click photo to enlargeIt takes a certain skill to speak in a foreign accent. I am not the person to say which English actors can master a US accent. However, I do know that, for example, Gwyneth Paltrow can produce an excellent English accent, and that Anthony LaPaglia (an Australian) makes (to my ears) , a very convincing US FBI agent (in "Without a Trace"). However, his appalling English accent in the role of Daphne's brother in the TV series "Frasier", was almost up there with Dick Van Dyke in terms of its clunking awfulness. Perhaps directors who want their chosen actors to perform outside their own accent should first test it on some native speakers, and then decide whether to unleash it on the unsuspecting public. That way the audience might concentrate on the film rather than the rate at which the linguistic howlers appear!
Back to this blooming cactus of mine! It's a Christmas Cactus, and dutifully produces its blooms during the festive holiday and on into the new year. Unlike its offspring. This plant, another "Christmas" Cactus, of course, blooms at Easter! Quite why this is, I don't know, but it does spread the beauty of these flowers through the year. When I came to photograph the flowers I decided to try and get away from my usual macro approach. So, I selected a couple of the arching stems, and composed a shot with the blooms at the bottom. I used a white background, a white reflector, and put a further white reflector below the blooms. A single flash provided the illumination. The shot was taken with a medium zoom lens at 38mm (35mm equivalent), with the camera set to Aperture Priority (f11 at 1.3 sec), the ISO at 200, and 0EV.
photograph & text (c) T. Boughen
2 comments:
Accents are fun. Even when butchered somewhat, they can be fun. Dick van Dyke is fun. Together the result is ... well ... fun. That, coupled with the fact that most Americans, while they recognize different intra-US and Canada accents fairly well, and the difference between accents of American speakers of English vs. those of foreign speakers of English, many (most?) can't differentiate between an Australian accent and one from South Africa. Many can't even separate these from the various UK dialects.
I am somewhat more tuned in to accents but hardly consider myself an expert, certainly not at the level of being able to nail down accents by block or at least neighborhood in parts of greater London, as I've heard some can. I can usually render a fairly good accent if I've heard it very recently but my ability to do so fades, and sometimes in the middle of a sentence, I forget what I was doing and drift into something else.
All that said, I didn't know Anthony LaPaglia was Australian. His accent is entirely plausible. Mel Gibson does a convincing American accent. Bob Hoskins can do that well. Hugh Laurie sounds a bit strained but unless you know otherwise, you'd probably not guess that it has anything to do with his not being a native speaker of US English.
Your Cactus photo is very interesting. The white background is vaguely suggestive of snow. There is something very festive about the color mix and contrasts.
Cactus in the UK. For some reason, the whole concept feels very strange to me; rather like the small stand of palms I recently noticed growing in front of an apartment block on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle. It just seems very out of place, rather like hearing on a talk show speaking in their native accent, any of the increasing number of foreign-born actors finding their way of late into the American media, in roles that require that they emulate US-English accents.
I like accents too. It's a sadness, but also an inevitability, that TV and radio are diluting the distinctive accents of relatively small geographical areas. I'd agree with you about Mel Gibson's US accent being good. I'm interested to hear that Bob Hoskins' is good too - he has a fine range of regional British accents as well. Something I find interesting is how some people who go to live in another (English-speaking) country keep their own accent, whilst others slip into the host country's way of speaking very quickly. I've often wondered what it is in the make-up of those two types that causes this to happen.
As for the cactus - I seem to recall reading somewhere that this type of plant isn't a proper cactus. I must check that. You may be surprised to hear that where I live on England's relatively mild west coast there is a type of palm that is commonly planted that thrives! I can see one in a garden near my house (it had Christmas lights on it!), and the graveyard of the medieval church nearby has a row of them. I have a photograph of them looking rather incongruous - in fact very tropical!
Thanks for your comments Eye.
Tony
Post a Comment