Breakfast for one

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Some weeks ago, when my wife was away for a few days on family business, I catered for myself (with the aid of kind invitations from friends to eat with them). One consequence of this was that I breakfasted alone, something that hasn't often happened during my married life. One morning, after I'd started to prepare my bowl of porridge and cup of tea, I went across to the kitchen window to subdue the glare of the low morning sun by angling down the Venetian blinds. In so doing I created the scene featuring the kitchen table seen in today's photograph. On subsequent days I tried to improve on the effect, but to no avail, thus proving something I've discovered with my photography over the years. Namely, the first shot I take of a scene is almost always the best, perhaps because it is seen intuitively, and "overthinking" in trying to improve the composition rarely produces anything better.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Breakfast for One
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/60 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Allotment poppies (correction - Ranunculus)

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The allotment is slowly disappearing from England's cities, towns and villages. These community gardens were originally conceived as pieces of land that could be rented from the local authority, for a nominal fee, on which people could grow food to supplement their income. Over the years, as incomes rose they became places where people grew food crops, flowers, sometimes crops for sale, more by way of a hobby than out of any kind of deep necessity.

With that change came the realisation that the standard sized allotment (c. 250 square metres) was too large for modern needs and so many were reduced in size. A decline in interest in renting an allotment some areas, coupled with a shortage of land for housing and other uses resulted in many allotments being sold off. Today the take-up of allotments varies considerably from place to place with some thriving and others moribund.

The village where I live has allotments and the other evening, as the sun was getting low in the sky, we walked through them. A group of ornamental poppies ranunculus sown by one allotment holder were in full flower and caught our eye illuminated as they were by the strong light. They looked a fine sight among the rows of beans, potatoes and brassicas, a splash of vivid colour among the greenery.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Allotment Poppies (correction, Ranunculus)
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/400 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Shallow focus flowers

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I can remember the first photograph that I took where I deliberately sought an out of focus background.  It was of the engraved metal head a processional cross in a church. The camera I was using was the Russian-made Zenit E with its "kit lens" of the day (though that phrase hadn't been invented then), a Helios 58mm f2. Needless to say I took the shot with the lens wide open at maximum aperture from a fairly close distance. I've been reading about the methods that cameras use to overcome shallow depth of field when close to the subject (as in macro photography). Most involve the merging of multiple shots each taken in a different plane of focus. Very clever and very useful if you want everything in focus as some kinds of photography do.

My photography, by and large, involves taking shots where I want a large depth of field but in situations where it isn't difficult to achieve by stopping down; for example when shooting architecture. When it comes to macro photography I rarely want everything to be in focus because this is a discipline in which I like to produce soft, out of focus effects.

Today's photographs are details from a bunch of flowers in a vase in our living room. I could have taken both shots with much greater depth of field, but the dreamy effect of the out of focus areas appealed to me more. The depth of field of the chrysanthemum shot is minimal, with the sharp edges of a couple of petals betraying where the point of focus rested.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1 Title: Lily Stigma and Anthers
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Manual
Focal Length: 35mm Macro (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: Off

Raindrops in sunlight

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Recently overnight rain was followed by a sunny morning and the glistening foliage of the garden encouraged me to put my old 35mm 3.5 Four Thirds macro lens on its adapter and mount it on the camera. However, even as I walked around searching for a subject the warmth of the sun was visibly drying out the leaves. Consequently I headed for one of our our patches of Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla mollis), a plant that I had been meaning to avoid.

Alchemilla is the obvious choice for any photographer wanting to capture raindrops on foliage. The minute hairs of the leaves cause rain to form into myriad drops of varying sizes. However, I'd taken photographs of the attractively shaped leaves on a number of occasions and I wanted to try a different plant. But the sun's effects elsewhere forced me back to the Alchemilla. So, rather than concentrating on the leaves I searched out the drops themselves. This photograph shows them clustered on the ends of a group of leaves that had yet to fully open. I liked it for the contrast of the dark, shady background against which I could place some drops. The only thing I don't like about the shot is that it has something of the look of a studio photograph taken with flash. I recognise that not everyone shares my antipathy to such things, but for those who do I can assure you that this was taken in natural light, in the garden solely with the aid of a tripod.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Raindrops on Lady's Mantle Leaves
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Manual
Focal Length: 35mm Macro (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f11
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:250
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Judas Tree, Thoresby College, King's Lynn

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Thoresby College in King's Lynn, Norfolk, was built in the early 1500s as the accommodation for thirteen chantry priest of the Trinity Guild of King's Lynn. The job of the priests was to pray in St Margaret's, St Nicholas' and St James for the King, the kingdom, the Aldermen, brethren and benefactors of the Guild. After the Reformation the the College lost its religious purpose and became a secular building serving as a house, a warehouse and a school among other things. In 1963 it underwent extensive work to preserve the building in very much the form that had developed down the centuries. Part of it became a Youth Hostel and other parts were used for offices and housing.

The photograph shows the lawned courtyard at the centre of the quadrangle of buildings. In particular it displays the Judas Tree in full flower. This species (Cersis siliquastrum) is so named because it is reputed to be the tree from which Judas Iscariot hanged himself. This example must be quite old and well-liked because its branches are being supported by steel posts to prevent them breaking off.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Judas Tree, Thoresby College, King's Lynn, Norfolk
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 9mm (18mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/1000 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Forget-me-not

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I remember being told a story in primary school about how the forget-me-not (Myosotis) got its name. God - or a god, perhaps classical, I don't recall - was naming all the plants when a small one that he had overlooked called out to him, "forget me not", with which that became the name that he bestowed on it. I've also read that in the middle ages women wore the flower as a mark of steadfast love. However, I often think the flower should be called "cannot-forget-me" because the fact is, once you have this flower in your garden, unless you are obsessively tidy, you have the plant for ever after.

The forget-me-not spreads its thousands of tiny seeds by dropping them, and by its pods attaching to clothing, cats, birds, in fact anything that brushes it when passing by. In our garden it is in full bloom in a number of locations, its blueness vying with the bluebells, another flower that spreads easily and quickly. My photograph shows one of the tiny groups of flowers on its stem, the yellow centre contrasting nicely with the blue petals. For all that it is invasive it is reasonably easy to control, and I have yet to find a person who doesn't have a soft spot for this diminutive flower.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Forget-Me-Not Flowers
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Manual
Focal Length: 35mm Macro (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Reproducing heucheras

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The first garden plant that I ever saw with a label saying that it must not be reproduced by the gardener because the variety was patented was a heuchera. It was probably a cultivar from the United States, a country where patent law frequently seems to be seen as an opportunity for lawyers and others to make money without doing anything useful. If you want to know more about that search for "patent troll" to find a definition of that term and numerous articles about the subject.

We like heucheras, their leaves are extremely attractive. They thrive in shade and semi-shade, and with quite a few trees in our garden planting sites favouring this plant are not difficult to find. What I find interesting about the patenting of heucheras is they reproduce themselves abundantly without the gardener having to do anything, so I do wonder how (and why) patents on cultivars are registered and enforced. We don't have any patented heucheras - the prices are too high and our interest in the plant is quite casual, not obsessive. But we do have varieties with leaves that are red, orange, brown, purple, green, glossy and striped. They are looking good at the moment and sending up spikes covered in very small flowers. On a trawl round the garden for a photograph or two I took this shot of one of the flower spikes with the macro lens and a shallow depth of field. I liked the dreamy effect and the soft colours merging into one another.

Looking at these flowers I am reminded that they will produce thousands of tiny seeds that will fall around the parent plant and blow onto our gravel, quite a few of which will turn into miniature heucheras that are completely ignorant of patents.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Heuchera Flower Spike
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Manual
Focal Length: 35mm (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/640 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Weathering steel, Cor-Ten and the IBCC

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It's interesting how company trade marks can come to be generic descriptions, for example, Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Tannoy for loud speaker and Biro for ball-point pen. A current example in the making of this phenomenon is Cor-Ten to describe weathering steel. For quite a while now sculptures and other exterior structures have been made of this kind of steel that weathers to produce a rusted and rustic looking exterior that then serves as a protection. In the UK the sculpture called "Angel of the North" was one of the first widely-known examples making use of weathering steel.

On our recent visit to the International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) in Lincoln we admired not only the commemorative walls erected in this material, but also the "spire" that identifies the location from afar. The height of this hollow, spike-like structure is 31.09 metres (102 feet), the length of the wingspan of the Avro Lancaster bomber that was the mainstay of Bomber Command during WW2. Its width at the base is 16 feet, the width of the Lancaster's wing. This too is made of weathering steel and will be the focal point of the Centre for decades to come.

The whole site is currently under construction. During our guided tour I took today's photograph from inside the spire looking upwards.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Memorial Spire, International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:1000
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Purple-edged white carnation

click photo to enlarge
My current macro lens is a Four Thirds (not Micro Four Thirds) 35mm 3.5 model that I used when I shot with Four Thirds cameras. I hung on to it because I thought it would transfer reasonably well to the new bodies with an adapter. And it does. It's a simple lens, like most macro lenses, and its very sharp, again, like most macro lenses! The adapter I have is an inexpensive, but not cheap, Chinese model and it works very well.

When I was taking a few photographs in the garden recently I spotted it in the lens drawer and thought it was time I used it again. However, the flower that turned out best was in a vase in the house - a purple-edged white (or light pink) carnation. I've said elsewhere that the tulip is one of the flowers I've photographed most, but the carnation must be in second (or maybe third - those poppies!) place. This one appealed to me as much for the soft daylight and reflected light in which it was bathed. It was penetrating the inner recesses of the bloom and gave a nicely semi-abstract, drawn look to the two dimensional image.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Purple-Edged White Carnation
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm (70mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Wayward flowers

click photo to enlarge
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley"
Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scottish poet and lyricist

Many people will recognise the lines of Rabbie Burns quoted above. They come from his poem, "To a mouse, on turning her up in her nest with the plough", though it is common today for the second line to be replaced with the more modern, "Go often askew". But how many, I wonder, recall what follows these words? The lines continue thus: "An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy!" Read in its fullness Burns' words will strike a chord with many - we have all planned something with great care and the expectation of a favourable outcome, only to be thwarted and disappointed when it all goes wrong.

I thought of these words the other day when I was casting round the garden for a few photographs of our flowering bulbs. In the main we prefer to group like with like so that each variety of flower shows itself off to full effect. However, as I moved from flower bed to flower bed a noticed a couple of bulbs that had, as they say "made their own arrangements". Or perhaps a bird, mole or squirrel had helped them out and moved a bulb to a different location. The first was a couple of tulips among the bluebells a real contrast of deep red against the softer blue of the smaller flowers. The second was a narcissus among the tulips. I recall these being planted in groups alongside each other, but now they seem to be starting to intermingle.

I'm not, despite Burns' words, disappointed by this disruption of our "best laid scheme". It seems to me that sometimes our plans go wrong with positive consequences, and something that has "gang...agley" can offer, unexpectedly, a "promis'd joy" that was unforeseen.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Photo Title: Tulips Among The Bluebells
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln

click photo to enlarge
We recently accompanied a couple of friends to the International Bomber Command Centre (IBCC) in Lincoln. This is a memorial to the men and women of Bomber Command who, during WW2, served in the RAF, often flying from airfields in Lincolnshire. The IBCC is currently under construction so we had to wear high-visibility vests and undertake a guided tour of the site and the completed sections of the memorial.

To date that includes a tall "spire" made of Cor-Ten steel and a series of commemorative walls surrounding the spire and made of the same material, These list the names of the 26,296 men of sixty nations who lost their lives serving in Bomber Command. It also includes a Lincolnshire Garden that has trees arranged to represent the relative location of the Bomber Command airfields of the county. The whole site is at the top of a hill that overlooks the city of Lincoln and which has a fine view of the medieval cathedral.

My photograph shows part of one of the steel memorial walls. People - perhaps relatives of those commemorated - had pushed British Legion poppies into some of the names. Over the next few years the project will be completed, but at present active fund raising is taking place. This includes a minimum of four guided tours of the site each month. We were pleased to experience one of these and to be able to make a donation.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Memorial Wall, International Bomber Command Centre, Lincoln
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm (34mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.5
Shutter Speed: 1/500 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Painted building facade, King's Cross

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The UK is pretty reticent when it comes to painting the outside of buildings. Traditionally render has been painted, usually white or cream though sometimes branching out into drab pink, blood red, a shade or two of green, and sometimes blue or yellow. In recent years quite a few new housing developments have been built that make use of colour. There are regions, often highland areas, where farms and isolated houses in the countryside are sometimes painted white to make them more visible. However, the place where colour is most readily accepted on the exterior of a building is the seaside town. Here terraces are frequently colour-washed one or many colours. Blue and white - nautical colours - are favoured, but others can be seen too.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century painted facades with a humorous or artistic intention, sometimes like graffiti writ large, began to proliferate. I have mixed feelings about such buildings. Sometimes they are fun, but too often they are eyesores, a garish flash of colour that detracts from the locality rather than adding to it. Frequently the intention is to prolong the life of a run-down structure, though the fading paint soon contributes to the air of dereliction. The example in today's photograph is near King's Cross railway station in London. The paintwork doesn't acknowledge the building at all, but treats it as a flat canvas with shapes and lines continuing across windows and pilasters as though they didn't exist. This distinguishes it from most such work. It's the sort of treatment that I feel I should dislike but I don't, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is that appeals to me. Perhaps it's because, in its location, it isn't so garish that it demands to be looked at. But more than that, the combination of colours and the strong diagonals are very much to my taste.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Painted Building, King's Cross, London
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 90mm (180mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f5.5
Shutter Speed: 1/200 sec
ISO:320
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Ropsley's slate gravestones

click photo to enlarge
Quite a few types of stone are used in the gravestones of Lincolnshire churchyards. The twentieth century shows the greatest variety. From that period I regularly see limestones, sandstone, granite and other common stones. There is also a myriad of coloured, imported (and native) marble. The nineteenth century has most of these stones too, but in the early years, roughly equating to the late Georgian/Regency period, oolitic limestone is very common. This local stone is also widely found in gravestones of the eighteenth century. However, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century, slate became very popular.

This slate that is dark grey, or with a purple tinge, or (most attractively in my view) a greenish hue, was often sourced from quarries in nearby Leicestershire, particularly in the vicinity of Swithland. It is a material that takes detailed, engraved carving very well, and monumental masons and sculptors delighted in embellishing the stone with putti, swags, swirls, cartouches and florid script. It is also a material that is strong in thinner slabs, and consequently was cheaper to transport. As I've observed elsewhere in the blog, the carving on many slate gravestones is as sharp today as it was when it was cut over two hundred years ago.

The other day I was photographing Ropsley church. This building, of Romanesque and medieval date, stands on a rise among a small forest of slate gravestones. As I took my images I reflected on the tidiness of the churchyard; the neatly mown grass, the absence of weeds, the fact that unlike many churchyards the grass was cut up to the base of each grave and weedkiller was nowhere in evidence. Was it the case, I wondered, that the precision and neatness of the slate gravestones encouraged the overall neatness of the graveyard itself?

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Ropsley Church, Lincolnshire
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12mm (24mm - 35mm equiv.) crop
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On