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Kelpies!
Because we were weather-delayed flying to Shetland we had a couple of days to fill. Some of that time was spent with a trip to see “The Kelpies”. Kelpies are mythical shape-shifting water horses inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. These Kelpies are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads between the Scottish towns of Falkirk and Grangemouth. The sculptures were designed by sculptor Andy Scott and were completed in October 2013. They stand next to the M9 motorway and form the eastern gateway of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which meets the River Carron here. Each head is 30 metres high and weighs 300 tonnes. They are positioned either side of…
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The fires of Up Helly Aa
At the end of January we went to Lerwick in Shetland to see the famous Viking fire festival called “Up Helly Aa”. There are several Up Helly Aa festivals in Shetland, and the Lerwick one is the largest. The festival involves various groups of Shetlanders called squads, and the main squad, the “Jarl Squad”, are dressed as Vikings. Their costumes are all made by them on the island, and are different every year. The festival culminates in a huge torchlit procession and the ritual burning of a replica Viking longship. Everyone else in the procession is in fancy dress, ranging from the sublime to the very ridiculous. On the morning…
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Happy New Year!!
I hope all my readers had a great Christmas, and that you are all set for 2026. I’ve already done my first two club talks. I’m looking forward to the next one, which is next week. A few days ago we went to the Worcester Christmas Tree Festival in the cloisters at the Cathedral. It’s a fab display over over 100 trees that have different themes. Some are from schools, some from companies, and some from charities. I took my OM-1 and my 9-18mm lens. Here I’ve set the shutter speed to a few seconds and walked quickly down the cloister. I love the light streaks from the closest trees.…
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Christmas greetings
Hey, it’s that time of the year again. The time where we celebrate with friends and family and reflect on our photographic achievements over the last 12 months. Reflect is such a good word, as this image is of some Christmas lights reflected in a water feature in Bristol. I wandered round Millennium Square yesterday evening before going to a performance of Handel’s Messiah at St George’s Hall. I had my trusty Panasonic TZ-100 compact camera with me, and it was perfect for unobtrusively capturing the colours and falling water. A friend gave us us a home-made Christmas decoration. It was made from an old CD, and it had holographic…
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“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
OK, so it’s now winter rather than Keats’ autumn, but the mists thing is still true. Tied in with mists there are other sorts of wetness, such as rain and condensation, and even melted frost. Yes, I know this is a tenous link for some water droplet images, but bear with me! It rained a week or so ago, and one sunny morning some lingering rain droplets were sat on a twig of one of our Japanese maple trees. I liked the way they were in a fairly regular line, and there were some fab reflections/refractions in each drop, so I popped my 60mm macro lens on to my OM…
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Tripping the Light Fantastic in Worcester.
One of the things that’s great about living in Worcester is the active arts scene. It sometimes manifests itself as “Light Nights” events, where there are various art installations all to do with light. Recently there was one called “Bridges of Light”. Whilst not as extensive as other “Light Nights” it was still fun. One installation used three very bright single colour projectors; red, green and blue, to throw multi-coloured shadows of folks in front of them. Some times people danced, so here’s a multi-coloured twirl. One installation inside a church consisted of a large rotating drum with cut-outs of stars and cut-out wording. Using my phone camera on “Long…
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Just how much lens do you need?
At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging. One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images. The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines. My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape. Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source. I recalled that I had some loose…
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Parys in the the Autumn
The post title is riffing on the famous visual trick: “Paris in the the Spring”, where “the” appears twice on separate lines, and many folks just read out “Paris in the Spring”. Anyway, this Parys is Parys Mountain on the lovely island of Anglesey in North Wales, and I was there last week. It’s an abandoned copper mine that was, at one point, the largest copper mine in the world. It’s an almost Martian landscape of colours and textures. One standout feature is the huge opencast pit, “The Great Opencast”, with the remnants of a wind-powered pump at the top. It’s a barren landscape in ochres and browns. The pump…
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A midweek miscellany
Today’s post does not have a single theme. It’s a mixture of images, each of which has its own story to tell, each of which shows an area of my photographic interest. Here’s a shot from a town’s bonfire night celebrations last year. They had fire-eaters as a diversion before the main fireworks event. It was hard to get into a good place to have a clear view of the fire-eater, and also hard to choose the right moment to press the shutter. I was pleased with the flame on this one. A nice tight crop to the corner and editing out some background distractions made the composition work better.…
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Helios – and a sunflower
A few weeks ago we went to to Coventry to see the Helios art installation. To quote from the National Trust’s website, “Helios, a seven-metre sculpture of the Sun, has been created by artist, Luke Jerram. It’s been made from 400,000 photographs of the Sun’s surface and observations by NASA to replicate swirling solar winds and sunspots.” This installation was outside in the garden of Charterhouse, Coventry, and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with it. I used the wide-angle lens on my Pixel phone to get a good view of the differences between those who chose the sun and those who chose the shade. There’s a bit…