![Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...](http://publicenergy.co.uk/Projects/52-Weeks/20100306-1145-0017-Edit/803460292_nQg6M-Th.jpg "Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...")
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Dave
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Dave
Nottingham Flickr Group trip to Skegness
The Nottingham Flickr Group had a trip to Skegness on Saturday. The weather was fairly grim except for 30 minutes of sunshine in the late afternoon. Photos from everyone involved can be seen here. A few of them should raise a smile or an eyebrow! I had a day of seaside cuisine which luckily I can offset against my new healthy regime – it was one serious blip though! – chips and icecreams seem to be the only thing you can find easily – especially if you don’t look that hard! ;)
Speaking of food, there was this food related photo taken in the train station which I quite like out of my set for the day. I’m a sucker for things like this though. A reflection is a reflection, but when you can factor in some interesting mess, I like that!
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Dave
A cow too far?
Commenters to this photo on Flickr have expressed concern about the frequency and nature of cow photographs that I take. I think I have mathematics on my side to prove it’s not an unhealthy obsession, but I’d thought I’d throw the question open to let you have a say:
Update:
In answer to the question – “Are there too many cow photos?”:
Conclusive result: More cows!
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brenda
That one is really creepy though. Did it dribble on you?
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greywulf
You can never have too many Cow pics, Dave!
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publicenergy
@Brenda – no, there was a safe distance and a bit of cropping involved. I have had my fisheye lens licked before now though (and pecked!)
@greywulf – I suspect as much really :)
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brenda
How safe is a safe distance in Public Energy land? I like cows but they are a bit much very close up.
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Stephen Wright
More cowbell !!
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donna di mondo
I love your cow photos….I can’t help it. I don’t think I ever thought much about cows before…maybe it was the fisheye thing?
I’m addicted now.
Cow is my crack.
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Daz
Definitely not enough cow pics. Keep them coming – they’re ace! :)
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Diana L-S
Yup, can never have too many cow pics! I love looking at all of them.
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Dave
There’s always something new to see in things you see all the time
Going to the same places frequently with a camera, it’s easy to fall in to the trap of thinking that you’ve photographed the things you wanted to photograph before and that there isn’t much left. I’ve sometimes felt like that, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s complete and utter cobblers.
The biggest restrictive factor in me getting photos I enjoy is my own brain telling me not to bother before I’ve even considered taking a photo. I’ve written about this once before. Whenever I have realised I’m self-censoring in this manner, I have to make a decision to break out of it. This sounds weird I know, but if I just go out somewhere with my camera and try and turn my brain off and just go with the flow, I enjoy myself more and I think I get photos that I enjoy more.
All of the way through school and afterwards, I’ve considered myself a logical, scientific thinking person – my favourite subjects at school were Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Although there is a science and logic to photography, and I can appreciate the time somebody has taken to prefect a scene and light it nicely and have things in just the right positions to be visually pleasing, I can also appreciate photos that are just point and click with no thought whatsoever – or at least an amount of spontaneity.
I feel like I’m overdue for a day out in a city where I just go nuts with a camera and see what happens. The photos from last time are still amongst my favourites – maybe part of that is the memory of how fun the day was as well as the end result.
So, considering my logical and scientific background, I find it amusing that years later I seem to be saying that it’s all about how it feels and don’t get hung up on the logical, mechanical and scientific elements of it.
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Bruce
That top image is very effective Dave; at first I thought it was a person the other side of a window in rain, taken on a slow shutter to produce streaking. Then I thought maybe it’s a reflection captured off a highly-scratched steel surface. And finally (I think the correct interpretation), weed in a stream taken from the bank. At full size there’s a ripple over the (presumably photographer’s) face, which is a great obscurification detail (coincidental?). It also looks like a filtered image of a landscape, with the kind of motion in the sky van Gough is famous for. Good work.
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Primed Minister
Yeah, the top image is great. What I like about these kinds of images (especially the more obscure ones) is that it gets you to think a bit more. I really like this no rules approach.
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Dave
ME X 24
I am currently at the start of a campaign to get fit again. Part of that is to lose weight through changing back to the lifestyle I lead a few years ago but drifted out of. I have already lost 4 lbs or so since starting, but have another 4 stone and 3 pounds to go before my target deadline of Dec 31 2009.
I’m using a website called Traineo and have already enlisted some of my more zealous friends as motivators. They will receive weekly reports from the service and be able to leave words of encouragement and generally check up on me and nag if necessary. At the same time as this, I thought it’d be fun if I took a photo of myself once a month to try and see visually if it’s making any difference.
I had originally intended to try and take a very sensible full length mirror shot, but decided that would be boring and instead used a wide angle lens to make the photo above. I am now intending to replicate the photo above each month and put them in a set.
You can check up on my by using either of the two obvious looking buttons on the side bar on the home page!
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Dave
Returning to the safety of a nicely written theme
Well, it was only in the last couple of days that I changed the theme here for something that would allow me to post pictures much larger than before. That turned in to a right royal mess! There were a number of problems with it.
- Having a really wide content column makes the text harder to read
- The theme I chose was doing all sorts of weird things to components that use to work that needed their own CSS – like the map, but all sorts really.
- The theme I chose was a bit of a nightmare to edit compared to what I had used before and it was taking such a lot of time for me to bully it in to submission to get it to do what I wanted it to do.
- The theme has functions missing from the resulting pages.
So, it went in the bin. I then went back to my last theme and remembered just how lovely it was to edit. The author obviously cared about it and had provided very helpful documentation, so what I didn’t manage to achieve in several hours with the theme that was here for the last few days, I managed to sort out in 5 or 10 minutes once I’d swapped to the current one.
The themes I’m talking about are from plaintxt.org. I don’t know much about coding and design of web stuff, but whenever I’ve been hacking away at a WordPress template, none of them have looked as good inside as these and none of them have been so self-explanatory as them either. I think they’re just lovely really!
As for having a really wide column to show large images, that just didn’t work, so I’ve set the main content column at a sensible width for reading, but I intend to use a lightbox to allow images to be shown at a larger size if they’re clicked.
I just need to go and take some nice photos now to use with it!
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brenda
Yeah, this is better.
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greywulf
Nice. Clean. Much better :)
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publicenergy
Yeah, I like simple really :)
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Scott
Thanks for the kind words. It’s always very nice to know what I put in to my themes is appreciated. :)
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brenda
Just a very minor afterthought. Did you try the title with the usual gap? The run-on is mildly making me think of either itchyness or something possibly greco-roman.
And on a completely different matter, could you try Jim Johnson’s “Notes On Politics, Theory and Photography”, please? I can’t see what’s wrong, but it is locking up my browser. I can’t even get in to find his email address to tell him. It’s his tracker, I think, not sure though.
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publicenergy
I tried Notes On Politics, Theory and Photography and it looks fine (I’m using FF3, but I also use the http://noscript.net/“ rel=”nofollow”>NoScript add-on which blocks a ton of javascript by default until you approve it – and there seems to be a lot on that site).
As for the title, I’ve not changed a thing about it, but I think I quite like it!
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brenda
I thank you for that!
(Must dl FF3)
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Diana
I like the theme your using now, I’ve been using Simpla which I found along with the Plaintxt.org themes, in a SmashingMagazine write up.
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Dave
Utrecht Central Railway Station & A drunken photo of a cow sign in a Dutch pub
I spent several days in The Netherlands last week. Mainly in a place called Veenendaal. This was work though so I had relatively little time to get out and about taking photos. The photo above was taken on the train journey back to Schiphol Airport when we changed at Utrecht. There are a few more from the trip here.
I’m changing the web site at the moment and I think photos will be posted at this new larger size from now on. I need to do some work to tidy up the design and kind of move in and make it mine, but I really wanted to post larger images. I don’t have any concerns about my images being taken and used without my permission, they’re all published under a CC licence which allows anything other than commercial use without permission. If somebody really wants to steal a photos and use it for some reason, they’ll do it anyway, so I’d rather just post the photos and be done with it. Who in their right mind is going to steal a blurry photo of a cow sign in a Dutch pub anyway! ;)
Hopefully things will be tidied up over the next week or so and this place will be nicer. Incidentally, the width of the photos and the container for them was picked based on it being about the same as the BBC web site. If it’s good enough for them, it’ll do for me!-
brenda
Wow: the blue! Such a big change for you. I really like it. :)
Can you point me to the link to your Blurb bookshelf? I’m having trouble establishing a permalink to my own, and thought it would be better/more interesting to link to yours. Tia.
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publicenergy
<p>Here you go: Blurb book link.</p><p>If I remember correctly, there was a link to view the book "as others would see it", and that page was the link I copied.</p><p>Yeah, the blue – originally this theme was a starting point and I wasn’t sure about it, but it’s grown on me! I still think there are lots of little things that need fixing, but I’ll get there – probably not quickly though! :)</p>
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Nils Geylen
I really love that blurry Osborne one. It has a real raw photojournalistic touch to it, like some quick insert you’d see in a nouvelle vague movie by Godard. Personally, I think it’s timeless and universal and therefore stunning. And no, I’m not drunk as I’m typing this.
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brenda
Yeah. I’m not drunk either.
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Dave
Langsett War & Peace Walk
I went for a walk at Langsett in the Peak District yesterday. The walk was organised by the local rangers and was called ‘War and Peace’. We walked around the reservoir and up in to the hills visiting sites that held some significance in wartime. The rangers were great – very helpful and knowledgeable. I wasn’t sure if this kind of thing would suit me, but it was really good fun.
We had a look at the site of a shooting range where targets moved long tracks to be used for target practice, shells on the ground left over from this, the site of the foundations for the towers that held up the chain curtain that protected the dam from any possible Dambuster style attack. We also heard stories about what happened in Langsett in wartime. All in all, a great day out – especially when it’s all wrapped up in a 7 mile walk with lovely weather.Some members of the group did find some new shells on the hillside and after some discussion with the rangers, some of these were safe to look at, others were deemed to be possibly dangerous and were noted so that they could be dealt with safely later.
You can find a few more of my photos here and photos from my fellow walkers here, here and possibly at some point here and here (these two aren’t noted for posting their photos quickly though!)
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Primed Minister
Glad you enjoyed it Dave and found it interesting. Great series of photos there.
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donna di mondo and 4 others are discussing. 
Roger B. 7:06 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink |
I haven’t been to Skeggy for yonks!