Looking at things differently

Christmas is a family time and for us this year meant a visit back to the UK for Christmas with my daughter and her soon to be husband, combined on the Saturday before Christmas with the wedding of my nephew Christopher and his new wife Amy.

Chris and Amy had the great idea of photo challenge for the children, who they gave a disposable camera and a list of shots they had to collect, later in the evening I gave my Sony Nex 7 to my two young nephews of about 10 and 8 to go and take some shots.

They quickly filled the memory card(s) and used up the batteries but the results show a different way of thinking and looking at things. Of course there are some shots of the family and the guests at the wedding both in and out of focus but then there is a fascinating time lapse of one of the boys with a mask of a face on the back of his head and his waistcoat and tie on backwards walking up the stairs but looking as if he is coming down (or maybe the other way around - I don't know which way round they did it).

At midnight on Christmas Eve we went to the Christmas service at York Minster, a strange mixture of very busy with people but very calm in the way it all worked

I do not often watch the TV during the day but being the holidays I found myself channel hopping on the TV and found a continuous looping of shows by Dynamo a UK based street magician who did some quite amazing and for me anyway bewildering tricks.

I made a strange mental connection while watching Dynamo and slowly realising this must be who my little nephew had been talking about a year ago when he visited me and attempted walking on water "like Dynamo" on the lake near where we stay

I had imagined he meant some new cartoon super hero but did not ask - of course not wanting to reveal my growing old age  ignorance of such things / people but now I realise that he meant this magician.

You can see some of his magic at www.dynamomagician.com

I think he can be best summed up by a quote I found on the Internet

After much consideration...…I have come to the conclusion that Dynamo is actually a wizard who is slowly revealing his powers to the world.

In among my Santa presents was a cardboard 'make it your self' film pin hole camera which has taken me hours to build but is now ready for its first shot

 I also now have an infrared filter, I have seen some beautiful infra red photographs but my first shot using this filter is not too impressive. The top red image is direct form the camera, the black and white image has been cleaned up but only on my ipad

Hope to be able to include some better images in future blogs.

Today we took a chance with the weather which is alternating between light rain and very heavy rain with brief periods of very cold hailstones a bit wet for photographs apart from a few opportunities between the showers

We walked from Grasmere up to Alcock Tarn, but following our normal route backwards - the shot below is from just below Alcock tarn looking over Windermere

Shot below is looking across Alcock Tarn, with a young family silhouetting across the light, cheerful and lively despite the rainy weather (still needs a bit of levelling adjustment)

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Go out more, take less photographs

I am a member of "Images" an English speaking photography club in Den Haag in the Netherlands.

The club meets every month but I only attend occasionally as it always seems to coincide with some work commitment.

Last week was the first meeting after the summer, just before the meeting the chairperson asked for some volunteers to talk about a favorite photographer and show a few of their pictures.
I chose to talk about Joe Cornish and just showed a few pages from his website and talked a bit about why I liked his pictures.

You can see his web site for your self here  http://www.joecornishgallery.co.uk/

I spent a few days with Joe and another photographer called Richard Childs last year in the Lake District. ( http://www.richardchildsphotography.co.uk/ )

They taught me to think a lot more carefully about what picture I was trying to take, and to not get caught by the digital disease of taking 100 photographs in the hope that one will turn out to be a real winner.

So now I mostly have my camera on a tripod if I am being serious, and I take far less photographs.
(Although I do currently have about 65,000 photographs on my computer, covering a lot years.)

I could do with a good clear up but when I try this I only manage to delete a few hundred each time before I get fed up with the process but this hardly makes a dent in the total.    

Yesterday I was in the house and I became aware of a lot of noise outside the house - this turned out to be a massive flock of birds - starlings I think - there must have been thousands in the flock and they landed on the nearby trees and roofs.

Birds on the roof

I have seen this before at a nearby nature site, Kinderdijk, when the flocks get bigger and bigger as night approaches, with groups of birds flying in to join the main flock.

The site is famous for its large number of windmills - which are used as is common in the Netherlands for pumping water rather than milling grain