News from Nowhere

The 2021 winners of the Bird Photographer of the Year competition, courtesy of The Guardian.

Many wonderful pictures, but naturally, what caught my eye (and caught the Guardian's eye, too, because they splashed it right across the centre spread of today's paper) was the Portfolio winner, Kevin Morgans' photos of Atlantic puffins.

Because everybody secretly likes puffins best, don't they?

Tuesday started out pleasantly enough, but soon started to rain, and didn't stop. This was the day we spent sitting under a gazebo in J and J's garden.

Wednesday was bright and sunny, and we accompanied a different J to a photographic exhibition in a dimly lit gallery.

So it goes.

( In the garden, in the rain )

So that was fun. The next day we had a date with another J, to see an exhibition of photographs by Elaine Vizor (on Facebook) at a gallery in Newton Aycliffe (there's an art gallery in Newton Aycliffe? Apparently so, based in the community college. (ETA: There was at the time of writing, but the website seems to have vanished, so who knows...?).

( With or Without (a camera) )

Martin Parr has been photographing rhubarb.

There's more to say about today in due course, but right this moment the thing I would like to get off my chest is that halfway round a splendid walk in the wine growing area of Irouléguy my camera decided that it had had enough. If you're reading this, you probably know just how catastrophic this is, but as a reminder, here's a scene from earlier along the route:



For whatever reason,the lens has jammed: it's semi-zoomed, and won't retract or function. If provoked, it beeps and says "Lens error, restart camera." Switching it off then on again counts as provocation, and removing the battery doesn't help. The internet suggests that the lens may have been knocked off-centre (which could be the case, although not a recent injury) and that it can be pushed firmly but gently back into alignment (which it can't, or at any rate not by me or durham_rambler).

Things could be worse. durham_rambler has been very long-suffering about allowing me the use of his camera. And of course my phone is a camera too, because even the most basic model - which this is - has a camera. So this afternoon I took photographs with my phone, until it declared itself full (at 15 photos). This isn't quite the first time I've used the camera function, I tried it out when I first bought the phone, but I never worked out how to get the photos out of the phone and onto a computer. Still, it shouldn't be difficult, should it? I have a cable with a mini-USB connection at one end and a standard USB at the other (it's my Kindle charger, if you're picky) which is what it takes to connect phone and computer; we even, I discover, have Bluetooth. Yet the phone refuses to talk. So all the embarrassment of discovering myself to be, after all, one of those terrible people who photographs her lunch with her phone was in vain.

And it could be worse. I've just realised that in tablet mode, my new toy notebook is a camera...

A clutch of unfinished (and unstarted) posts seem to be accreting around a common theme - or perhaps it's just that wherever I start out, I return to the same interests.

On Monday we persuaded Gail to accompany us to the Glass Centre in Sunderland, because I wanted to see their exhibition of Chris Blade's photographs from the Arctic. It was a tiny exhibition, one wall of the gallery overlooking the shop, perhaps ten or a dozen photographs in all [there was far more to see on his website, but it has vanished. nonetheless, for the record, I liked this panoramic landscape, and was intrigued by this shot of a disused mineshaft, and spent a long time looking at it, wondering how it had been taken (not just the distortion introduced by the wide-angle lens, but the balance of dark interior and exterior light). At the Ouseburn Open Studios last autumn I had seen Stevie Ronnie's photos of the same abandoned Russian mining town, Pyramiden - evidently it is overrun by visiting artists. In fact, TripAdvisor rates it seventh out of nine attactions on Svalbard. There go any illusions I may have had about the remoteness of the northern wastes.

I have been reading Colin Thubron's In Siberia - the first of his books I've read, though I knew him by name, as a respected travel writer. He's a curious traveling companion, presenting himself and his personal reactions without concealment but without context. There's plenty of remoteness here, the vast expanse of Siberia being one of the few things I knew about it: but I had pictured it as frozen, empty, a blank canvas on which the horrors of the gulag could be written unhindered. I had not known of the many indigenous peoples who have lived there over the millennia, though perhaps I shuld have: if Peter the Great had a collection of prehistoric Siberian treasures, their existence is not exactly news. More recently, The "Ice Princess" has attracted her share of press coverage. The golden buckles are gorgeous, but what really astonished me was the survival of textiles from two and a half thousand years ago: a finely knotted carpet, a felt swan...

Via the Guardian, which ran a feature on historic photographs, I discovered the work of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, pioneer of colour photography (he photographed Tolstoy in colour) who set out with the blessing of the Tsar to document the Russian Empire. Wikipedia has a gallery of his work; and there are some lovely photographs here from the Silk Road.

In the ongoing process of sorting through the photos I took during our holiday, I've just reached one from Inverkeithing. As I was taking my camera out of its case, a police van pulled in to the kerb between me and my subject. I had to step out in front of it, concentrating on not getting run over, when a very affable young man with a heavy accent and an abundance of piercings came in very close to me and pointed out that just down the road, there, was the historic church, well worth photographing. And nearby were other cultural highlights which I no longer remember.

Anyway, that's my excuse for the interesting angle of this shot.



I didn't have the heart to tell him I was taking a picture of the heavily shuttered Chinese restaurant - I liked the contrast of the boarded-up appearance and the golden characters on the dormer windows (the shadow reducing its name to 'Happy Pal' is a fortunate accident). I hope he thought it was the historic Mercat Cross (at the right of the picture) I was after.

All the pictures of Inverkeithing

I drag my feet about admitting it's Christmas, and then I drag my feet about admitting it's over. But Twelfth Night is past, we have eaten our galette, actually on Twelfth Eve, since Twelfth Night itself is Phantoms at the Phil, when desperance and Gail and Sean tell us ghost stories. And we've done that, too, packing the Lit & Phil library full of people to hear three very different stories: Sean O'Brien's creepy faceless nastiness on a branch-line in the heat of an Edwardian summer provoking a nervous laugh at its shocking ending, Gail-Nina's continuing obsession with vampire rabbits and other lagomorphs leavened by the sharpness of her wit, and finally, desperance bringing the mood back to a properly haunted tale of loss and exorcism.

This morning I took last year's cards to the collection point in town: when I say last year's, I mean the cards we received in 2009, not 2010: I haven't finished with those yet. But before I indulge in sorting through the cards we received, here@s the card we sent:

I was very flattered that the City of Durham Trust wanted to use one of my photos as their Christmas card - and also rather nervous: what if it didn't sell, what if everyone hated it, what if it turned out to be a disastrous choice for them? Much to my relief, none of these disasters came about, it seems to have done reasonably well for them.

That's not why durham_rambler and I chose to send it to our friends, of course - as I said, I'm genuinely delighted to have someone else like one of my photos enough to make it into a card. I would probably have chosen a snowier, more explicitly Christmassy image, but I'm pleased with this one, too - I can never resist those through a window, one thing framing another, shots.

And I like the subtly polemic nature of this image. It shows a view that no longer exists, since the statue of Lord Londonderry has now been moved across the Market Place, and can no longer be seen through the Guildhall window. In his new position he's much higher up, and more dominant, but the ensemble of Town Hall, statue, St Nick's has been broken up - but let's not go through that again.

On a point of etiquette, I hope it is in order to offer this conjoined 'thankyou' to the people who said kind things about the photo in my previous post.

I might just have brought myself to say a simple 'thank you' to each of you, but then I wouldn't have gone on to explain that it's one of those photos where the thing that pleases me in the end product is not at all the thing that pleased me in the scene I was trying to photograph.

I'm happy with the symmetry, and the crispness of the detail, but I'm aware that I haven't really caught the quality of the light at all...

The light had been changeable all day, mostly soft and - not grey, but cloudy, and then the sunshine breaking through. We reached the Curling Pond mid-afternoon, but it felt later, the light was almost opalescent, as it is sometimes on summer evenings, and it was that quality, filtered through the still bare branches of the woodland, that made the scene special. As I got my camera out, it clouded over, but we sat for a little, and just as we were moving off it brightened again, and I stopped (durham_rambler was very patient about this) and took this picture.

Which is really too much to say three times. But I'm glad you liked it.

It was durham_rambler's idea that we should spend a night in Quimper; if there was any particular reason he didn't mention it, but he was keen, and the Brittany Ferries package we were booking offered a hotel there - not the most exciting looking of their hotels, but in the right place and at the right price, so we went for it.

I thought we'd been to Quimper before - I thought we'd explored Brittany pretty thoroughly, and I vaguely remembered a Tourist Office with a display of the faïence for which the place is known... Unless I'm thinking of Nevers? Because I also have vague memories of walking round ramparts washed by the sea, and I'm pretty sure now that was Concarneau - not Quimper, at any rate, which is not on the coast...

Which is how we came to be strolling, in the low light of an autumn evening, around a town that was completely new to us, crossing the Odet, the river which runs down the centre of the main street and whose many footbridges are weighed down by baskets of flowers, and making our way into the old town in search of dinner. And when I say old, I mean it: Brittany is full of towns that look old to someone who lives in Durham, towns like Josselin, where half-timbered houses lean to meet each other across narrow streets.

Quimper has its share of old houses, and a taste for painting them in bright shades - or filling their windows top-to-bottom with primary colours. I wanted to photograph everything, and though I did take a fair number of photos of Quimper, both that evening and the morning after, they aren't all fit to be shown to the world. I'm nowhere near mastery of my new camera - only gradually learning what it can do, and what foibles it displays in doing it. I need to learn how much more I am photographing than the viewfinder shows me, and how it is distributed; I need to makes sure I am holding the camera level (this has always been the case, but more so, now). It's wonderful, taking pictures in narrow streets, to have some extra wide-angle capacity - but the resultant fisheye distortion can be spectacular.

And I need to read the manual. There's a lot of it to read, and it's perfectly possible to set the dial to auto and just point and shoot. But what a waste. I'm absurdly pleased with this picture: walking back to the hotel after dinner, following the little river Steir down to its meeting with the Odet (I was amazed, the next morning, to read that this picturesque waterway had actually been built over in the mid-twentieth century, and only opened again in 2003: even if we had been in Quimper before, we could not have seen it... But I digress) we came across a tiny garden arranged around this bust of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the dramatic lighting throwing shadows from the trees (which were waving wildly in the wind) onto the white facade of the Monoprix shop. I set the 'film speed' to as fast as it would go, braced myself against a handy lamp post and went for it - and the result does catch something of what I saw. But reading the manual later, I discovered descriptions of all the 'scene' settings, including a night-time one which I think would have given me a gentle flash and removed the shadow on the face. I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd like to have tried it.

It's a learning curve.