Well, it seems an eternity since I visited this page with an update so here we are once more.

I like Halloween, rather I enjoy the concept. I’m long past the stage where I had a child of suitable age to enjoy and appreciate the thrill of ‘ trick or treat ‘ and I’m not too sure about some of the commercialism that seemingly goes hand in hand with the occasion ( or any other occasion for that matter ). I just enjoy it for it’s archaic potential, that age old battle between the living and the dead, the day where the two worlds, the now and the afterlife, are separated by the thinnest of veils allowing the spirits, the ghosts and the ghouls to return to the living for the briefest of moments.

I love that it allows me to explore the darker side of the human psyche and pass it off relatively humorously, hopefully without offence but not withstanding, a little irreverence.

In the normal course of events I would have thought and planned a little more thoroughly, searched for other props, indulged in a little face painting, found a more exciting location but things overtook me and I was suddenly aware that Halloween was very immediate and if I wanted to do something, anything, then I’d better make the best of what I could find to hand.

So, here we have it, an old oil lamp which has come in very handy on previous occasions, a bandage, which like the subject, has seen better days and a little post processing to create the image. Happy Halloween everyone ……

……. except when it does!

I’m never going to be found ‘ pottering in the potting shed ‘ , gardening is never going to be one of my strengths or go-to’s, the shed exists in order to contain the few tools necessary to tame the small plot my wife and I inherited from her father. It does, however, sometimes provide props and inspiration for messing about with my camera.

Struggling to work in the tiniest of spaces, and with the crankiest of models, looking for inspiration in the most mundane of things is good exercise for the old grey matter. It serves to make the brain tick, looking for ways to overcome obstacles both physical and mental, exploiting the equipment available and the conditions that are naturally presented in order to balance the outside light to reveal the foliage with the light provided by the flash to illuminate the darker interior of the shed and the dubious character within.

It also whiled away an hour on a grey, slightly damp September morning, and provided food for thought. In the right surroundings with the right subjects it could provide an interesting concept for further investigation. They say that the camera never lies but it can be manipulated to deceive quite convincingly ….

…… blasted by the wind.

The season’s changed, noticeably! The dry, arid conditions of just a few weeks ago have been replaced by the colder winds and the rain, much needed admittedly, but a marked change all the same.

This poor specimen, high on the ridge, has been stripped bare already, blasted by the winds chasing across the open fields, just a few odd clusters of leaves clinging on for grim death and the ever present ivy, which nothing seems to deter, winding it’s way up the trunk. It provides scant shelter for anyone walking the track but it’s skeletal beauty is laid bare for all to see and admire. There is something sculptural, architectural, beautiful, in the shape of a tree denuded, robbed of it’s leaves in the Autumnal blast of the cold wind even on an evening where the setting sun adds a thin, warm glow to proceedings.

Though the change in the weather is a slight shock to the system it heralds one of the most wonderful, colourful times of the year. The promise of colours, red, gold and green, warm hues in hedgerows and woodland margins, and, as time wears on, the promise of cold, clear nights and misty morning sunrises sometimes coupled with crisp frost to decorate and adorn the hardy grasses, teasels and the like is something I look forward to. Wrapping up warmly in coats, scarfs, hats and gloves a must on an early morning or late afternoon adventure into the countryside with my camera is the complete antithesis to the title I’ve chosen today.

……… The Low Lighthouse, Burnham on Sea, Somerset.

I’m not necessarily a big fan of the ‘ iconic ‘ photograph. Not that some local scenes which are considered ‘ iconic’ aren’t , it’s just that I look at the numerous photograph’s taken and wonder whether or not I could manage to create something different, something unique, something worthy enough to stand out from the crowd or would I just be capturing a ‘ record shot ‘ for the sake of taking a picture. Hence, despite living here in Dorset for 10 years I have yet to visit Durdle Door or one or two more coastal spots that attract photographers like bees around a honey pot.

That said, I am drawn further North to the Somerset coast and, with friends and photographic colleagues, often find myself on a Summer’s evening or a Winter’s afternoon here at Burnham or further along the coast at Weston Super Mare to capture the dying embers of the sunlight, the magnificent skies or the empty, open, windswept expanses of sand exposed when the muddy waters of the Bristol Channel wash in and out.

To that end, perhaps. I am no different to those seekers of the ‘ iconic’ to whom I alluded in the beginning of today’s meandering, the above photo being a prime example. There must be hundreds, thousands, perhaps more, of this wooden lighthouse on the sands. I’ve no doubt that it commands the title ‘ iconic’ and for all my reticence in adding to the numerous shots of it I am drawn like the moth to a flame. I am drawn to the quality of the light, the enormity of the expansive seascape, the graphic quality of the structure placed, almost inconsequential, in the vast open space. I am mesmerised …..

……. despite my early misgivings.

My last words before going to sleep last night were ‘ if I wake early in the morning then I may pop out and see if there’s anything to photograph ‘. Well, I did wake early but not as early as I might have and as a result it was a quick scamper to try and find a location which might prove fruitful. Timing is everything, patience is a blessing, both are required in spades at times and stood at the side of the road in a stiff breeze watching the clouds ( and the rainstorms ) track in from the South East I was reminded of such.

The light changed constantly as the clouds flicked across the rising sun and played across the rolling countryside, warm at times when the sun shone through, colder and harder at others where it hid it’s face behind threatening skies. Fortunately the rain played ball and stayed away, apart from a few stray drops carried along by the wind, certainly not enough to be a nuisance for the time that I was out.

My earlier apprehensions as to whether or not the morning would provide me with anything proved to be false and the one location that I’d had time to reach afforded me a handful of images which, after some judicious editing, have proved to be quite ‘ rewarding’.

….. the night’s are drawing in and the weather is becoming seasonably Autumnal.

On Wednesday evening a fellow photographer friend and I drove across across North Dorset and Somerset to Weston Super Mare. It’s a location that we’ve used fairly regularly because it often affords some wonderful sunsets across the waters of the Bristol Channel. On this occasion, however, it wasn’t the sunset that was the main attraction, in fact we’d intentionally set out later than normal to allow for the sun to begin to disappear, this evening was all about trying to capture the lights of the pier and the reflections on the incoming tide as darkness descended.

Officially the Autumn Equinox begins on the 22nd of September at 19:20 BST, the time when we experience roughly the same amount of daytime and nighttime, after that we are on the slippery slope of increasingly dark evenings as the year wears on. The coming of Autumn is a time I look forward to, of all the seasons it’s the one that pleases me the most. The days may be shorter and the nights longer but the opportunities to photograph increase proportionally and I look forward to embracing the challenges of cold, misty mornings following clear, crisp nights. I look forward to the changing colours of Nature, the dropping leaves, the hedgerows and gardens alive with reds and golds as the vegetation gets ready to shut down and survive the change of the season. I look forward to attempting to capture the Autumn in all it’s glory as the months go by ….

……. here, in a photographic sense!

As someone who enjoys taking photographs it quickly becomes apparent that capturing the scene before you is not always enough, sometimes an image will benefit from a little help, a gentle nudge, something that might elevate the ordinary into something that might grab the attention of the viewer.

Increasingly it seems that ‘ help’ arrives in the form of an app, a package or an add on, in addition to whatever editing suite you might choose to use in helping to present your chosen image in , potentially, it’s best light. The advent and increasing use of AI in photography now makes it possible to create all manner of wonderful images it seems. If you can think it, AI can produce it ….. to a degree.

I’m stubbornly ‘ old school ‘, although I have dipped my toe into the waters of Artificial Intelligence and tried one or two things at a very basic, simplistic level. I am still firmly a person who lives in the world of relatively basic adjustments such as exposure, levels, contrast and brightness, the addition of borders and cropping for effect, as in the image included here.

There was a time when I subscribed to the theme of ‘ Biggest is Best ‘ and loved to see images reproduced at a larger size but over time I have come to realise that other formats are equally as impressive. The recognised image sizes of 3×2 or 4×3, square or 16×9 or, even more drastically. 3×1 all have a place and the simple act of restricting or altering the perceived original view can make such a difference to the outcome of a scene and introduce a sense of drama far removed from what the photographer originally saw.

In this instance, taking away the warm colours of the sunset and cropping away the relative expanses of sky and sea have served to create another scene. The monochrome version , to my mind, delivers a more graphic approach to the view, a harder edge as opposed to the romanticism of the same image below. As with most things it’s a matter of opinion, one person’s pleasure is another person’s poison, there is no right or wrong, only a matter of perception in the eye of the viewer as to which version stimulates the senses.

…… I edit and save approximately a hundred photos a month! I undoubtedly take far more photos than I keep because not everything is worthy of either editing, or saving. That said , there are sometimes occasions where I might take less photos but edit and save more because there will be more than one way of editing a scene or displaying it in a particular format. On average it usually works out near a hundred images at the end of the month all the same.

When I first moved here to North Dorset I attended a talk by a prominent local photographer who lives in a nearby village. Her ethos was to get out at dawn or dusk ( or both ), take her camera and her dog, and walk for about 15 minutes in the locality and then take her photographs for the day. She captured incredible local scenes and I made it my goal to try and achieve similar results, I enjoyed both the photographs she’d managed to capture and her ethos, it highlighted the fact that one didn’t have to travel far for great scenery and that, sometimes, we fail to look properly at what’s under our noses.

Now, some ten years later, I find that I’m having to travel further and further afield to find images that appeal to me. The image above being a good example of the current situation I find myself in. We just don’t have heather in North Dorset, beautiful as the area is it just doesn’t support the soil and conditions required and so an hour driving, an hour at location and another hour to get back home was the order of the afternoon. Hard work for what amounted to no more than just over a dozen images, more than half of which will never see the light of day, not because they aren’t worthy but because they are repetitious. There are only so many shots of heather in one location that might spark an interest in the viewer once the initial novelty of colour, form and repetition have been exhausted.

…… on the 1st Saturday of the month the local car enthusiasts car club holds an open meeting in the small former market town that I live in here in rural North Dorset. As an event held in a rural backwater it punches well above it’s weight, the summer months when the event is held on the recreation ground often attract in excess of 300 vehicles of all sizes, shapes and marques, the owners of said vehicles and a goodly number of enthusiastic supporters of the internal combustion engine, myself included.

I’ve held a driving licence since the first opportunity arose to do so at the age of 17yrs, I bought my first motorcycle at the age of 15yrs in anticipation of getting on the road on my 16th birthday but the Government, in their ( dubious) infinite wisdom, chose that precise moment in 1972 to raise the licensing age from 16 to 17yrs and dashed my early exuberance but not my enthusiasm.

My treasured Driving Licence arrived very shortly after my 17th birthday and my love affair with motorcycles began and continued with either a car or a motorcycle, sometimes both, always a constant and always a pleasure. I have loved both driving and riding, the sense of freedom that it brought was always a joy and still remains so even on todays congested and poorly maintained highways though I no longer ride, although I miss it, my sense of self preservation has increased somewhat with age. I’d like to last a while longer yet and riding a motorcycle now doesn’t seem to be a good way to achieve that particular goal. Nowadays I find that photographing other peoples vehicular exotica seems an easier way to ‘ get my kicks ‘ and still maintain that ‘ License to Thrill ‘ ….

…….. it doesn’t stand still, and, while I had the best of intentions to blog regularly the best of intentions don’t always come to fruition. Despite being retired it seems that there is always something which demands time and attention though I have to admit there are often times when, despite things needing doing, I have neither the enthusiasm or the inclination. The humdrum necessities and monotonous regularities of everyday being just fail to enthuse me I find.

Far more entertaining to lose oneself creatively, behind the camera or at the keyboard. The garden will survive another day, week, month without being manicured to within an inch of it’s existence, and the birdlife will thank me for it. The housework will be there on another day, I haven’t reached the stage where I can write my name in the dust on the mantlepiece or side table yet. It can wait. Creativity, however, has to be grasped whenever it surfaces. It has to be embraced, nurtured, loved, treasured, exploited for all it’s worth in case the moment is lost and the spark extinguishes.

Einstein stated that ‘ Creativity is intelligence having fun ‘, if that’s the case it would possibly meant that somewhere in the deepest, darkest reaches of my cerebrum ( ‘the principal and most anterior part of the brain in vertebrates, located in the front area of the skull and consisting of two hemispheres, left and right, separated by a fissure. It is responsible for the integration of complex sensory and neural functions and the initiation and coordination of voluntary activity in the body‘ posh quote that I looked up, far too in depth for my brain) there lies a spark of intelligence that requires my time and encouragement. That spark will not make me a genius but at least it’s something that Einstein might possibly have recognised in me.