It was yet another bright sunny day and we finally managed to get up to White Nancy cycling from Prestbury—naturally. We were armed with a borrowed Sony Cybershot P100 camera, a much better machine than my A205 but unfortunately White Nancy proved to be a very difficult subject to capture. I think this was due in part to the lighting conditions and the huge contrast (dynamic range) of this famous white object with shadow foreground against sky. But photographic disappointments did not detract from a lovely weekend with the even more lovely and capable Gill!
On the way back we stopped off at the revamped Lord Clyde in Kerride, one of my favourite refuelling locations on the Middlewood Way blast. By now the weather was positively balmy, though conditions atop Kerridge hill were typically gusty and a little chilly when the sun went in. Long range visibility was no where near as good as it can be in autumn or winter but we could still clearly see the land marks of Jodrell Bank, Stockport and Manchester. The new and ever ascending Beetham Tower near Castlefield was remarkably clear and well defined in the distance.
Note to self, Total millage as of today: 5,817.9
Spring really is here now and a number of consecutive warm and sunny days have helped to lift the mood and inspire a degree of optimism, though I’m rarely lacking in that latter quality.
Gill and I managed to bike it into Didsbury last weekend and it was certainly a more fulfilling trip than one I made (and commented on) last year. This cultured and cosmopolitan Manchester suburb was positively buzzing with the old vibe, the essence of studentvile that characterized Didsbury when I was a kid visiting my grandmother’s house just outside the main town. But the blight of the megaplex mess on Kingsway is still just as irksome as ever. This temple to consumer orientated culture and artificial indoor activities was partly responsible for sweeping away the old Parswood rural studies centre, a very bohemian institution run and managed by the Workers Education Association and a place that offered some sort of a glimpse into the delights of rural life for inner city kids , now of course its just an over sanitized picnic area completely overshadowed by the giant tin shed temple to fast food, manipulative main stream cinema, and bingo.
We managed to stay ‘up the smart end’ for most of the visit and in this more halcyon time of spring Fletchermoss Park and the Parsonage Gardens looked just as good as ever. The photo of the magnolia tree above was taken in Parsonage Gardens close to the location of mum and dads wedding photos and my christening shots.
Next weekend I’m taking Gill up to one of my local vantage points, the famous white Nancy atop Kerridge Hill. Photos and reports to follow….indubitably.
It’s a short entry today but I felt compelled to note some recent thoughts and observation on photography—I think it is a sort of motivational dialogue with myself in truth.
I have got to get a Nikon D70 digital SLR as soon as poss. One of my contacts on Flickr has produced some outstanding work with one of these “affordable” SLRs and I know from first hand experience that this is a very satisfactory make. At one time Nikon was the king of Japanese cameras.
My good old FG20 saw me through college and more than ten years of film based shooting and it has never let me down. The shutter still moves like silk and the exposure meter remains highly accurate and reliable. Unfortunately, my days of film based work are petering out; I find that the convenience of digital (even bog standard digital) hugely out weighs the stress and tedium of a processing and printing stage.
Flickr in fact is proving to be highly educational, it is a sort of show-case for the digital idiom and one thing that strikes me about the medium of digital photography is the new found acceptance of a semi ‘pictorialist’ approach. Once again photographers are free to manipulate their images almost to any extent and still command respect from the photographic establishment, such manipulations have become intrinsic to the new medium. The process of ‘denaturing’ photography in the pre digital days was sometimes regarded as an almost sinful or treacherous act. It implied a desire to make the photographic image conform to the values of painting whilst simultaneously denying the photographic medium’s own unique set of artistic and cultural ‘values’. Now you are no longer seen as a photographic apologist if you over saturate to the point of melt down, apply all sorts of masks and layers, or radically denature the subject through post processing applications.
Current weather: Indecisive warm blue fits and starts. April showers and hailstone mixed wi rain’ n’ lighnin. Light icing— plus fair degree of light refreshment etc.
Some may have noticed that I have set up a ‘Flickr’ page which now runs in concert with my own website, so far I have found Flickr to be rather good, it’s a great meeting place for photographers of all levels and constitutes a kind of documentary resource in a way. That is if you consider it as a massive world wide repository for images captured by millions of cameras with thousands of up loads a week. However, I do worry (probably needlessly) about the possibility of ‘theft’ or something that the folks at Flickr refer to as ‘creative identity theft’ i.e. the reposting of other peoples photos and passing them off as original work. Now of course I have gone and done that paranoid thing of stamping all of my new JPEG uploads with my name which completely ruins the photos, but unfortunately I have also thought about extending that modest safe-guard to the stuff on this site.
Photography is set to become the main objective once again. Right now I’m working on a couple of developments that will help to increase the image capacity of this site albeit in terms of aesthetic organisation and presentation. I don’t think it would be wise to increase the number of thumbnails on the home page, so now I intend to have a second gallery of thumbnail links in the form of a simple ‘table’ page—-hurrah for that.
I’m hoping to go up to Edale ASAP with a view to getting some good landscape shots, maybe even from atop Mam Tor. It is a fabulous location which also has some familial connections as my Uncle Harold Leonard was the live-in Station Master at Edale from the 40’s right through to the early 60s.
Music wants and needs have swung back to good old Compost /JCR records mostly thanks to trawling through the online back catalogue of sound clips. I had almost forgotten how good outfits like ‘Koop’ were. Jazzanova and New Spirit Helsinki are on the grab list again! This highly innovative music connects back to more youthful days—never a bad move! I have also recently discovered the beautifully mellifluous Iron & Wine (aka Samuel Beam) curtesy of Mr Martin Willson of Herearephotos. It’s a very different kind of music, a form of transfigured ‘Country’ that has a hint of early period Simon and Garfunkel whimsy. I gather that Iron & Wine conforms to a new genre known as ‘Sub Pop’ which appears to place an emphasis on acoustics, lofi or simple production techniques, and rural or agrarian imagery.