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.
A friend has asked me if I still have any paintings for sale. I haven’t had an exhibition for more than twenty years but I do have framed paintings from that time, so here is a selection.
Prices on request.
As you can see, I’m really missing my occasional trips to London. Just before lockdown we’d been planning a Thames-side walk from Bushey Park to Greenwich Park, meeting up with friends at various stages, including Alistair, who celebrated his birthday at the weekend, hence this card.
My latest homemade birthday card is for my great nephew Zach. It celebrates the home movies that my brother, sister and I made in the days of Standard 8 cine. As you can see, Bill took the action roles, often at risk to life and limb, with my sister guest starring as the ‘Hostile Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and, no doubt hoping to break out of being typecast, a World Security agent scanning the skies for invaders from outer space.
Our friends were regularly in the cast, launching flying machines and hatching dastardly plots for world domination. Mostly we filmed in our garden; the rhubarb patch made a suitably lush jungle but for a more dramatic setting we headed for the local quarry.
But we did consider health and safety. I remember us discussing the possibility that our flying machine might overshoot and end up crashing down onto the railway line. In the event it plummeted vertically downwards when we launched it from the top of Horbury Quarry although I stood well back when filming, just in case.
It would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday this week, on the 9th, so I’ve dug out this four-second snippet, filmed in very shaky Standard 8 cine from our black-and-white television, when John and Yoko were appearing on a chat show, probably The Eamonn Andrews Show in the spring of 1969.
I was surprised when my friend Hilary told me that in the early 1960s she’d been at the Saturday morning ABC Minors’ matinee at the ABC Regal cinema in Wakefield when The Beatles made an appearance. About twenty years ago I met a woman who had worked at the Regal at the time and who remembered telling off John when, after the performance, he offered her young daughter a cigarette.
My painter friend Jill told me that one of her tutors at art college (this would have been Manchester, 1969-1972) had previously been a tutor at Liverpool and had caught the young Lennon urinating down the lift shaft.
Finally, as a teenager, my brother’s daughter Hannah learnt the drums from at musician who’d been on the northern circuit in the early 1960s. His group had appeared on the same bill as The Beatles (possibly in Doncaster?), so after the show he’d approached John to say how much he liked their music.
“I especially like Yesterday“, he enthused.
“One of McCartney’s.” said John, and turned away.
Almost a decade before The Beatles performed at the Regal, Laurel & Hardy made a brief appearance, again at a children’s matinee. My friend Richard Knowles was taken by his uncle and remembers two elderly men coming onto the stage and waving at everyone, although at the time he didn’t know who they were.
We were lucky with the weather at Bridlington on Tuesday and even luckier that the gulls featured in this video didn’t spot us eating fish & chips.
