Category Archives: Photos

Morning, with a hint of castle

Penshurst Place, Kent

Seal of (dis)approval?

We were on Scratby Beach in Norfolk today, soon after high tide.

It slopes away fairly steeply there, with the result that small waves were only breaking quite close to the shore. Apparently there’s some quite good surfing here at times, though.

To our surprise and delight, during the course of our short walk, three or four large seals swam in close enough to have a good look at what we were doing. I’m not sure they approved…

Seal at Scratby Beach

Waiting Room

Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire

Over the seas to Rye

Sunset over Rye Harbour Nature Reserve on Saturday evening

Storm Rider, Grantchester

Storm Rider, Grantchester

Gold, Silver and Bronze

Gold, Silver and Bronze

Holme Fen

Into Fairyland

Into Fairyland

A photo taken last weekend in Monks Wood, with a little processing.
(To hide the fairies. They’re very camera-shy and wouldn’t sign a model release.)

Winter Walk

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We had a rather chilly but very pretty walk on the Wimpole Hall estate this morning.

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Here’s the view from near the folly:

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If you really want to see the whole picture from here, though, there’s another of my scrolly-panorama things here.

Then we walked back through the woods.

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The Morning Bathe

The morning bathe

Trying a tripod

tripodI got a new tripod yesterday, and took it out to play today (just very briefly while I was ostensibly walking the dog).

One thing I’ve been enjoying recently is stitching together multiple images to create a panorama, and a tripod makes this work very much better. But how to display the very wide images that can result?

Well, here’s one way.

And here’s another image from a slightly different viewpoint.

I quite like this effect, but even in this form, I’m using images that are 1/5th of the original size in each dimension. Here’s the smaller one as a 60 Mpixel image, for example, albeit not at full quality.

Now, interestingly, I have a printer which can take rolls of photo paper, meaning that I could actually print out something like this at a decent size. Anybody got a spare corridor in which to hang it, though?

Iconoclasm

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This bold new installation at Wimpole Hall asks difficult — some would say provocative — questions about the role of traditional art forms in a modern world.

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Echoing the delayed gratification of the wrapped Christmas gift, the artist seems to imply that the projection of the sculptor’s immediate intent onto the viewer’s consciousness is, in itself, best understood as an ephemeral dualism.

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The exhibition runs throughout the winter, and there is no charge for admission.

Textures

What is this strange exotic mix of natural textures flowing past the domed obstruction?

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And the answer is…. chicken wire!

At least, it’s a fence post to which chicken wire is attached. I photographed it twice using a macro extension tube in the low winter morning light, then stitched the two halves together before doing a reasonably high-contrast conversion to black and white.

Here’s a more conventional view taken a bit later from further away – using the same lens, as it happens, but without the macro tube.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser