Wild flowers, bees and butterflies at Walton Colliery nature park, near Wakefield, on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting, 11 August.
Exposures
I’VE READ half a dozen books on photography; on landscapes, nature and most recently on digital photography exposure but, now that I know the difference between an f-stop and an ISO rating, I’ve got to the stage with my new camera, the FujiFilm FinePix S6800 when I need to get out taking photographs, all kinds of photographs, especially the kind where I have to more than just point and shoot.
I take the opportunity to pick up a few hints from my friend Roger Gaynor while we’re visiting. Even the dessert spoon on the table can serve as a subject to illustrate the effects that you can get by using the built-in flash.
I hadn’t realised that the flash can be useful even in bright sunlight as it can fill in what might otherwise be blacked-out shadows. The human eye can usually adjust to see details in the shadows but the camera can sometimes struggle.
Fill-in Flash
I think that this works well on the photograph of the dandelion but the effect can be overdone. Although the flash fills in the shadows on these crab apples, I think it makes the lighting look a bit too contrived, as if it’s an illustration from a nurseryman’s fruit tree catalogue.
Colour Setting
Roger also showed me how to change the camera’s colour settings from standard to what Fuji calls ‘chrome’, boosting the colours slightly, to something resembling the colour you’d get from slide film.
Looking at the LCD screen I thought that the setting had gone too far in pumping up the colour so I changed back to the standard setting. The result was the same. The red of the berries really is so saturated.
Stopping Down
Another way to boost colour is to slightly underexpose. There’s a ‘+/-‘ button on the camera to enable you to do that, using the camera’s selection wheel to move the exposure in one third of a stop increments on a plus and minus scale.
I stopped down to add a little more colour to the blue sky behind the branches of the hedgerow elder (right) but there’s another way to adjust the exposure when it comes to an evening sky;
- Point the camera’s exposure meter (which is marked as a small rectangle in the middle of my viewfinder) to a patch of sky. Select darker part of the sky if you want a lighter picture, a lighter patch of sky if you want the sky to look darker. I went for a medium tone.
- Half press in the shutter button to take a reading and hold it there to retain that setting.
- Move the camera to frame the portion of sky you want to photograph and press the button the rest of the way to take the picture.
Art Space
THE ART SPACE was too tempting, a perfect rainy day activity; coloured tissue papers, scissors and Pritt sticks were all to hand and, thoughtfully, there was some subject matter to get you started; three potted cyclamens and two watering cans. I don’t remember the last time I made a collage so this is a surprising burst of colour in my pocket Moleskine. I love the colours you get where the tissues overlap.
We’d called at Leeds City Art Gallery to see Art and Life, an exhibition of paintings by Ben and Winifred Nicholson from the 1920s, which also includes work by Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood and the potter William Staite Murray.
The paintings have the texture as well as the colour and form of their (mainly) coastal subjects. Like amateur artist Wallis, Nicholson would paint on rough sheets of board. The scratchy, tentative quality of the paint invites you in to this weather-beaten world. The drawing is friendly rather than intimidatingly academic.
The sense of fun and spontaneity that comes across encouraged me to try something different.
Must do some more fun drawings.
Links: Leeds City Art Gallery (the URL that I’d noted on my drawing is no longer there).
Billy Swift
LOGGING IN to renew my library books I noticed a link to a wonderful online resource that Wakefield Libraries have recently made available; access to the British Library’s digital archive of nineteenth century newspapers.
I tried a few names from my mum’s side of the family – the Swifts of Sheffield – and soon found this notice from the births, deaths and marriages column of the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent dated 18 November 1862.
Could my great great great grandfather really have been ‘present at the Battle of Trafalgar’ on 21 October 1805?
I’ve put in a request for the death certificate to check that this really is ‘our’ William Swift. We already knew that he’d worked at Joseph Rodgers from an obituary notice for his son, Samuel Burgin Swift, who followed in his footsteps there (as did his grandson).
My mum has the article, reprinted as a handbill;
‘he [Samuel] was a thoughtful, industrious workman, and inherited the skill of his father “Billy Swift”.
It seems to me unlikely that a young man from landlocked Sheffield would have served in the Battle of Trafalgar but Geoffrey Tweedale, author of A Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers, 1742-2010, tells me; ‘Being at Trafalgar is not so strange — he lived a long life and his earlier career could have included military service. I’ve come across at least a couple of cutlers/silver platers who saw action during the Napoleonic War.’
Trafalgar Day
Tomorrow is Trafalgar Day, the 198th anniversary of the Battle. I hope that I’ll get the chance to search the records, for instance the Muster Rolls of the twenty-seven ships in Nelson’s fleet.
I still have this 1957 Ladybird book, a Christmas gift from our neighbours, Mr & Mrs Hudson.
Could that be my ancestor, hoisting the signal flags in the background?
Fly Agaric
IN THE autumn woods at Newmillerdam Fly Agaric is pushing up through the leaf litter.
This delicate-looking toadstool is sprouting from an old stump nearby.
Redshank
AT THE BEGINNING of last month we saw a group of five Redshanks perching on the rocks at Marine Drive, Scarborough, preening as they waited for the tide to go out. They were a bit too distant to draw but I photographed them with my 30x zoom, resting it on the concrete top of the sea wall.
Writing in British Birds in 1952, G Warburg described some remarkable communal behaviour in breeding Redshanks when dogs and, once, an otter, Lutra lutra, approached;
‘up to 20 packed close round intruding mammal, following it carefully with bowing and bobbing movements (in the case if L. lutra, silently) when dog ran, birds hovered overhead, giving Chip-calls.’
Warbury 1952 and Grosskopf 1959, quoted in Birds of the Western Palaearctic, 1983
Inner Eye
I HAVEN’T USED my smallest sketchbook, the little Moleskin, for almost two months but as I tie up one loose end after another I’m getting into drawing mood again.
OCT Scan
I had my first OCT scan at the opticians this morning. The infra-red scan mapped out a small area at the back of my eye and rendered it in 3D, reminding me of the 3D modelling I’ve experimented with in programs like Bryce and Vue.
A shallow crater is where the cone cells for daylight vision are concentrated. These are particularly sensitive to movement but they’re useless in the dark so as the iris opens to let in more light a wider spread of rod cells takes over, with the crater of cone cells becoming a bit of a blind spot.
This explains why when observing a faint object in the night sky, such at the Andromeda Galaxy you have to do that trick of looking slightly to one side of it. It’s too faint to register on your array of cone cells.
My true blind spot, the spot where blood vessels and nerves enter the eye, looks less like a crater and more like a corrie surrounded by glaciated peaks.
Turning to Ink
I’M NOT EXPECTING to see any natural history on our weekly morning shopping with my mum but I’m wishing I’d brought my camera as there’s a 2 square foot plus clump of a Coprinus fungus on her back lawn.
Apart from the main clump there are streaks of it following the lines beneath the turf of the roots of the old horse chestnut tree which was felled at least 5 years ago.
With no camera to hand there’s no choice but to go back to my old method and to do a very quick sketch. I’ve shown some of the fresh fungi and a couple of the caps which are beginning to curl up at the edges and turn to black ink.
Fresh caps have radiating grooves, like the struts of an umbrella.
Skyped
It’s so good to have a clear desk again. Clutter might be more interesting to draw but a blank desk gets me thinking about fresh projects.
And I’m catching up on technical bits and pieces that I should have sorted years ago. Getting logged back onto Skype proves too challenging for me but luckily my iMac came with something similar and a whole lot simpler, so I’m able to do my first ever FaceTime video chat live to California, where it must be quite early in the morning, but sunny judging by the light flooding through the window on the surprisingly good live-streaming image I’m getting.
But it is rather alarming seeing a little video image of myself inset, looking like the cartoon I’ve just drawn of me being baffled by Skype.
I can’t seem to get out of the ‘complete your profile’ dialogue without giving Skype/Facebook my personal phone numbers which are actually none of their business.
Clearing the Desk
AFTER THREE WEEKENDS away and another catching up, I’m finally getting back to ordinary life. I’ve just sent my latest article off so it’s time to clear my desk and get started on the backlog of drawing and writing that I’ve got in mind to do. But first, to draw a line in the sand after all that frantic activity, I decide to draw my cluttered desktop.
I feel that random compositions are often the best so I don’t rearrange a thing before starting. As a change from fountain pen I decide to give myself the challenge of working with a dip pen and Indian ink, starting again from scratch as it were, and this nib certainly gives a scratchy effect compared with the rounded nib of my fountain pen.
I’m amazed how badly I flounder on proportions and positioning with a captive subject like this. My struggles are most obvious on the one of the few diagonals in the drawing, the handle of the tripod, but books and magazines also get out of proportion, probably because I’m not allowing enough for the effects of perspective which are an important factor when you’re so close to a subject, about four feet from the nearest pile of papers in this case.
Also I’m happily listening to Radio 3 as I work so I might have been better giving my full attention to my drawing.
But at least I’ve made the attempt and I’m hoping that now we’ve settled down I’ll be able to take the odd hour off to draw again.
Bookshop
IT’S RARE for me to have a whole hour free so to make the most of it, while I wait for Barbara to finish work, I draw the bookshop, starting with the door frame and working across the double-page spread, running out of ink halfway and borrowing a pen from Barbara to finish.
With any complicated subject I have to establish an anchor point before I can start mapping everything in its place. Those long verticals of the door frame that I started with on the left weren’t much help and it was only when I established the leaded window above the door that I was able to get a grip on proportions. The 45° pattern made a useful grid.
You can see where this went slightly wrong as the window started going into perspective on the right, my drawing equivalent to the distortions you’d get if you were photographing the scene with a wide-angle lens.