Oliver Wood Photography

Green Shed By The Reservoir

The outer limits of Macclesfield in Cheshire — days spent in contemplative study.

Long Journey in a Slow Machine

An HDR processed image of Macclesfield Forest.

Teggs Nose

More photos from a recent trip to Teggs Nose and Macclesfield forest.

Ridgegate Reservoir

Morning Sun, Teggs Nose

A day with the camera at Teggs Nose and Macclesfield forrest — more to come. It is now my favorite local place.

Cloud and Reflection, Teggs Nose

Detail of the Silk Road foot bridge

Spent quite a lot of time photographing this very attractive footbridge near Macclesfield. I have always admired its wooden structure.

Bridge over the Silk Road Macclesfield

Cheshire summer afternoons, lazing in the grass. One of a series of shots that I did on the way home from work, it has been very warm recently. I wanted to try a bit of split tone processing on these and it has worked out well I think.

Update: 4th July 2010, I finally have wordpress up and running!

It’s a grey misty morning but pleasantly mild for a change and I’m in the process of recovering from yet another bout of really bad toothache. The dentist has put me on a course of extra strong antibiotics so that should sort things out. I am pleased to announce that I am now, at last, a non-smoker! Not a giver upper you understand, ‘giving up’ implies a temporary hiatus in an activity that one would rather continue to pursue, so I am officially a ‘NON SMOKER’ make no mistake.

I’m waiting for some appropriate lighting conditions to facilitate another round of local photography. I keep noticing little things (details) that I think are worth recording. My locality is full of trivial curiosities if one is open to such things, items like vintage 1960s bus stop signs nestling in hedges and those rather stylish 1960s design municipal bins inside a wooden frame. We did have an original one with the red bucket inside on a neat grass verge. I know it sounds trivial but I can make something of these things with photography and I think details like this are interesting to record for posterity.

This is going to get super geeky but I also noticed on a recent ride that a run of very old pylons near Bollington Cross had disappeared! I took a few snaps of the petite lattice towers about five years ago with a little PAS 2Mpx camera.

These were quite interesting, as they were very old dating back to the earliest days of the national grid infrastructure when the highest system voltage was around 135KV. Judging by the insulators this line was operating at about 30KV and the conductor gauge (which was large for a ‘feeder’ line) suggests a current capacity of around 500 amps which equates to easily enough power for a village the size of Prestbury but the line headed in the direction of Butley Town.

The cable catcher arms were a common feature on these older pylons where the wire span crossed a road.

Last minute update at 11:02pm, Just listening to last weeks excellent GP show literally at the last minute — well almost. It is the first Brownswood Basement show of 2009, always good for rarities and collectibles and also featuring a tribute to Blue Note with a vintage European psychedelic jazz trip coming up — I’m in heaven.

Roberta Flack “Feel Like Making Love”

Music of the moment includes a classic and much loved oldie from Roberta Flack. Giles just played the “I Can See the Sun in Late December” track off the Feel Like Making Love album from 1974. I had forgotten just how good and original sounding this song was until just now. Loads more obscure 70s deep R&B Jazz goodness to come.

I’m still quite enjoying the abundance of free time and the sense of not having to rush along with things or avoid certain things altogether because of a need to adhere to a certain hierarchy of events / chores / activities through the weekend. I spent most of the afternoon lazily returning from a trip to Macc. This time cycling back along the Bollin Valley Way but taking all sorts of exploratory detours and looking for photo opportunities. I really do need to record more of my experiences with my camera.

Last week was a particularly difficult time for me both emotionally and physically. My new-found loneliness is not getting any easier and I do miss Gill and the boys such a lot. Sometimes I find it hard to get motivated or inspired to be creative. I was also struck down for the fourth time with the most appalling acute toothache resulting from yet another smoking and stress related abscess. The situation could have been a lot worse when I discovered that my local dentist had ‘struck me off’ due to missing a couple of previous appointments. That was back in the days when I used to feel such a strong commitment to my employer that I would even go all the way into Manchester with chronic tooth pain just so that I could make sure certain ‘clients’ where up to date. Of course, it’s not clever, or heroic, and I feel a return to the days of union lead contempt for this kind of corporate sycophancy is long over due. Fortunately, I did manage to get treated by the NHS emergency centre in Macclesfield. Then re-register with another practice in Macc and hey presto, my new dentist said that he can treat and restore the tooth that others said would have to be ripped out and all at a very reasonable NHS cost, viva the NHS! Yet another smoking cessation is one of the more positive side benefits of the recent dental malaise and this abstinence appears to be ongoing. I’m really going to quit once and for all this time!

I managed to miss all of the local snow bound photo opportunities due to the general discomfort of the last few days not to mention the groggy side effects of painkillers and antibiotics. I had in mind a few shots up in the fields in virgin snowfall conditions, my solitary footprints disappearing into the distance, that sort of thing, existentialism in the English landscapes no less! These would then be infra red processed in B&W. It may still be possible to do this as yet more snow is forecast.

One of the highlights of last week was helping my friend Rob with a bonfire in the Churchyard on a rather beautiful winter day. Rob is the village’s entertaining and erudite odd job man, an ex merchant seaman with allegiances to the beat generation and early counter culture ideology who never really sold out! I always think of Rob as a sort of legacy of the 70s heyday of Cheshire (country) living fashion when places like Prestbury would not have been completely devoid of creative bohemians, youthful eccentrics and other colourful characters with maverick anti conservative values. It is these little moments with Rob that help to keep me sane in Prestbury. It is the meeting of minds, the joy of simple pleasures and the shared love of the environment. This is always combined with a healthy dose of often comedic bourgeois bashing and the deconstruction of consumer capitalism (consumer moron culture) with plenty of Jazz and situationist detours not to mention a healthy dose of pythonesque self mockery.

Last night was a good moody night, one of those nights when I have a clear sense of the ethereal harmony of things, the characteristics of the seasons, the weather, an almost syneasthetic sense of correlation’s. Actually, I was out and about on my bike but I don’t really know quite where I was as I managed to get lost somewhere between Adlington and Pot Shrigley on very dark lanes. Eventually I found my way back to the secluded Macclesfield Canal and made a very precarious return journey along the rutted towpath to the familiar setting of Whitley Green. The prospect of a “strange encounter” and the possibility of having to route an assailant or a misjudged high-speed manoeuvre resulting in an impromptu slam dive with bike seemed to add to the excitement in the dark darkness. Yes I know, I’m weird crazy personified :-)

It was a bracing night with a fierce looking sky made up of hard edged broken cloud scampering to the east in a jostling squally fashion and allowing the impressive stars to show through; albeit somewhat tentatively. My favourite planet Mars looked fabulous last night, skulking low in the south and standing out from the crowd with its unmistakable fiery orange glow. There was a curious mood of ominous portent with a robust war like essence to this red theme’d and typically seasonal night. Don’t ask me to explain! Actually, I have quite a soft spot for Jupiter too, naturally! It’s an interesting and highly energetic world perfectly suited as the Ruler of Sagittarius—but of course.

I am continuing to indulge in a sort of nostalgia for the music of my youth, or rather shall we say the missed (non-attentive) years of my pre adolescence. Actually, my adolescence was firmly rooted in the “Punk” era of the late 70s, a time when one had to pretend not to like any of the preceding genres. Nearly everything we hear now appears to be in some way derivative and it is easy to convince oneself that the non “classical” music styles have run out of material and exhausted all possibilities for invention and progression.

This is why I like to loose myself in a sort of retrogressive journey of belated discovery trawling through obscure 70s back catalogues for those fiendishly well arranged and ambitiously orchestrated “P Funk” masterpieces from the early 70s and virtually everything on the Stax label. No one does music with this sort of quality now. It would be fascinating to delve into the John Peel shows from the pre-Punk era too if only to get an angle on the “underground” or serious and innovative stuff when all we can think of is razzal dazzle commercial rubbish. Who can remember “Family” and those gritty social narratives set to organ rich compositions with a hint of 70s TV themes?