Imperial measures

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When I was in primary school (age 5 to 11 years old) every exercise book we used had useful information on the back. This included a list of most of the common Imperial units of measurement. Talking to people I've discovered that this was common to most areas of the country and accounts for the fact that 1,760 and 5,280 are significant numbers for people "of a certain age" (they are the number of yards and feet in a mile). Ask anyone of this era the name for a distance of 22 yards (the length of a cricket pitch) and they will immediately rattle back, "a chain". If you are fortunate they will go on to bore you with the fact that a chain is one tenth of a furlong (itself 220 yards), the latter is one eighth of a mile, and furthermore its name derives from the distance a team of oxen would plough (a furrow long) before resting, then turning and ploughing back again. However, if you press them, most will confess scant knowledge of the rod, pole and perch, measures that were archaic or specialised by the time of the mid-twentieth century but, nonetheless appeared on the backs of those exercise books.

A unit that will most definitely be recalled is the hundredweight (112 pounds, with 20 to the ton). It was an important measure at the time, continued after the metric system was introduced in the 1970s, and is still sometimes used today. The abbreviation is easy to decipher with the "c" standing for the Roman 100. What was never made clear to me is why the extra 12 pounds is involved. In fact, it's only in recent years that I realised it is 8 stones (a stone being 14 pounds). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that over the years the hundredweight has varied between 100 and 112 pounds. The former is sometimes called the "short hundredweight" and is favoured in the United States whilst the higher figure reflects British Imperial measure and has been called the "long hundredweight".

I came across the hundredweight (cwt) when I photographed an old brass warning sign (above) that was for sale on a stall selling railway memorabilia. Fifty cwt is two and a half tons so perhaps the electric safety lift in question was designed to carry more than people - or maybe a lot of very big people! Old signs are full of character, often much less clear than modern signs, but so much more durable.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 23mm (62mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f3.5
Shutter Speed: 1/80 sec
ISO:1600
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

A conversation with myself

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How much should a blogger reveal about themselves? The answer to that question will vary from person to person: some will be happy to be more expansive than others. I always think of myself as a private person, and though I'm fairly free with my opinions in this blog (which blogger isn't!), any details that I include about my personal life tend to be brief and fairly innocuous or non-specific. I deliberately don't speak in any depth about my immediate or extended family. Nor do I write too much about the village community of which I'm a part.

With an outlook like that I do, of course, eschew the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and all of the other social media sites that are so popular today. The idea of documenting the details of my life, important or inconsequential, minute-by-minute and day-by-day is quite alien to me for reasons of time and inclination. The plain truth is I find it difficult enough to respond to comments on this blog, so I really don't know how I'd manage communicating with pseudo-friends through Twitter!

People sometimes ask me why I blog. There are a few reasons that I've mentioned before, largely centred around the idea of a window for my photography and a means of improving it. That usually leads to the next question: "Why do you accompany your photographs with a 'reflection'"? The original thinking was to differentiate my efforts from those of others and to give me a regular intellectual challenge quite different from those I faced in my day job then (and face now in retirement). But as the years have passed I've sometimes come to think of this blog as a conversation with myself: the putting into print of the thoughts that buzz around my head, thoughts which, in the ordinary course of events, would go unheard unless I shared them with friends and family. The fact that quite a lot of people visit PhotoReflect on a daily basis to read them and look at my photographs still surprises me. The fact that relatively few comment doesn't! I appreciate that is down to me being a fairly ineffective blogger - for years I've taken none of the recommended steps to "build my readership". Moreover, I'm not the loquacious type, so the chatty conversations that some bloggers and readers value don't often occur here. But I'm O.K. with that because I'd find it hard to give the blog more attention than it currently gets.

Today's photograph is one of my rare, openly manipulated shots. I took a photograph of myself reflected in the mirror of a lift that opened alongside me when I was photographing the numbers I recently posted in the triptych. The resulting image was symmetrical with strong perspective and me just to the side of the vanishing point. I found myself wishing for a stronger convergence of lines in the photograph and so I added them in the form of "light rays".

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 7.9mm (37mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.4
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 250
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Snapshots

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snap-shot, n.
Also snap shot, snapshot
1.a. A quick or hurried shot taken without deliberate aim, esp.one at a rising bird or quickly moving animal.
2.a. An instantaneous photograph, esp. one taken with a hand camera. Also transf. and fig.
 from The Oxford English Dictionary

If I extracted the first part of definition 1.a. and added it to the second part of definition 2.a. I would have a description of the word "snapshot" that more accurately describes how I took today's photograph - "A quick or hurried shot taken without deliberate aim...with a hand camera."

We'd gone into an art gallery and museum as a respite from the weather and to see some paintings, and we were ascending the building in the lift (elevator). My mind was clearly elsewhere because I didn't notice the wonderful reflections that the mirror walls of the lift were producing until it stopped and my wife had started to move towards the door that was about to open. At that instant I raised the camera to my eye and took this "snapshot". Everything is wrong about it. The aperture is F8 (unnecessary), the speed 1second (not hand-holdable), the ISO 3200 (it needn't have been) and it is blurred. Moreover, I look like I've got an enormous stomach (it's bigger than it was but not THAT big) due to my bulky gloves in my fleece pockets. And my hat is rammed down over my head in its warm but silly "outdoor" position. My wife also looks heftier than her sylph-like dimensions warrant because of the position of her cold-weather, thick red coat. Incidentally, recent photographs might suggest that she possesses only a red coat. The fact is she has three different red coats (and a few of other hues), the red colour not being entirely unconnected with the fact that a splash of red can often be just what a photograph calls for!

Those criticisms notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the shot isn't sharp, I quite like it. So I've posted it as the latest in my intermittent series of self-portraits.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 17mm
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1.0
ISO: 3200
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On