Mouse Grill

Before anyone phones the RSPCA, no rodents were cooked during the creation of these images. Last weekend I dusted down the 300mm zoom - my least used lens - in order to record an aerial phenomenon that turned out to be a sun dog. I noticed how the low, late afternoon sun was playing over this metal grill we had installed to prevent the local mice from ransacking our kitchen, so switched to manual focus, and played around creating various 'bokeh' effects with different degrees of un-focus, various focal lengths, and variations in camera-subject distance. The resulting abstract patterns struck me as quite fun, so here they are.

Time, Flies

A simple, if somewhat macabre update. This is how I found the little fella - prone on his back with a hole in his wing. Cause of death - unknown, although as you can see from the position of the legs, it wasn't a high speed collision with a fly swat. Photographed in window light, with fill from the white surface. Minimal editing apart from cropping, contrast curves and the conversion to black and white.

Window Dressing

The images in this update are linked by subject matter - windows.

To begin with, some (more or less) straight images featuring (details of) the stained glass windows adorning St Mary's Church, Wivenhoe. Two have been partially desaturated because I wanted to draw attention to other aspects of the window than the usually-dominant colour.

The middle set are some digital overlays involving the rainscapes from the previous post and images from St Mary's - including one of the windows, the organ, and a floor carving. You are welcome to interpret them as you will. As with most imagery, a variety of conclusions could be equally valid - assuming you sign up to the idea that a work does not merely communicate its author's ideas. Suffice it to say that whilst creating these images I was thinking about E.E. 'Doc' Smith.

The update concludes with two images shot whilst riding on the top deck of a bus on a typical British summer's day.

Rainscapes

The perfect subject for an English summer - fresh raindrops on the window, with a variety of backgrounds. The only processing was a contrast and colour boost, and an occasional crop - otherwise they're as shot (the final lith-toned image apart).

Top Hat

A mini-update featuring some retro glam portraits by a 'colleague' of mine.

Field of Dreams

It is the sign of a photographer (or a goth) that they actually want to get into the local graveyard. The Wivenhoe Photography Group visited the cemetery on Belle Vue Road with a loose brief of 'depth of field'. The cemetery stretches out from both sides of the road, one side featuring a wonderfully overgrown collection of crumbly old headstones, and the other being an altogether more modern and kempt affair. No prizes for guessing which side most of us made a b-line for. Bone yards can serve as a reminder of many things, not least that death is not so much a terminus as a stop on a cyclical route, so I decided to search out the life in the old place.

A Pair of Briefs

Another Wivenhoe Photography Group shoot, another brief ignored - well, not quite. The theme was symmetry. I shot a load of stuff where symmetry could be found within an essentially asymmetrical composition. Here it is.