Sloane Square Christmas Lights

Donna Nook

Took Sam to see the Grey Seals giving birth to their pups on the RAF Donna Nook bombing range on the Lincolnshire coast. I've never seen seals so accepting of humans, and there are more than a thousand youngsters already. Another month and they'll all be gone to sea.
It was almost dark but the Canon G11 coped at ISO1600 in a colourless landscape.
Todays count by Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust was 1082 seal pups, 975 cows and 331 bulls.

Dinosaur feet

Dusk and driving rain - sheltered in a small beech hanger - surrounded by Dinosaur feet.

Round Barrows

Aldbourne Four Barrows was used as a cemetery from 2500 to 1500BC, but apparently the bones have been moved to the British Museum, so the round barrows are not too spooky to stand on. Canon G11 1/30th at f2.8 in a howling wind.

Aldbourne

Fence post remnant of ancient field system dating back to when tractors were small and grey and only 35 horse power. (Canon G11).

So Long Ago

I found Wansdyke on the map and went to have a look, but never imagined the richness of pre-historic monuments to be found on a 3 mile walk on the Pewsey Downs. I started at the bottom of Knap Hill (above and below) a hilltop causewayed enclosure from about 5700 years ago (BP), where Stone Age folk would meet periodically to celebrate and renew tribal loyalties or deal with their dead.

Then comes Adam's Grave, a chambered tomb (long barrow) of about the same age on it's spectacular hilltop dominating the Vale of Pewsey (below)

A glimpse of Silbury Hill in the distance is unexpectedly through a gap in Wansdyke, made by a farmer to get his tractor through (or perhaps a horse and cart).

Wansdyke shocks. How much labour and determination did it take to dig out this massive snaking bank and ditch? It originally stretched from Savernake Forest near Marlborough deep into Somerset and maybe to the River Severn. One bet is that Ancient Britons built it in the 5th century AD (after the Romans left) to protect themselves from the invading Saxons, but nobody seems sure. If so it obviously didn't work. Perhaps like the Maginot line the enemy just walked around it! Alternatively it could have been to establish the boundary between two tribes.

Then it's onto Pewsey Down itself; magical moss green tentacles of chalk sliding down into the vale.

Across a valley is Rybury (or Rybury Camp), an Iron Age hill fort (5-700BC) built over another Neolithic causewayed enclosure, at least 5000years old, and there long before the first Egyptian pyramid was built at Djoser.

Met some nice friendly chaps - Welsh Blacks?

They gathered to watch two men mending the fence round Alton Barnes White Horse (cut in 1812 or thereabouts) . Perhaps the grass looked greener over the fence.

Back down towards the car, and the present, and Knap Hill had changed colour in the last of the evening light.

Upper Paleolithic Cave V Modern Newbury Car Park

Drying out slowly

Jarvis Cocker

Went to a free three day gig under a railway arch, where the audience could wander in off the street and lounge on scatter cushions, and Jarvis Cocker invited anyone who turned up with an instrument to join in the jamming. The music sounded nothing like Cocker's usual stuff, but just whatever a gaggle of great musicians made up on the spur of the moment, incredible long riffs getting more and more intense, exploding almost into white noise. A twenty minute improvisation on The Who's The Wall (It was the anniversary of the demise of the Berlin Wall) was the only time that Jarvis sang. Miho Wada wandered in with her flute and is in several of these pictures.

The Guardian said "With endless stories predicting the imminent death of the music industry, he also wanted to explore the idea that music could return to simply being an art form."

There was a single light over the players, so most of these were at full aperture and ISO6400. Not bad! The scatter cushion picture was the recombination of two exposures prised from a RAW file, such was the difference in the light on the musicians and the audience. Remember the good old days of film? No thanks!

Windmill Hill

Walking up on Windmill Hill near Avebury today I'm the only human for at least a mile around. After a time the mind starts going back to times and places that haven't surfaced since I was a child, but then a memory is suddenly elusive; half there, then lost again, leaving a feeling that something important has gone, but I'm still back in north Lancashire treading the fells in a bitter wind all those years ago.

The bell barrow is Bronze Age (1600BC give or take a century), but on a site much older; a 5700year old Causewayed Enclosure, where people may have come to celebrate, or may have come to lay out their dead for Ravens to pick clean the bones. It's almost hidden by time. This faint indentation in the ground curving from bottom right to top left is all that can be seen of the inner of three ditch and bank circles (below).

On leaving, a strange fingered cloud formation points like a dervish back down the track as if as a reminder that this is a place belonging to another people and another time.

Some favourite signs.

Chalk Horse

My son's favoured place seems to be the whiskers of the Uffington White Horse. It's just off the Ridgeway and dates back to the Bronze Age (about 1000BC). On Thursday he stood entranced, looking out across Oxfordshire for fifteen minutes; last time we came it was twenty, but always standing on the whiskers, and always, seemingly at peace. One's requested not to stand on this ancient monument, but he's been dealt a raw enough deal in life without denying him such a simple pleasure.

Old Ektachromes

A plumber came and an electrician and both needed to look under the floorboards beneath a cupboard. I cleared the cupboard, and at the back found slides of Peter Cattaneo who directed The Full Monty back in 1997. They must have been there untouched for twelve years!
I remember using a single Elinchrom studio flash with a huge soft box - about 1.5 metres across - and a 70-200 zoom. The grey background was the wall of some preview cinema that we borrowed for half an hour.

James Dyson launched his latest invention on Tuesday; the 'Dyson Air Multiplier', or desk fan without blades. A small fan inside the base blows air out through an annular slit in the back of the blue hoop, which has the effect of drawing more air through the hoop, thus saving much electrcity. He said it worked using the viscosity of air. I think it uses Bernoulli's principle - moving air has a lower pressure than still air and low pressure attracts more air, just like a low pressure weather system. Perhaps it's a bit of both.

James came over as a really nice guy, who was perfectly happy to risk making a fool of himself farting about with a scrap of handkerchief.

I took the photographs using the glass table of a conference room at the Dyson HQ in Malmesbury, Wilts, using a single Elinchrom 1500 joule flash bounced off a white wall on my left, and a six foot flat silver reflector slightly behind and to the right of him to fill in the shadows. It was very simple arrangement giving some latitude for him to move around without the exposure going awol - and made up on the spur of the moment. I spent an hour with press officer Mario Seisdedos Garcia (Yes! That's Mario Sixfingers Garcia!) setting up and refining the picture before James arrived, and the handkerchief was his idea.

Available light with low energy bulbs and Canon digital SLRs.

Now that tungsten household bulbs are to be phased out there is a little problem for digital camera users. There is no setting for low energy bulbs. There's AWB (auto white balance) sunshine, cloud, tungsten, fluorescent tubes and so on, but nothing for the new bulbs. Picture 1 shows how AWB copes with the light from a low energy bulb.

The whites are not very white! The colour meter suggests setting 3100 Kelvin as a colour temperature if you have this facility. There's an improvement, but it's still not right:

So, leaving it at set at 3100K we go to White Balance Shift in the menu and drag the little cursor right down to the bottom left, setting B9 and M9 (I've set Blue 8 and Magenta 8 here so that the cursor is visible).

And here's the result - reasonably white whites and grey greys, and the red, green and blue don't look to bad either. This applies to Canon digital SLR cameras.

I can't vouch for other makes, but hey, have a poke about in the menu, because they'll probably have similar stuff that you can manipulate.

MoonWindow

MoonWindow
Originally uploaded by jpequal1

View from my window, Canon EOS5D MkII, iso6400 (asa) 1/10th @ 2.8, camera held against the window frame.

Bentley

Bentley's warehouse car park in Crewe was graced with some beautiful old cars this weekend, as owners and enthusiasts descended for a cut price spare parts sale to help make space for new models. Nobody seemed to mind that the catering wasn't altogether Rolls Royce and the counters were trestle tables.