad as he tried out the interchangeable lenses of his Leitz Leicina.
I’m sure that expression isn’t genuine, so perhaps at the start of my teenage years it’s supposed to signify a combination of worry and hang-dog; if so, that was good practice for me, as that’s the default state of mind for most of us who choose to become freelance illustrators.
But it could have been intended to represent diffidence and scepticism: a useful attitude for anyone who makes a living from looking at the world.
Our garden looks so verdant and I realise that having that as my backyard made a huge contribution to the person I became, as a resource for inspiration and as a sheltered habitat for concocting waywardly creative projects.
Behind a prolific row of raspberry canes, the runner beans are just starting to climb their canes. Partially hidden by an old Keswick cooking apple tree there’s the timber summerhouse that had been built by the former occupants of the house, the Baines family, in the 1920s or 30s.
My Dad, Robert Douglas Bell, Doug to his friends, appears in this early reel, picking gooseberries. If he’d still been with us, he’d have been celebrating his 100th birthday in October but as he died 28 years ago after a steady decline with dementia, it’s good to be reminded of him in his prime.
Mum, slightly older, would have been a hundred last Monday, 26th February, so we met to remember her in the place that she’d suggested, should she make it to that milestone: Charlotte’s Ice Cream Parlour, a favourite place with her for coffee and scones. She appears in the 1964 film, characteristically, putting the washing on the line.
This Standard Vanguard Estate, with a registration, RHL 777, that I wish we could have kept, was my favourite of all the cars we had. Its headlights had been painted yellow for a summer holiday in France. Note the AA badge and the badge of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, which my Dad was rather proud to be a member of.
I was wondering where my Dad would be going, in his collar and tie and with a cigarette in his hand. My sister tells me that at that time he worked for the Coal Board in Wakefield and he would have come home for lunch, so he’s heading off back to work. Because of the traffic today, you’d be hard-pressed to get to and fro between Wakefield and Horbury during a regular lunch hour.
Also appearing, Vache, an English springer spaniel, kennel name Chastelton Merrylegs, my Dad’s gun-dog but in fact the perfect family pet, a remarkably laid-back spaniel. There are brief shots of him ambling across the lawn; sitting half in and half out of the back door; pricking his ears up when he thinks a visitor is arriving and rolling on his back as he enjoys being fussed over.
Again, for me, they evoke his character more effectively than the stills we have of him.
My Dad gave him his everyday name, Vache, not because his liver-and-white markings resemble those of a Friesian cow but because my Dad bought him when he was attending a course at the Vache Coal Board staff training college, a country house near Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire.
One of the reasons that I was so keen to get the films transcribed to digital format was so that we’d preserve a rare snippet of my grandparents on my Dad’s side.
Jane, Bagshaw as was, and Robert Bell met at the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby.
When he arrived at the celebrations, Fred Bagshaw, who worked in the stables, asked him “Would you like to take a girl on the swings, Bob?”
The girl, Fred’s sister, Jane, was already in service at the age of 14. She and Robert married some years later.
I’ve still got the invitation in our family archive. I guess that I wouldn’t be here today if Bob hadn’t taken Jinny (as he called her) on the swings that day.
It’s amazing that we caught them on film.
Grandma is chuckling as she puts on her white gloves and I can see that, before setting out, she’s popped one of her favourite sweets, a Nuttall’s Minto, in her mouth.
One final blast from the past: in the August of 1967, my Dad, my sister Linda and family friends Betty and Alf Deacon, emerging from the arched entrance to The Street of Many Fools on the backlot at Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire.
Carry On, Follow that Camel, had just finished filming, so Phil Silvers, Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale and Joan Sims had probably walked that way in the previous weeks.
Knowing of my interest in films and stage scenery, Betty had arranged with a friend who was a scene painter there to give us a full tour of the studios.
By then, my brother Bill and I had already made a couple of sci-fi shorts (with my sister playing the monster), a war film, a spy film and we’d made a start on shooting our most ambitious five-minute feature, Those Magnificent Boys in their Flying Machines, with a spectacular disaster filmed on location in Horbury Quarry.
We learnt a lot from our tour of the studios and greatly improved our technique in the next scene of the film, in which a remarkably lifelike mannequin of my brother plunges on a feather-winged bicycle from the top of Storrs Hill.
Like the Pinewood Team, we took a cast of Bill’s face – in our case in plaster, making the mask from papiere mache. To tell you the truth, it turned out to be better-looking than Bill himself, so we’d leave it sitting around in odd corners of the house, which confused my Mum on her rounds and she’d ask it, over her shoulder “Bill, haven’t you started your homework yet?!”
It’s that time of year again: Apple have updated their operating system – from Sierra to High Sierra – which is great except that my scanner, a CanoScan 8800F, won’t work with the new system, not surprisingly because it’s four years since Canon updated the driver. Luckily, I’ve come up with a solution . . .
Late afternoon and I pull in at the viewpoint to photograph the cloudscape as we cross the moor top between Hawes and Langstrothdale.
“I think those clouds are caused by air rising as it moves over a hill,” I suggest to the man who has pulled in just behind us to photograph them on his iPad, “I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide, but I can’t remember what they’re called.”
“Lenticular clouds?”
“That’s right; you are a cloud spotter?”
“No . . . just nutty!”
Just as I’ve got myself back in the car and out of the cool breeze, I notice another cloud-spotting feature to the left of the lenticular cloud that is hanging above Ingleborough and I grab my camera.
“Have you seen the sun-dog?” I ask the man with the iPad; “They’re caused by ice crystals in high clouds refracting the light and they always appear at a certain distance from the sun – I think it’s something like 23 degrees.”
“I wonder if that’s because we’re at 53 degrees north?” He surmises.
I wasn’t too far out, it’s 22° but the phenomenon is a halo effect caused by tiny ice crystals in translucent cloud, so the effect is independent of latitude.
Half an hour later I take the opportunity to photograph sunset over the top end of the dale from the first floor window of our barn conversion accommodation at Nethergill Farm.
It’s the first time that I’ve tried the ‘sunset’ setting on my camera. It might have warmed up the colours a little but it’s more successful than the camera’s default setting which attempts to adjust the exposure to make the scene resemble regular daylight.
It so good to be back in my studio and working again. I’ve just e-mailed my latest Wild Yorkshire nature diary off to the Dalesman, so it’s high time that I caught up with this online diary, which provides most of the raw material for my Dalesman articles.
It’s a month since my studio floor was taken up but there’s been a lot of work for me varnishing the new tongued and grooved timber floor and putting back my plan chest, art materials and book stock just as I’d like them (and there’s been even more work setting up our new kitchen in the room below, which is looking great).
Improvements in my studio include these four Ikea Blecka hooks (above) for my small, medium and large art bags, which are hanging there ready for me to grab when I set off on a small, medium or large adventure, each complete with a selection of art materials and an A6, A5 or a square of the narrow side of A4 (that’s 8 x 8 inches) Pink Pig sketchbook. Like Goldilocks, I tend to feel that the middle sized bag is ‘just right’.
On the fourth hook my new digital SLR is hanging, plus a camera bag holding my new macro and telephoto lens. It’s an Olympus OM-D E-M10II which has great possibilities for nature photography. I sold my trusty pocket-sized Olympus Tough muji on e-Bay and I’m missing it already but I’m holding off buying the latest Tough to replace it as I want to get thoroughly familiar with my digital SLR.
The drawing is in bamboo pen using Winsor & Newton black Indian ink. I wouldn’t pack this combination in my art bags as the ink, where it has formed a blotty pool, takes days to dry.
