Sad Week

I was on holiday last week but it was far from the relaxing week I anticipated, work was very intrusive with lots of calls and mails which I had to respond to, but far more significant was the call I received early in the week to say that a young colleague in my team had been suddenly taken ill and had died early that morning.

Very hard to understand how something so tragic could happen so suddenly.

This event totally dominated my thinking and behaviour during the week.

In my photojournal post for 2 April I wrote

Today has been a very sad and emotional day. I learned early today that a young colleague in my team had been taken ill and died this morning. Sudden, unexpected and absolutely tragic.

I have spent some time deciding if I should post today and if I did, what could I use that could in any way represent my feelings and immense sadness.

When I got the news I was already out walking so faced the dilemma of whether to turn back or continue. There is no right answer.

Todays image shows a view into the distance, a reminder that none of us knows really whats to come, we think we can see ahead, we plan for the future, but the unexpected is always just around the corner.

I have tears in my eyes as I am writing this and the only thought I can leave with you is to forget the small things and live every day to make today the best day of your life so far.

Despite this sadness life does go on for everyone else, so I spend time walking, photographing and reflecting on life, particularly the balance between work and personal life.
Why would i continue to work when I could spend my time walking and photographing in the landscape

My question is whether what is now a pleasure, at least partly because its different from what I can do most of the time, would become less interesting if I could do it all the time?

In the photograph, taken in the early morning on a cold bright day, you can see just see ice on the surface of the lake, standing on the shore you could see the ice being blown to one end of the lake by the slight breeze, and listen to the crunching noise as it slowly piled up on the shore of the lake.

A fleeting moment, with just an hours more sun most of the ice was gone, the lake surface was rippled by the breeze as the lake and the land around started to warm, a totally different scene.

This second shot, taken on a different day shows a colder view with the broken ice clear in the foreground.

Each morning we were woken by the sound of a bird knocking against the window. Again and again this little bird flew at the glass trying to get inside the building. I think this is a house martin, trying to get inside to build a nest with some shelter from the weather. Day after day this bird tried to get inside.

On returning from the UK To our home in the Netherlands I immediately left again for a few days meeting and team building in the Swiss Alps ski resort at Les Closets, another strange week as today we fly back for the funeral of my young colleague.

Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, ends with a tear. When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so that when you die, you're the one smiling and everyone around you is crying.

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Again and Again

You may remember that since the beginning of 2013 I have been taking and uploading a photograph each day to the Blipfoto journal website ( See Blipfoto )

This means that everyday I have to find and take a photograph, some days this is very difficult, particularly if I am busy at work, or travelling on business, other days it is easy and I end up with a choice of possibilities.

The other realization I have made in this process is that I return to and photograph the same locations again and agian, and it is remarkable how the the whole mood and atmosphere of a shot can be altered by the lighting conditions, and also just how short your memory can be of how the waether chnage sin just a few days or weeks.

The two images below are a good illustration, the top image was taken on a bright day (10 Feb) the lower image just 2 weeks later on the 24th February when winter had temporarily returned.

 

Another return location is one of my ' favorite' trees near Grasmere - I have this tree in many of its clothes and disguises.

The top version shows the tree and a lot of background with the mist still boiling off the lake, and for me looks a bit busy and messy.

The middle misty version isolates the tree from the background giving a more atmospheric feel.

The last example includes the lake and two fishermen in a small red boat giving yet a different feel to the image

 

 

Having photos which I cannot choose to use in my daily journal is also forcing me to consider why one image ' makes it' and others are left out.

Sometimes its a clear choice, sometimes very close, and its not always the best most in focus picture that I choose, sometimes its just the right mood for the moment.

Left below is an image I did not use, while the right shot is an iPhone image that I took in Amsterdam walking back from a restaurant, which I thought captured the mood of the city just after midnight and which did go in my journal. 

 

Looking ahead 2013

Here I am back from an extended blog break as a result of Christmas and a very busy work schedule at the start of the year.

This year I decided not to make any New Year Resolutions, in the past I had all the usual plans, lose weight, get fit, exercise very day, eat less and more healthily, drink less and so it goes on. I would start the year with grandiose improvement plans which would have all stopped or failed within a few weeks, sometimes leaving me a bit depressed by my apparent lack of will power.

It seems I meet exactly the remark of one of the characters in the Oscar Wilde comedy play Lady Windermere's Fan, " I can resist anything except temptation"

By the way when I was checking exactly where this saying came from i discovered a lot of other good quotes from this play
- you can read them at  -
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1897835-lady-windermere-s-fan  

At least so far I have stuck to my "no resolution" almost exactly.

Anyone who has been following my blog will recall that a few months ago I started a collection of photographs taken out of my Hotel room window whenever I was travelling. As my job takes me all over Europe I have lots of opportunities for this collection.

Well this year I have taken this a step further by joining a website called Blipfoto, which allows you to upload just one single photograph each day, with the aim to have a photograph each day. This has two impacts, both to create a record of the year but also to make you think all the time what your photograph can be today, so you end up always looking for things to photograph.

Yesterdays photo is below and if you are interested you can find the others at....http://www.blipfoto.com/Bizonderimage

 It was incredibly cold and quite windy when I took this photo, the display in my car said -5C but AccuWeather on my iPad gave a 'realfeel" temperature of -15C, taking one of my gloves off to adjust the camera settings left me with very very cold and painful fingers in just a few moments. 

Of course I took a few photos during my Christmas break, I have one I particularly like taken at Alcock Tarn just above Grasmere in the UK Lake District.

I like it because I think it shows the true nature of the Lake District, nice view across the Tarn with Lake Windermere in the background, raining but with the sun trying to break through, family out walking stopping to check the map.
 

It also makes an interesting black and white photograph showing how this same image has been created again and again over the years

 

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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Home or away

I seem to have been very busy recently, so I am falling behind both in writing these notes but also in submitting the assignments for my photo course.  This weekend I plan to catch up on everything.

This has not been helped I have also had a serious problem with my home WiFi network, which simply stopped working correctly so I had to spend some time trying to work this out.  Our system had a simple router and a repeater (our house has concrete walls which seem to eat the signal) First the repeater stopped, so I bought a new one, which then turned out to be an extender not a repeater - so an apparently simple problem got bigger and bigger - so here I am with a whole new system - which seems to have solved the problems at last. Except my backup system is now not working properly. Why is that once one part of my computer system breaks, as I fix one bit another bit seems to break. I suspect that this could be my lack of computer competency shining through...

At last work is starting to calm down travel wise, Just one trip to London last week, but interestingly one night staying in a hotel in my 'home' city of Rotterdam.

Its a bit obvious that you don't often stay in a hotel close to where you live - you just go home - who wouldn't.
But this week I had a good reason so stayed in a small boutique hotel called Pincoffs in Rotterdam
(www.hotelpincoffs.nl )  This was doubly interesting for me as we used to live in an apartment building only 100 metres away from this hotel while the original building was being redeveloped into a hotel.

Unknown to me at the time was that the development was also the subject of a TV show about the dream of the owners to create a luxury hotel in Rotterdam   You can see a bit of this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aooKKECgJ-s

We worked in the hotel during the day and then went out for dinner, when we returned we found another TV show was being filmed in the Hotel at that moment -  A famous Dutch actor (or maybe presenter) - who of course I did not recognise and even after shaking his hand in the bar I have no clue of his name or why he is famous  - was making film about the homeless in Rotterdam at Christmas ( homeless in Dutch is Dakloos - literally 'roof less' )

Rotterdam has a nice skyline at night which was clear from the window.

 

Erasmus Bridge Rotterdam

The latest part of my photo course has been about exposure and rescuing photographs, this has taken me a long time to do and it is a bit strange deliberately taking bad photos so you can save them later. Some turned out OK but the real lesson is that a bad photo usually stays bad whatever you do

I did have one very frightening moment, I had agreed with our neighbour in our rented house in Grasmere that I could walk down his fields to the lake to take some photographs.  By the lake in a little corner of a fenced off field there was an old boat which had filled with water, and on the morning I visited was just covered with ice, and from the corner of my eye i saw there was a small body trapped in the ice - for a heart stopping moment I thought it was a child, but luckily it was just a big doll someone had left there - for me a very rather scary experience. You can just see the doll peeping out of the boat in the next photo, and below that a rescued photograph of Grasmere village

  

How nature changes in a week

Autumn is a great time for taking photographs, the trees show magnificent colors, the dawn is not too early, in the right places there can often be early morning mist which transforms the landscape into a magical unrecognizable place.

It can sometimes be cold, wet and uninviting to get up and go out early in the morning with my camera, but always it proves worth the effort as the sun starts to rise and light breaks through revealing what the day will really be like, the low sun, still water and changing leaf colours provide some great reflections and picture opportunities   

Unfortunately it is also one of our busiest times at work as we prepare plans and budgets for the coming year, this involves a lot of travel, dinners and late nights.

However I have manged to squeeze into my schedule 2 consecutive weekends in Grasmere, my wife stayed the full week, I took a little trip to Dubai in the meantime.

What really came home was how much the landscape changed in that single week.  The trees changed from being full of beautiful colored leaves to being at least half bare with the leaves lying on the ground, the weather had been dry (and windy) so the carpet of leaves was now dry and heading more towards brown than red, another week and I think the beauty of autumn will be over.

  

Back to the begining

 

Being on holiday I decided to try blogsy to write this weeks update. Unfortunately blogsy ate the first version, probably a mistake by me but I really don't know how it happened

Mixed holiday experience. Started with being sick all night on the ferry to England (food poisoning rather than sea sick) so much that I could not drive the car when we got to England. Lucky that after 2 years of refusing to drive my car Jane suddenly had the nerve to get us where we needed to be. Weather has also been mixed, mostly light rain mixed with heavy rain. Also took me a few days to recover so as a result both walking and photographing has been more limited than we hoped.

We did see a lot of our family which was really nice, and my nephew taught me to watch out for the wingless daddy longlegs which is of course the most poisonous thing on earth. ( lucky that he has weak fangs that cannot bite a tough person like me - the daddy long legs that is - not the nephew).

Both my sister and her two boys walked with us up to Easdale Tarn - a nice afternoon with no rain for a change but still enough water around to get the boys really soaked.

So bit of rain photography was needed........

 

 

 

Although the bridge made a nice photograph, by looking the other way you could see just how full the river was, overflowing onto an area which is normally a dry path.

Walking past the same spot the next day we found the water almost gone from the path and a group of artists sitting in the same spot sketching the bridge.

After the rain a lot of damage could be found all over the hills, with big landslides in some places, including a mini landslide across the main road into Keswick.

I have also started a course in photography from the Photography Institute in England. Online distance learning. Not sure if I need this or if it will improve my photographs but no harm in trying. Have done the first module, which dealt with lenses and cameras, and although I mostly already knew the material it was interesting to do the assignment which dealt with choosing what equipment you would take on different photo assignments

For the second assignment I have to photograph a household object - which is proving more difficult than it sounds to find something slightly interesting.

Back to work tomorrow.........

 

 

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