Motoring Through the Ages!

Sunday turned out to be rather a surreal day! We started off heading to Tatton Park to meet up with a friend who was at the BMW show. Sounded like a good excuse to get pictures of cars and of the fabulous park itself. We spent several photography-packed hours there, taking pictures of cars, army Jeep, and finally Deer. The picture above is obviously from the BMW show.

I should point out at this point that I've got nearly 1000 images to process and sort out from the weekend so it'll take me a while to get them all on the website and DeviantART, will post another blog entry when I finally manage to do that.

After Tatton Park it was back to York to quickly dump our things and then rush off to do a photoshoot that Rachel had organised with Maddy. The shoot was at Maddy's house and quickly evolved to include a harp, a cat, Maddy's Mum and then a rather amazing vintage car that her parents own!

I should explain that both Maddy and her parents are pretty cool (for want of a better expression). This shoot came about simply because Rachel was doing her usual thing of constantly keeping her eyes open for people who are particularly photogenic and who could fill a role in some creative idea that happens to be bouncing around in her head at the time.

Since Maddy is sixteen Rachel, of course, made sure that her parents were fine with doing the shoot and it was her Mum who arranged everything in the end and was so welcoming and enthusiastic about the whole thing. In fact, so much so, that she ended up participating in the shoot as you can see from the picture on the left (I've deliberately de-saturated the colours to try and make it look like an 'older' picture). For anyone that is interested, the location is the York Racecourse car park.

In itself this made for a perfect and rather amazing shoot ... and then it got even better, some friends of Maddy's parent's turned up in a, erm, new purchase.

I really didn't think the day was going to turn out so amazing and fantastical when I got up in the morning! It really was such an enjoyable day and certainly one to remember! Also further proof, not that it's really needed, that York has some amazing, hidden gems in and around the city; and not just the cars, the people too.

I Think the Lens Works

I spent a fantastic afternoon in Delamere Forest with a friend of mine, walking, chatting, and taking pictures. I'll eleborate more on that and the rest of the weekends activities later as it's rather late now. But I just wanted to share this one photo (I've got quite a few to process later in the week):

I tried LOTS of shots to try and capture a dragonfly and in the end I got this - it's a crop of the full size picture but even at 100% (click on the picture and it will show that) the image is pin-sharp. For the photo geeks, this picture was captured on a Canon 5D with an old 80-200mm lens that came from a Canon 35mm film camera. No image stabilisation, no L-series glass, nothing apart from an awful lot of luck!

Update: Another picture that came out well!

Through The Lens

This was a little bit of an experiment to see if I could get a nicer shot over the back of York University without the glare from the sun that had just decided to come out from behind the clouds that had been giving a nice pattern to the sky as well as doing a good job of blocking out the glare from the morning sunrise.

Not sure whether this really works too well but I think it looks quite colourful and would certainly qualify as "different" photography. Well I thought that until I was told by B that the idea of taking pictures through sunglasses has been shown on the kids art programme, SMART, a week or so ago! I wonder if my son is going to want to try this out at some point.

Anyway, the set of images have been uploaded to my deviantART page where you can download the full size photo or leave critique (if you have a deviantART premium account).

Deviant

Thankfully this is Deviant as in the site DeviantART which I've wandered across before but really got to use a bit more since going out with Rachel as it's where a vast number of the photographs by and of her are.

For those that don't know, the site is for sharing art works and is, for basic service, entirely free and you can upload an unlimited number of items at the present time though of course it's only one at a time and no bulk submit unless you pay which seems fair enough. However, even the basic service seems much better than that provided by Flickr or Picassa.

So far I've only got a few of the shots from London, and these are available at: http://fionasboots.deviantart.com/

It has occurred to me that I have a rather public online presence, what with this blog, pictures on sites like DeviantART, LinkedIN, FaceBook (though that is partially restrited in what can be seen/read). I'm not entirely sure whether this is good or bad or if it really matters much at all. I do feel that be being open and honest seems a better approach than trying to hide away or be secretive about my life. I think this is something to mention further with the recent spate of stories in the news about transsexualism and children, worth covering in a seperate post.

Blasphemy!

I heard this story on the radio while driving yesterday. I wasn't paying much attention to the the news, it was just background noise keeping me awake and mildly entertained. However, as soon as I heard a few bits about this I could feel my blood start to boil.

Essentially it seems that a photographer who liked, as he says, the "architecture" of this particular church took some "erotic" photos of women at the location and now there is some kind of moral outrage and calls of blasphemy which seem to have culminated in legal action.

First some technical points - I'm not sure what the rules are regarding pictures involving property, are the owners entitled to some royalty if the photographer profits as a direct result of the setting? Would this apply to church land? Does church land count as private property? I guess there could be some straight-forward business considerations here which is fine, if the church could legally make money by being used as a location in this way all well and good.

As for this being blasphemous or morally wrong I find that prudish at best and in actually fact quite offensive and repugnant! How dare they vilify erotic art by making a claim that it is in some way 'wrong' or should in any way disgrace those who were married in this church or have loved-ones buried there. Propagating such vile, repressive and, in my opinion, downright evil views is the cause of many problems in society today. What gives any organisation the right to sit in moral judgement over natural sexual acts? Yes, I know they seems a really silly question when clearly almost all of the repressive and puritanical legislation passed in the UK/US (and probably everywhere else in the world) is due to ridiculous religious interference in governments or pubic opinion!

These prudish views are insidious (and insipid in my opinion) and permeate through many aspects of culture and society and are hugely damaging. The news story got me thinking about myself and the fact that I'm not exactly the most worldly-wise person there is, and I don't recall a huge amount of positive influence when it came to erotica; it's still viewed by many as something that may cause offense at the very least or even worse something that should be hidden. And that is so wrong, such a message should be spread, quite the reverse should happen.

Religions should stop trying to dictate moral standards by persecuting people and condemning their actions. Instead they should try leading by example and being accepting, understanding and open. Clearly this is an impossibility however, certainly give the evidence of history so far.

An interesting night

It sounds quite a bland title but I mean it most sincerely and completely, I had a fantastic time last night at the launch event/party/celebration (not entirely sure what to call it) for the book Single Mother on the Verge written by Marie Roberts and based on her blog of the same name.

I should explain that I was there because my friend Kim invited me along since her and some other friends, also there that night, were friends with Marie; I did have all the history of where they'd all worked together and the whole history but it's way to complicated to go into here.

Anyway, back to last night. The event itself was fun, a few readings from the book, some extracts from other books by different authors, art, music and the inimitable compere for evening who introduced herself as Precious Cleaver, one half of the folk-singing duo The Cleaver Sisters (very entertaining she was too). I wish I could remember the names of the woman from LA who sang as well as the duo who did a few of their songs too, they were all very good.

The night was also made more enjoyable by just meeting fantastically fascinating people, like one of Kim's friends who works for the company that produced the Super Lamb Bananas that recently graced the city of Liverpool with their colourful presence. (I believe the company is called Wild in Art and they have lots of other similar art projects on the go).

The art on display last night was by Anne Earnshaw and both pieces were actually photographs though this was difficult to tell so I had to ask. One of them, not shown on her website unfortunately, was of oil on water and captured lots of different reflections, colours and shapes and was just so intriguing because at times I was convinced it was an abstract painting.

Another person I met and have a wonderful chat with was an author, Qaisra Shahraz, writing of several novels including The Holy Woman which I think I shall add to my must read list (after completing Single Mother on the Verge obviously).

Of course I did get to talk to Kim as well, who is interesting herself!

So, this is probably a bit of a name-dropping post but the aim is not to make me sound more interesting by association (it reads a bit like that, not intentional honest), but simply to promote people who I found so intriguing.

[ P.S. I desperately need a thesaurus! ]