Category: Light

Light – 10 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

The fog was there when we woke this morning and it stayed all day

One of those days where there wasn’t much to encourage us to go out. Although it wasn’t cold, it felt damp and uncomfortable. Although I managed to do my ‘8 active hours’ according to the Fitbit, I couldn’t tell you how I achieved them. It felt like a day of sitting around.

It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that I managed to shift myself enough to go out to get some photos. I walked over to St Mo’s looking for some macro subjects to ignite my interest. The subjects were there, but I really needed the light to be better. More light would help and some of it needed to be directional. I had hopes that there might be some late sunshine when the clouds parted slightly to expose a tiny sliver of blue sky. However the tear in the clouds soon healed again and the sun was lost for another day. I found a small toadstool growing on the edge of the pine woods and tried unsuccessfully to get a decent, sharp image of it. That’s when I switched my phone on and used its torch to give me that directional light. It worked and I had my PoD.

Also on my phone came the news that North Lanarkshire was to remain in level 3 of the restrictions after threats that we’d be elevated to level 4 which is basically full lockdown again. Skye, on the other hand were downgraded to level 1 which gives them a bit more freedom. Back home Scamp was talking to Jackie in Skye and congratulating her on her freedom.

She, Scamp, had been to Condorrat while I was out and had bumped into Chris Davies’ mum again. Hadn’t seen her for years and then bumped into her twice in a week. Sometimes life’s like that.

It was Scamp’s turn to make dinner and tonight I got to choose between two different offerings. I chose Kedgeree and it was a great choice and a great dinner. Tasty and just nicely curry flavoured.

Today may have been dull, but tomorrow will be wet, WET, WET. Not a Scottish rock band from the ’80s. More a Scottish weather pattern. We may go out, just to get away from the house for a while.

Season of mists – 9 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Today dawned a bright day. Too good to stay in.

By 11am we were walking along past what was The Hebo House restaurant until they fixed the sign. Anyway we were walking past it and up on to the towpath of the Forth & Clyde canal. The view along the canal with Barr Hill in the distance covered by low cloud or mist, I’m not sure which was too good to miss, so I grabbed the chance to take a few photos. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of swans flying overhead and waited a second or two to grab one shot of a trio of swans flying over. Just a pity I didn’t get their reflection in the canal.

We walked on down to the old railway line path from Auchinstarry to Twechar. It appears that the work on upgrading the paths is ongoing and will be so until mid December. We crossed over at the plantation and back up onto the canal towpath again from there we walked back to Auchinstarry and the car which was patiently waiting for us. On the way back we noticed someone had formed a wee flower and a heart from copper wire and mounted it on a tree stump. It looked really good sitting there in the sun and I grabbed a shot or two of it. By the time we got home the light was disappearing and the mist was coming down.

Not satisfied with the photos I’d taken, although they looked good on the ‘puter, I went out for a walk in the afternoon to see if St Mo’s had anything to offer. I think I left it too long. The mist and clouds were now obliterating the sun and destroying any decent light, so I was struggling to get anything decent. I did try a few shots of spiders on the whin bushes, but they were too small in the frame and difficult to focus on, so I gave up. The PoD would be the canal with the flypast of the swans, with second prize going to the wee flower sculpture.

We had booked a WhatsApp video call with an agent from Scottish Gas to give us a quote for a new boiler. In these Covid days it seems that visual visits are the way things are being done. When he phoned to confirm he asked if it would be ok to use new software they were trialling instead of WhatsApp and we agreed. After a false start we got connected and he took us through the areas he needed to photograph to get the information to build the quote. About fifteen minutes later he called back with the quote and then emailed the details to us. An interesting and useful exercise. Now we need to get a comparative quote from a local gas fitter.

Watched a Nigella recipe programme tonight where she made a curry whose main constituent parts were cauliflower and chopped up banana skins. I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.

No plans as yet for tomorrow, although weather looks a bit like today.

A dull day in the morning – 5 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Blue sky looking out the front window but really black at the back.

We decided to wait it out and see if the blue sky or the black clouds would win. Eventually the blues did win the day, but it was lunchtime by then and we stopped our cloudgazing to have a Bruschetta each for lunch. Sounds very posh, but the bread was going stale but would make good toast and the wee tomatoes were just past their sell-by date. A good way to use them up. Full marks to Scamp.

After lunch Scamp decided to make a chicken curry for dinner in the slow cooker and headed off to the shops to get a couple of chicken legs. I gathered my camera gear together and took a walk over to St Mo’s. Today I was mixing my cameras. I had my Oly with a macro lens and the Sony with the kit lens. I was fairly sure the Sony would produce the best landscape shot, and I wasn’t wrong. But I was equally sure the Oly would produce the best macro and again I backed the right horse. In fact, the Oly won the day with PoD going to a conifer trunk with a pattern looking like the flatworms from MC Escher’s lithographs. Google “Escher Flatworms” to see what I mean. I think the tree was a Larch because it was starting to shed its needles.

Back home the chicken curry was beginning to scent the air in the living room, because the great thing about slow cookers is they’re portable. You can plug them in anywhere there’s a power socket and they’ll do their job as well as sitting on the kitchen counter.

For a while we watched the antics of a couple of 70-somethings arguing about who won and I thought: Would I really want either of them to run my country? Boris is a bumbler, but these two are zoomers.

Tonight was Guy Fawkes Night, but since he was a bit of a terrorist and it’s not the done thing to glorify terrorists, the celebration has been renamed Bonfire Night.  That’s what we used to call it anyway, so it’s obviously the right name.  Although we didn’t have an official fireworks display this year, or maybe because we didn’t, there were loads of rockets flying through the air and explosions all around us.  Certainly one of the noisiest Bonfire Nights for many years.

Tomorrow we go out for lunch, but still stay within the boundaries of North Lanarkshire.

The Chicken Curry? Of course it was beautiful. Tasted as good as it smelled!

More junk goes – 2 November 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Even more junk will arrive to fill its place, that’s inevitable, of course.

The junk in question was my Linx 12×64 laptop(ish) computer. The (ish) refers to the fact that it won’t sit comfortably on your lap, because it takes up a fairly large footprint with its kick down stand extended. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but like all ‘good ideas’ there were drawbacks. It was fairly light with a decent sized screen. It wasn’t fast, but I knew that at the time. It could run from an emergency phone charger battery quite happily. The killer was that it was Windows 10 and constantly wanted to ”Get you going again” only it didn’t. The downloads nearly always failed for some unexplained reason and with every successful download it got slower and slower. I finally decided it had to go and today was the day. Scamp was out having coffee with her sister in the morning, so I’d plenty of time to get it organised. I did my final check to make sure the battery was 100% and that it would charge if needed, polished the screen, swept the crumbs out of the keyboard (terrible keyboard) then packed it in its box, ready to go.

It was still looking good outside when I was finished, so I grabbed the camera and headed off to see how much water was in St Mo’s pond. The answer was really quite a lot of water. In fact, all the weeds and assorted rubbish in the pond had blocked the outlet and the pond was overflowing onto the path and cascading down the other side into the gulley that takes it out to somewhere else. I have no idea where. Didn’t get many photos because the trees were looking a bit bare after the buffeting they’ve had from our recent gales. I did try a few landscapes, but I wasn’t impressed with the look through the viewfinder.

Back home, Scamp had arrived just before me and we had lunch. My first look at the photos on the computer confirmed my suspicions that quite a lot of work would be needed to find anything worthwhile there. Took the Linx up to CEX which are the easiest company to deal with for small electrical and electronic gadgets. The next best, I’ve found, are the workers at the council skips, but CEX give you a few quid more for your unwanted electronic junk, and there’s not such a big queue. Left the Linx to be checked and GS23’d and came home to close down Inktober 2020 on Flickr. It hasn’t been such an easy job being admin for the group this year. Too many punters seem to think that slapping some coloured ink on a page is drawing/sketching. It’s not, it’s just being a poser and if you keep doing it, I will remove your ‘artwork’. That’s what happened to an irate Italian bloke last night who seemed to think that he could unload his entire back catalog into my Inktober site. He got barred.

With Inktober sorted, Scamp and I turned our attention to additional storage space needed in the front bedroom. I suggested we get another bookcase and create an organised shelf system. That seemed to meet with her approval.

Back up at CEX the nice lady handed over the readies and I took some of them round to B&M where I exchanged them for a cheap chipboard bookcase. Strangely I met Emma, an FP (Former Pupil). I’d been reading last year’s blog the other night and had written about meeting her in the Beech Tree restaurant a year ago last week. She was one of my nicer FPs. I stopped on the way home when I saw what might just be a decent sunset forming. It got a few shots, and that’s what you see here. Sunset over the Pylons! Scamp approved the purchase of the bookcase. We’ll build it tomorrow.

Watched and interesting video on YouTube tonight that showed how to adjust lens adapters. The first one I bought was very loose. I fixed it tonight after watching the video. Very happy with it now. I’ll be able to use my Nikon lenses on the new camera until I save up enough pennies to buy Sony ones.

Tomorrow the Gas Man is booked to do the maintenance on the boiler. We know he’ll probably try to encourage us to get a new one. We may just let him make an appointment for us. Don’t know how that will work with Covid restrictions. We are now in Tier 3 of the Scottish system. England go into full lockdown later in the week for a month. Wales are just coming out of a ‘Circuit Breaker’. It’s complicated!

Writing – 8 October 2020

Posted on by Zogman

So much writing today.

This morning I sat down to write to my brother. We communicate by email and send each other what we consider our best photos. It’s roughly an email every two months, but I’ve been especially tardy of late and realised with a bit of a shock that my last epistle was sent on the 25th of July. It being the 8th of October today, that makes it nearly three months. I’d a fair bit to tell him, because a lot has happened at this end in the intervening 75 days. It started with Good Morning Alex, and was finally posted with Good Afternoon Alex. He deserved the time. His photos this time were excellent. Another photog who has moved back to Canon from M43. I must admit that I like the Olympus cameras and the Lumix lenses and the light weight of the cameras. I also like the detailed complexity of the menu system that allows you to change almost every bit of the hardware, but I’ve never liked the 4:3 format. I much prefer the 35mm 3:2 format whether it’s full sensor or APS-C. I just think it looks better. Anyway, I finally posted the email with my contribution of images in the afternoon. I felt better after that.

Having been sitting around all day, I needed to get out and walked down to the shops to get some stuff for tonight’s dinner, but mainly for the walk and maybe a chance to grab some photos. I didn’t get the stuff for the dinner and I didn’t get any photos either until I came home. I saw the light shining through the yellow leaves of the chestnut tree outside our house and took some shots of that, but none of them really worked for me. Instead, while I was making dinner I was putting some fish wrappings in the outside bin where they wouldn’t smell the house and saw one of Scamp’s roses just opening and there was still enough light to grab a shot. That was PoD. The rose is Remember Me and it goes through some amazing colour changes from bud to fully opened.

Dinner was Mediterranean Fish Stew. Another one stolen obtained from JIC and Sim’s recipe book, and another winner. I’d definitely make that again.

Sketch prompt today was “Teeth”. I couldn’t decide what to draw that would reference the subject. Scamp suggested the teeth of a comb. I thought of a saw’s teeth. Eventually I just sat and doodled a face with broken teeth and there was today’s picture right there.

Tomorrow all the pubs and restaurants in Central Scotland will close at 6pm and remain closed until the 25th of October. We may go out somewhere, anywhere tomorrow to have a pre-lockout drink or a lunch.

Dining out – 23 September 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Just an opportunity to go for lunch and put aside Covid fears for an hour or so.

Scamp had bought the original Itison (Scottish version of Groupon) voucher back in February with the intention that it would be a useful lunch treat in the spring or summer, then Covid arrived and we tumbled into lockdown. Recently, when restaurants opened again, the vouchers came back to life. Today’s was for “21”, an Italian restaurant in Hamilton.  We even got free parking in the town because all the meters were covered, presumably to avoid folk having to risk catching the disease when emptying the meters. A little bonus. We walked down to the restaurant in the sunshine and arrived right on time. Scamp had Cream of Veg soup to start, followed by Veg Risotto. I had Salami Bruschetta followed by Balmoral Chicken. Both were perfectly satisfactory, but I wished later I’d stuck with my original choice of Lasagne. Because we’d had a cheap starter and main we felt it would only be fair to had a dessert too. Scamp had Coppa Amarena (ice cream with cherries) and I had Tiramisu. The Coppa looked great and the one cherry I had was beautiful. The Tiramisu was dry and looked as if it had come from a wholesaler. Not great. All in all it was fine. Next time if we go back, I’ll be more sensible in my choices. What impressed me most was that the staff spoke Italian to each other. That’s the way it should be.

Back home and back to reality, Scamp cut the front grass and I volunteered to do the same to the back grass. Maybe that will be the last cut of the year. The light was still good when we were done, so while Scamp relaxed, I took the Oly over to St Mo’s and went for a walk in the woods. It was a bit cold out of the sun, but the low light created opportunities for some decent photos. PoD was a backlit shot of a spider wrapping up its dinner. It’s a Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus).

Tonight about 8pm I was taking the recycling out for collection tomorrow morning. A group of folk were standing outside the house next door. Their father and mother, whose house it is, were inside with their grandchildren, but the parents were outside talking. Some were standing, some were sitting in garden chairs. It was dark and the temperature was a chilly 9ºc. What they were doing was perfectly legal and in line with the new rules for Scotland, but why would anyone go to those lengths? Will they do the same in a couple of months when it’s snowing? Who knows.

Tomorrow we may drive in to Glasgow.

The Bin Man – 22 September 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Finally, if I get this blog posted, I will be up to date.

Scamp was out this morning meeting Isobel. That gave me a bare two hours to organise my PoDs, export them and then import them to Flickr, write up the remaining blog posts and combine them with the images and post those online. I managed to get almost all of that done while Scamp was gabbing chatting with Isobel and had time for a cup of coffee too.

We’d decided to make good on yesterday’s promise and go to Falkirk looking for a duvet cover and a fancy new kitchen bin. We went, we looked, we came back empty handed. On the way home we dropped in at B&Q and found a bin there for much less than they were selling them for in Falkirk. I went looking for a new dash cam in Halfords while Scamp went looking elsewhere for a duvet cover, again we returned empty handed, at least we had a new bin. Unfortunately the bin didn’t fit into the space the old one had lived in, so there was a bit of rearranging of the kitchen, but everything is now in place and working.

Went out late in the afternoon to post a card and to have a walk round St Mo’s. By the time I was getting there the light was all but gone. Not just the good light either, all the light was gone, it was like twilight had come early, although twilight actually arrived about 2pm today. It was just one of those days. PoD became a picture of a late blooming dog rose rescued by using HDR (don’t ask what HDR is. JIC goes crazy when I start talking in Technospeak.) It’s not great, but it was the best of a bad lot today.

Remember yesterday I was being Bob the Builder? Tonight one of the real builders trundled up in a mini JCB to level off Scott’s garden. He did in about an hour what Scott had been trying to do in three weeks in his spare time. No barrowing needed today. Technology did the grunt work.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go to Hamilton for lunch. For an hour and a half we can pretend that Covid happened somewhere else.

The Teacher and the Teacher – 9 September 2020

Posted on by Zogman

Out after a quick coffee this morning to meet John.

Drove to Chatelherault to meet John. We were going for a walk in the Chatelherault Estate to talk about cameras, apertures, shutter speeds and the mysteries of ISOs. Things I’ve been using for years and years, but never really had the chance to explain to anyone. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve talked about them to lots of folk, but very few of them listened. Even fewer understood a word I said. Someone said of photogs, that they could conduct an entire conversation using just letters and numbers. I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, but there is a semblance of truth in it.

We started off going over the Duke’s Bridge and on past Cadzow Castle which is pretty much a ruin now. It would appear that the restoration has hit a roadblock, judging by the fact that nature has more or less covered the scaffolding that was erected about ten years ago. John took us up to the Cadzow Oaks which are much more impressive than the ruined castle. They are reckoned to be over 800 years old and as someone commented, they look like how you’d imagine Ents to look in The Hobbit. They surround an area of earthworks that may have been the groundwork for a castle that would predate Cadzow Castle and may have been Roman in origin.

Ah, but we weren’t out to do historical stuff, we were there to take photos. The weather was mixed. While we were sitting talking beside the oaks the light was constantly changing, making it difficult to get any decent shots. That’s my excuse anyway. I tried to explain the basics of exposure, using the triangle of Aperture, Shutter speed and ISO. I don’t know if I covered it all that well and I’m sure I didn’t explain it as lucidly as I’d have liked, but it was a decent day, and we were out for a walk. While we were photographing leaves and moss on an old (not oak) log a woman stopped to comment on the shapes the lichen was making. She had a dog with her. A white dog with a face like a lamb. When I got home that’s how I described it to Mr Google and he informed me it was a Bedlington Terrier. We, John and I went for coffee and a cake before we parted company. He was determined to walk home, I was driving.

Got a bit of a fright on the M73 passing a Land Rover which was tootling along doing about 50mph while I was in the outside land doing a neat 70mph. Then the Land Rover started sliding across into my lane. Whoever was driving must have seen me at the last minute and swerved back into their lane as I took evasive action. In my rear view mirror I saw them indicate and fishtail onto the hard shoulder. Glad of the dash cam which caught the incident nicely! The clip is now downloaded just in case.

Dinner tonight was chicken stir fry made by Scamp of course. I don’t do stir fry. I won’t say can’t I can, just not as good as Scamp. After that we watched the final episode of Series 3 of Line Of Duty. Irritatingly, halfway through it I remembered how it ended. It didn’t detract from the build up though.

PoD was of ivy growing on the Juke’s Bridge at Chatelherault.

Tomorrow we may go to Glasgow, just for the run and the dash cam will be on!

The Red Juke is gone – 3 September 2020

Posted on by Zogman

The Blue Micra is here.

After being fleeced of another bag of money by Nissan Insurance, the papers were emailed to me and we drove to Stirling with hope in our hearts. Said goodbye to Big Red Juke and signed a fist full of documents. Some of them were ‘real’ documents signed with a real pen. Some were ‘tronic documents signed by typing my name into a box on an iPad screen. Actually the whole procedure which took the best part of an hour was fairly painless. We were led out to admire the Blue Micra. I drove it home and then Scamp took it for a spin around Westfield. It’s amazing how technology has moved on in the three years since we got the Juke and utterly astounding the advances since Scamp bought her first car, a Nissan Micra, ten years ago.

We sat and admired it for a while then had lunch. Despite the high winds and the driving rain we just had to go somewhere, anywhere just to get the smell of a new car in our nostrils. We drove to Robroyston at Scamp’s suggestion to get some polishing cloths to clean the screen of the Micra that had been ‘sanitized’. Then we were intending to have a coffee in Costa, but the thought of queueing outside in the rain didn’t endear itself to us, so we just drove home. Still, we’d been out. In a new car.

I took a camera for a walk in St Mo’s just to see if there was anything worth photographing, but there wasn’t, so I came home and took a photo of the new car, well the roof of the car with a wee fly on it. I liked the way the light shining through the trees made patterns on the roof and the wee fly was well placed to be in the sweet spot.

It has been a stressful day and I’m glad it’s over. Tomorrow we can enjoy the car properly and go somewhere a bit more scenic than a queued out Costa at Robroyston. Perhaps, just perhaps, DML all being well. Well, it is a tradition.

Bob the Builder strikes again – 13 August 2020

Posted on by Zogman

A slow day to start as far as the weather was concerned, but lots to do.

Got an email from the garage with my order form for the new Micra attached. Just a formality really, but at least I now have a proper breakdown of the deal.

Shona had sent a text late in the afternoon, yesterday. Ben had broken the lock on the bathroom door. He likes to play with the water in the bath, but doesn’t realise that it’s running through into the flat below. It was mid June when I was last called to the fix the door and I screwed a hasp on to the door frame and a staple on to the door itself. It seemed ok at the time, but as I predicted at the time, the now twelve year old Ben has demonstrated that he can tear those screws out. I went to B&Q to get a couple of bolts. That meant a bag of bolts, of course. A bag of washers too. As I’d left the house without a screwdriver, I had to add one to the list as well. Unbelievably, the bag of washers which are simple steel discs about 15mm diameter with a hole in the centre was nearly twelve quid! Outrageous, but I needed them for the job. Back at the flat it was a simple job to drill the door, then drill out the staple itself to fit the bolts. Then I assembled the whole thing with a couple of those expensive washers in place and tightened one nut and a lock nut to keep the other nut from breaking in to the bathroom again. If this doesn’t work I’ll have to source a manacle to fit a twelve year old.

Back home the coffee maker was on and my roll was already buttered for me to fill with corned beef. Quite delicious and washed down with a nice strong espresso. Scamp is so good to me. While I’d been out being Bob the Builder, she’d done some washing and had thrown out some stale bread for the birds. Instead of birds, there was a Peacock butterfly perched on the slice of what had been nice Italian bread. I can’t imagine that butterflies eat bread. I took a few pics with two cameras “belts and braces” style. One of them became PoD.

After lunch we walked down to the shops, because Scamp wanted a new stiff broom to sweep the paving stones, because as we all know: A New Broom Sweeps Clean. She seemed happy with the brush and because I was in the mood for drilling holes and driving screws into things, I fixed up a hook on the fence to hold it.

No slide show tonight. This will be a long one, it’s Venice. The main reason we had a balcony cabin last year if the truth be told, and the reason we’d have had one this year if Covid-19 hadn’t reared its ugly head.

Tomorrow we may be going for lunch – to a restaurant!