Christmas Day at the Sidebothams

I can't believe that it's been almost a month since I last wrote anything on my blog, but monthly changes may be in the offing, so I'll keep the surprises until next month.  

Today I felt that I just had to share our Aussie Christmas with you, especially if you live in the cold, cold, North.  North of anywhere really.  North of Watford seems to be the usual boundary, but North of the Hawkesbury is another.  If you don't recognise that town near London or that river near Sydney, then congratulations, you don't live north of anywhere, but you are an Eastie or a Westie.  Sydney Westies have an undeserved reputation - for anything dodgy really and so we'll say that they come from the flatlands close to the Blue Mountains.  Easties, who come from the seaside suburbs of Sydney, mostly ARE dodgy, but as they only deal in large sums in their dodginess, they can afford the sea views and they can afford successful lawyers.

In fact, most of them are successful lawyers!

But to get back to the Sidebothams, who live north of Sydney and are thus jolly nice bucolic folk.

The run up to Christmas has been more of a stagger this year, with Mrs S spending the last three days before Christmas in hospital.  Thanks must go to so many people who helped me out during her absence, Reinhard and Sylvia taking me visiting and feeding me, and Jenny taking and bringing home the patient.  This involved 5 am starts.

So, mea culpa, or maybe I should say nostrae culpae, we FORGOT to get each other a gift or a card.  Oh well, the sales start tomorrow!

For the last two nights M and I have averaged four hours sleep, whereas last night, we both averaged three hours sleep, so to say we are tired is something of an understatement.  We are VERY tired.

This year I baked a cake and used my grandmother's wooden spoon dating back to her marriage in 1913, for the final stir and wish.  I wished the marzipan had not been dried out quite so much (it was flaking off) and I wish that I thought of icing it before yesterday.  I didn't realise it was so complicated.  I used Delia Smith's recipe.  Her recipes are very reliable.  It called for four egg whites.

Unfortunately, Australian eggs are slightly larger than English eggs, and so my four Australian egg whites had slightly more volume than four anglowhites.  I beat the aussiewhites to within a centimetre of their albumen before adding the icing sugar slowly.  It peaked  (we are the country of the pavlova, after all) just as it should, and the first coat went on beautifully.  It was then that I noticed I was supposed to allow three days for it to dry before putting on a second coat, and then three days later a third coat.

So this morning, I iced the cake for the second time with the hope that it will dry out sufficiently to have a slice tonight.  But before I did that I had to go into the kitchen.

My bare feet started paddling across the floor through icy water.  It took ten minutes to mop it up and dry the floor with towels.  Words were said.  Fortunately there was no water underneath any of the kitchen appliances.  The source of the icy torrent was a five kilo glacier that we had bought from the servo/gas station/service station/garage and which we had just enough room for in our esky/insulated ice box (keep up!) because there wash't room in the freezer.  The ice was for medicinal purposes.  To reduce the swelling on Marg's neck, and to provide a couple of coldies before Christmas Dinner.

Unfortunately, guess who forgot to close the drainage tap on the esky.  Clue: it wasn't Marg. and 5 kg of ice forms quite a lot of water when it's spread over the floor.  Fortunately none went under the furniture either.

We have a lovely couple next door with four well behaved and bright children.  I do wish Father Christmas hadn't woken them up quite so early.  Just as I was about to go into the shower at 9.30 am, there was a knock on the door and two of them stood there with a present for us.  We were in our night clothes.

We still have our Christmas dinner to cook.  Duck with Morello Cherry Sauce.  We shall toast each other and make our Christmas wishes, which are always the same.  To spend Christmas next year somewhere where someone else does the catering!

The Government are trying to stop me from publishing this . . .

It must be a couple of years ago now easily, and a condition I have called peripheral neuropathy, where the nerves in my legs are dying back partly because of the medication for a complaint that I have, and partly because I made the complaint. "Oy! I've got this complaint!" which gave me medication . . .  (already made that sick joke ANYWAY. . .)

The upshot is that over a period of time I have reached the sunlit uplands of the high Sixties (69 in March), but medically I am a mess.  I am independent but cannot drive as I am a reasonably stable epileptic.  I have chronically restless legs, but I can still get around very independently on public transport.  My hobby is photography, mainly around large cities on public transport with 2 or 3 km walking.  I recently gave my Doctor a suggestion that I was not yet ready for a walking stick, but I feel that perhaps I have not been looking at this problem in the proper way.

Who's a Chartered Engineer?  Who's always looking for room for a bottle of water/ some food/ a camera bag/ wet weather clothes/ a built in tripod/ a seat?!!! /Documents    ?

Could this be worked up into a bag with wheels which could be taken onto a plane?  Which brings us to the legals?

Who can advise on the legals?

Are there legal maxima which apply only to Seniors?

If I started off with an old zimmer frame or similar, what could I attach to it?  What minefield of regulations and inspectors would I attract to it?  What plans would I need?

If anyone can comment please feel free to contact me on sidebothamjohn@gmail.com 

This could be thrillingly interesting but there aren't any pictures unfortunately, but please read it because it really really is!!!!

It must be a couple of years ago now easily, and a condition I have called peripheral neuropathy, where the nerves in my legs are dying back partly because of the medication for a complaint that I have, and partly because I made the complaint. "Oy! I've got this complaint!" which gave me medication . . .  (already made that sick joke ANYWAY. . .)

The upshot is that over a period of time I have reached the sunlit uplands of the high Sixties (69 in March), but medically I am a mess.  I am independent but cannot drive as I am a reasonably stable epileptic.  I have chronically restless legs, but I can still get around very independently on public transport.  My hobby is photography, mainly around large cities on public transport with 2 or 3 km walking.  I recently gave my Doctor a suggestion that I was not yet ready for a walking stick, but I feel that perhaps I have not been looking at this problem in the proper way.

Who's a Chartered Engineer?  Who's always looking for room for a bottle of water/ some food/ a camera bag/ wet weather clothes/ a built in tripod/ a seat?!!! /Documents    ?

Could this be worked up into a bag with wheels which could be taken onto a plane?  Which brings us to the legals?

Who can advise on the legals?

Are there legal maxima which apply only to Seniors?

If I started off with an old zimmer frame or similar, what could I attach to it?  What minefield of regulations and inspectors would I attract to it?  What plans would I need?

If anyone can comment please feel free to contact me on sidebothamjohn@gmail.com 

Some thoughts on Perception and other stuff

Never go to Sculpture by the Sea because if you go very early in the morning no-one will have arrived but none of the residents will have left for work.  In the evening it's the opposite way round.  During the day, the school parties arrive, regardless of the weather.  You can tell if it's raining because the teachers are scowling and it's wet underfoot.

But . . .

At 3 pm on the first Tuesday of November, the Melbourne Cup is held, the race which stops Australia, and to our shame it does.  So if you are not a fanatic of matters equine or a betting person, get your fresh air on the cliffs above the Tasman Sea between Bondi and Tamarama with just the gulls and whales for company.  The photo is a general shot looking towards Tamarama at 3.02 last Tuesday.  A perfect time to visit.

But first my perception that our housing officers are not as caring as they might be.  As you may know, I took a pair of A4 photos down to Millers Point to where Ben and Bridget had been evicted.  The Housing Manager offered to take the photographs into the office.  I did not expect to see or hear of those photos again.  So I was very pleasantly surprised to find the very next day that Bridget and Ben and another neighbour had been housed adjacently in Newtown (and not way out in the outer Western suburbs) and had received my photos.  Thank you very much Sydney Housing for your prompt attention in getting these photos to them.  Bridget phoned me up to thank me.  She felt that my photo had made her look old (she is over eighty)

And then it was time for Sculpture by the Sea.

I was lucky this year, in the 18th season.  I had a long chat with the Founder of SxS, and I had lunch on the same day with the sculptor of the winning humpback whale piece.  Which I did.  But it's all a matter of perception.

(I went to the information tent to buy a programme, and I was introduced to the Founding Director, who happened to be standing next to me, and we had a five minute chat consisting mainly of pleasantries;  next I went to get some lunch, there seemed to be a bit of space at one of the tables, and the guy who moved over just happened to have carved a breaching humpback whale out of a piece of red gum driftwood.  Driftwood>Swiss Army Knife; Swiss Army Knife>Driftwood;  Driftwood>>Humpback Whale)  It's just perception.

Tamarama Beach was strewn with objects including a giant frying pan.  I thought I'd got the shot end on from the handle, allowing the shadow to delineate the handle, but no, it doesn't quite work.  For the image to be successful, a little more handle is needed.  I heard one little girl say "Mummy, can I make sandcastles?"  "I wish you could make an omelette, darling" was the reply!

One of my friends who loved the peacock, hopefully will like this brace of photos for her new Bondi home

Then my favourite SxS shot taken early in the morning in Marks Park with a wonderful colour palate of blues, purples, greens mauves and pinks.  It was a general shot, but it so happens that it has captured everyone when they were looking in the same direction out to sea.  This explains the strange walk, the almost zombie-like inexorable move in one direction, and the "Wicker Man" in the centre of the exhibits.  

This is probably my favourite "S x S" shot for 2014  Very much what is seen is a false perception of what was in front of the camera that morning!

 You can, of course, get an incorrect perception of a scene like that below, so beloved of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe.  It is a photograph of Whitby from St Mary's Churchyard (the Parish Church), high up on the cliff top.  The colours are accurate.  That mauvey coloured sea fog rolls in on warm days, polluted by the chemical works of Hartlepool, and the temperature drops.  The headstones are covered by an earlier pollution - coal black.  The grass looks as though it would hurt if it ventured into spring green.  It hasn't been spring for grass in Whitby for decades.  The best it can manage is not being winter.  And yet within the photograph is the great gouge in the cliffs between the camera and the hotels opposite, where Captain Cook and the Endeavour; The Fishburn, the Friendship and the Scarborough and other members of the Australian First Fleet; numerous  Polar whaling fleets under the command of Captain Scoresby, all left or arrived at the busy little port of Whitby to and from the whole wide world.

The building on the cliff opposite is where the American novelist Bram Stoker conceived and wrote Dracula, and in the story, it was on the beach on the right where Dracula in the form of a large black dog, escaped onto British soil from the wrecked Russian sailing ship "Demeter"  A perception which is strongly held in these parts today.
Which brings us finally to yet another form of perception.  There actually is a point to all this.!

Over fifty years ago I had a very good art teacher  who one day asked what "St Paul's Cathedral, London", looked like, and proceeded to ask me to draw it on the blackboard.  What eventuated was something akin to a domed settlement in a desert oasis.  The fact is that our brain takes well known visual cues and tags them in short hand to a "norm".  This explains why it was several weeks before the Geography teacher at a school I taught at suddenly said, "You haven't got a beard!".  To be precise it had been something like six or seven weeks that I hadn't had one, but his brain knew what I looked like, and was more interested in  the messages being sent from my face.  A sound survival strategy against year eights!

I was reminded of this in reverse this week, because I have to take consciousness-amending substances, for want of some better words, and the transition to the new drugs has been far from smooth.  I was having a cup of tea with an old friend from down the road, when I realised that with the evening light behind her, she looked slightly different.  It was Jenny . . . and yet it wasn't quite Jenny.  The drug was forcing me to look at the real Jenny at that moment and not just the built up picture over time, the "avatar" if you like that was in my head.  I'm afraid I did peer rather a lot, but it was rather fascinating.  Shapes were not entirely what they seemed.  Her eyes were wider, her brow broader; her hair was reddish.  So this was certainly a new perception, but whether the new perception was more or less true was impossible to say.

A Sad Post Script

On August 16th I posted a piece about the State Government decision to sell off  the dock workers cottages which, as public housing, have been lived in for over a hundred years by rent paying tenants.  The Government takes the view that now is the time to sell off these heritage listed cottages which have considerable harbourside views.  That there is a huge thirty-odd storey casino under construction a few hundred metres down the road is, no doubt, completely coincidental.  The argument, which is a cogent one, is that the price the Government would get for these flats would be sufficient to build five public houses in Western Sydney.

You will recall this photo that I took.

The young man was going to email me with his address, but he never did.  I was going to attend the street picnic, but I never did.  Eventually, today I took two A4 prints for them down to their street and went into their corner cafe. The owner said that if I couldn't find them, he would keep the photos and give them to them later.  The street was quiet, and they weren't there, but there was a removals van.  One of the movers said that the old lady was Bridget, and that he had known her for years.  She had moved out last week, but he said that he could give the photos to her.

At that moment a well-ish dressed lady from the Housing Department asked if everything was OK, and she also offered to get the photos to them both.  She said that she had managed to house three of the neighbours near to each other, though of course, NOT in Millers Point.

She further said that some of them wanted to go, but I couldn't help thinking that those who wanted to go, could go anyway.  That's called free will.  The sadness, the crime, is the forced eviction of people who want to stay in the houses where in a few cases they were born.

I could quite see the logic of the Housing Manager who would be getting five new units of housing stock for every old unit of housing stock sold, thus increasing rental income considerably, and I thought of a member of his staff sending out carefully drafted letters to all the tenants.  It would probably be less than a day's work.

I, thankfully, live in a house owned by Marg and I, so I can't imagine what it must be like, when out of the blue you receive a letter which says,  "Sorry, but we don't want to let out our house to you or to anyone, when your agreement expires in six months."  

Your shops, your schools, your ways to work, perhaps even your jobs, will change; so will your dentists and hospitals; your GPs and pubs; your trains, your buses; everything in your life will, for better (hopefully), or worse, change completely.  Just one letter, yet it will change your life.

So goodbye, young man; good luck, Bridget.  Take care.  Have a good life.  Wherever they've put you.

The camera can lie . . . beautifully

My father-in-law used to tell me how, when he was in his teens, he used to catch the steam train down the North Shore Line towards the City.  At Wollstonecraft, the line diverged downhill to the right of the present day line and went round the shores of Lavender Bay until it reached Milson's Point.  From there two huge ferries used to ply back and forth to and from Dawes Point from where it was possible to get a penny tram ride up George Street to the City.  About 1928, a large area of the harbour was reclaimed with landfill.  This was to be the construction site for the future Sydney Harbour Bridge, Sydney's Depression Project.

Strange to say, this story starts and ends in a very obscure manner with that wonderful old Sydney Icon.  After 1932, when the Harbour Bridge was opened, the Lavender Bay construction site was turned into an amusement park, and in the American style of the day was christened "Luna Park".  It also sported one of the very first jocund fat face entrances that subsequently became the trademark of many funfairs.

I attended a photographic exhibition at Luna Park a few weeks ago, and when I came out of the hall, I took a picture of one of the avenues of attractions.  You can see that there is a fair amount of lens distortion, and as I was at home about to correct the image, I thought of "Fat Face" at the entrance.

Here he is, a robust, rotund, jolly, joyful gent, who loves japes and wheezes.  He's wearing the moustache for Movember the prostate cancer charity.  Please give generously!

It was then that I had my moment of enlightenment.  Instead of using the camera lens distortion reduction lens to give me a more accurate idea of reality, why not distort it even more, particularly with barrel distortion to give a jolly effect at a fairground.  (Which I have to say they desperately need.)  Have you ever been round an empty fairground at ten o'clock in the morning?  You can feel suicidal.

And so here it is, my jolly, barrel-shaped, jolly old barrel-shaped, Luna Park.  

When you usually perform a lens correctionSometime ago, our Sydney Monorail was taken out of service.  This I think, and thought at the time, was a pity.  The tourists liked it; it wasn't doing anyone any harm; indeed it didn't go anywhere where it could cause any real harm.  It was a fairground ride which could masquerade as real 22nd Century Transport.  Sydney could be seen as being sooo modern without actually being so in the least.  Off I went to the centre of Sydney to take my last pics of the system.

In itself, I think it's quite an interesting photo.  Perhaps it's not Gold Medal territory, exactly, but it shows Sydney as it was at the end of 2013, and in only a very few years, it's the sort of photograph which will be found in the Museum of Sydney.  Quite fortuitously (I took an Honours degree in Serendipity by accident), monorails are longish objects and length needs emphasising.

So if you distort it and stretch the image lengthwise to fit nicely onto a piece of A3 paper, it changes tracks and comes much closer to you, and the whole image has far more impact.  You don't seem to notice the extreme distortions around the edge of the image.  Indeed they seem to have become the frames.

This was becoming addictive.  Although I had more than enough images to experiment with, I decided to see what happened if I tried the technique on a building that looked distorted to the naked eye.  So I went down to Ultimo, to the Frank Gehry building.  

Barrel distortion did not work.  In the end, it was extreme cushion distortion that gave the most interesting result.

 Maybe it needs to be squashed into a square format as well.

























































Sometime ago, perhaps as far back as 2009, I went to Sydney's magnificent zoo, Taronga.  As a former Brit who is used to zoos showcasing lions and tigers and not hedgehogs and badgers, it comes as a shock to find that although Taronga does have a few tigers, a very old bear, chimps, a few gorillas, etc., most of its collection is Australian.  Australia is so big and our population is so sparse, that we Australians have never seen the majority of our fauna.  So I looked in the pen containing the Big Saltie (the Australian Salt Water Crocodile) and couldn't see it.  And then . . . I gradually made out the head, mainly the jaw, and particularly the teeth.  Nothing moved.  It was not necessary for anything to move.  It was the perfectly evolved animal.  If it was necessary to move it would move.  With deadly effect.  And then it would stop moving again.






 Call that a Big Saltie?  THIS is a Big Saltie!

To be honest, I don't want to meet either of them, especially on a dark night.

And so at last we obscurely come full circle.  On its maiden World Cruise, the Queen Mary 2 moored at the RAN Garden Island Naval Base, as the Royal Australian Navy was on holiday at the time.  It moored there because it was too long to moor at the International Passenger Terminal in the middle of the city, and with less than a metre clearance under the Bridge at low tide, it was a Risk Too Far to take her to any of the upstream berths.  Three years later the IPT has been renovated and the QM2 can now be berthed there, and of course, so can the other super-cruisers.  My last distortion makes this beautiful ship look even more beautiful.

Breakfast!

NOT ALL THE ARTICLES ON MY BLOG ARE ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHS.  THIS ONE IS ABOUT THE HUGE AMOUNT OF MEDICATION THAT IS GIVEN TO PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC ILLNESSES.  IF YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO NEVER LOOKS TOTALLY HEALTHY, WHO IS TAKING LOTS OF MEDICATION, PLEASE READ THIS, AND PLEASE SHARE, PARTICULARLY IF YOU HAVE MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS IN YOUR CIRCLE OF FRIENDS. 

PLEASE READ TO THE END AND PLEASE SHARE.


In 1950, at the age of four, I ran into the quiet road outside our house and I was knocked over by a bicycle.  From the head injury that I received I developed epilepsy for which I was prescribed phenobarbital (a barbiturate) and benzedrine (an amphetamine) . . . uppers and downers for a pre-schooler!

Later, my mother told me that I should lead a normal life, and that if anyone had a problem with that, it was their problem, not mine.  There was no reason why I could not do anything I wanted provided I was "not silly"  Wise words.

Since when I have not been wrapped in cotton wool, I am a retired Chartered Engineer and Member of what was then the Institute of Metals, I have an Honours Degree in Materials Science and Technology from Bradford University, and I hold a Fellowship in Management and Training Development from Ashridge College in the UK.  So you see, I followed my mother's advice, and I've had a fulfilling life.

However, and sadly, there is always, a however . . .

Over the years, my epilepsy has changed; new medication has been brought out, and different specialists have had different ideas concerning my problem.  Ever drug has side effects, and of course these side effects can be treated with other drugs which also have side effects . . . you get the idea, I'm sure.

I am at the moment swapping over one of my epilepsy drugs to a new one.  This cannot be done cold turkey, it has to be done gradually over about three months.  This morning I set out my medication for the next TWO days.  These are the two heaps of chemicals that will go into my stomach for the next two days and every two days until the day that I die.  I roughly estimate that in my life I have taken about 1 tonne (1000 kg) of active ingredient and as much again of fillers.



This (not terribly good) picture is my intake for just two days.  It doesn't include any antibiotics or painkillers.  Just epilepsy and side effects.  So, what I want to know is:

Are there doctors who specialise in investigating drugs and their side effects with the intent of minimising the amount of drugs that have to be ingested?  If so, why are they not being used more commonly?

As a Materials Engineer, if a weld started to fail, I would try to find out why.  I wouldn't rivet a patch on it, and when that started to fail, shout metal fatigue and weld a larger patch on it.  That's a quick way to lose customers (and lives!) An engineer goes back to the beginning to see if a totally new route might be more successful.

So I say to all Medical Professionals: "Gentlemen, I appreciate what you do for your patients, but when you prescribe one little white pill, this may be what the patient and his body has to cope with.  Please make sure that your way is the best way, and not just a bolt on solution.  Are you working by yourself or are you discussing individual cases with other specialists in different fields?"

Thank you for reading this.  Now, please, share.

Judge not that thou be not judged!

I'm an old man now, and it's probably difficult for my friends and colleagues to believe that I was the Shane Warne of my time (leg spin and first slip, but perhaps not as good) and later, the Dicky Bird of my time, (but perhaps not quite as good an umpire as him).  I mention this because in the past I have been a public arbiter of rules.  It probably came about because our Games Master, Illtyd Pearce (ex- Llanelli and Wales Rugby Union) realised that I had sunk through so many cricket elevens that I had fallen out of the bottom of the lowest eleven.  I was therefore only good enough to be an umpire.  All a cricket umpire has to do is follow the Laws of Cricket and rule on them.  OK, then.  Just to be going on with.  How many Laws are there?  How many ways can a batsman be out?  Not as easy as you'd think, is it?  And photo judging has the artistic element added as well.

When I was about seventeen, the unthinkable happened.  One of our first XI batsmen was given out, but he continued to stand for five or six seconds before he walked.  The Headmaster gave him a stroke of the cane, and next morning in assembly the HM made the bizarre but absolutely true statement that the Umpire is right even when he is wrong.  And this is equally true for football referees and photographic judges.  We may differ in our opinions, but if we invite a person in to critique our work, we should listen to what they say, and possibly learn more about our work.  this is not to say there are not bad judges.  There are some stinkers.  I can think of one who will never critique my work again.  I hope our FCC has a program to improve the standards of the comparatively few judges that fall seriously short.  For reasons good and bad, our NSW judges seem to discount photographs of other photographers, pelicans, works of art, the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and cloudless skies, so I made a gently critical but hopefully humorous AV, which ended with some of my favourite shots.  Many of these are not good technically, but mean something to me.  A photograph does not need to have an award or even deserve an award to mean something to the author.  Here is a link to this masterpiece.  Unfortunately, there is no link to bring you back automatically, so you will have to come back to this blog the long way round.

http://youtu.be/rwD6siI6foA

Imagine you are a judge.  What would you have to say about these next two pictures, and would you give them awards?  Could you explain why you did or did not award either of the pics?  What indeed are these photographs depicting?

 

 

Well, the top one is a crease in an inflatable tent.  Would that affect your judgment?  If I were judging the second one, what would I say?  Lose the lights.  No real composition.  Background too indistinct.  Not sure the yellow and purple achieves anything.  If I had taken the second one, by now I would be thinking that the judge is a total idiot.  Can't he recognise the ionisation field which occurs for a few milliseconds around a lightning strike when he sees one?

 

 

One of the problems is that so often there is a mismatch between the knowledge and experience of the judge and photographer.

 

 

 

Not all NSW judges have been to London even though I am sure there would be a campaign for an educational trip if it could be arranged at a suitable price.  So not all of them are aware that this is Trafalgar Square, with Nelson on his Corinthian column looking down Whitehall, and a poignant statue of a pregnant thalidomide mother on the Fourth Plinth.  The Fourth Plinth is becoming justly famous for its modern art.  For years it just stood empty, with the other three supporting Imperial Nonentities.  A NSW Judge might quite simply see this as a composition of two works of art.  S/he might miss the connection between the missing limbs and the overcoming of personal adversity.

 

 

 

Solarised M & Ms on a glass table top.  What could a judge say about them?  What could you say about them?  For that matter, what could I say about them?  And yet a judge has to find something to say about them, in a short time, in front of quite a lot of people.

 

 

 

I knew (somehow!) that we'd eventually get around to pelicans.  I think that most of us, if we were critiquing the above picture, would see it as an ordinary pelican picture.  the sort of picture that anyone with a camera might take while on holiday.  Not a photograph that you would expect to be special enough to be seen in a photographic exhibition.  Technically, the background is awful, and is still too much in focus to make it look less awful.  I took that photo.

 

 

Now my wife and I were married by a clergyman who was dressed a little bit like this pelican.  This bird is wearing a near black cassock with a white surplice, and I can almost imagine him about to start a service with "Dearly Beloved, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places . . ."  There is a comic transformation of bird into clergyman which most judges would see.  The background is uncluttered.  There is much to comment on.

 

 

 

We are having a competition soon on Flora and Fauna.  I might just enter this.  It is literally a black and white rendition of some wind blown grass.  Being minimalist it means all things to all people, even if they are different things.  A judge should relish such images, his ideas are as valid as yours, but of course, the value he puts upon them may be different.

 

 





 



This is the other end of the equation.  Everything is on show here.  There is very little room for manoeuvre in the ideas department, but some words might be said about the technical handling of the picture, which I rather like.  And that may be something which I hadn't seen, which pops the pride a bit, but makes sure that future pictures are just that little bit better.

I make no secret of it.  I love it when a judge puts a Merit next to my name.  I'm ecstatic when I can say going home that I got two Merits and two Highly Commendeds that evening.  It shows that I am doing something right and that other independent photographers think so.  But I've never been a points chaser.  I'm not even quite sure how many points you get for what.  The best judge in the room doesn't give points, though.  YOU are that person, because it is YOU who can see how your photos stack up against everyone else's.  And as for the Judge at the front, who often has an hour's travel before he gets home again that night . . . 

Just remember, he's always right, even when he's wrong!

An Ode to Joy

This is not an entry about my photography, but about joy.  That's joy with a small 'j', not with a capital 'J' who is a whole other story.

New South Wales is a very enlightened state that issues Seniors' Cards to all over sixty who work less than eighteen hours per week.  It says on it, and I quote:-

"The holder is a valued member of our community.  Please extend every courtesy and assistance."  

And in the main people do.  I remember vividly the day that mine arrived in the post.  It was accompanied by a booklet and one or two separate sheets of paper that fell on the floor.  I picked them up and read them.  They were both advertising discount funerals.  

Essentially it is a discount card, and many cafes and restaurants, DIY outlets, some supermarkets and others offer special deals to Seniors.  But the greatest boon, especially to a hobby photographer, is that many of the State's transport organisations offer remarkable and much-appreciated discounts.  I can travel for approximately 100 to 150 miles (150 to 200 km) by train, bus or ferry, go anywhere, for just $2.50 per day.  One is tempted to wonder for how much longer this deal may last.

Anyway, eight years ago, when I first received my card, I decided to go to the Heads.  Ex-Naval personnel will immediately have one image in their minds, but I mean the entrance to Port Jackson, the maritime name for Sydney Harbour.  To get there, I had first of all to catch a train, two buses and then walk for a kilometre to reach the car park on top of North Head.  I was soon talking to an affable young man with a mobile phone, who was a professional whale spotter.  From our lofty position on top of the cliff, he located the migrating whales and communicated with the many boats which take visitors out to see these amazing creatures at close quarters.

He said that there was a young humpback whale actually in the Heads.  I looked down, but all I could see was a flock of Silver Gulls driving a small shoal of fish to where they could easily be snapped up and eaten, but there was no sign of any whale.

Only a few seconds later, the water erupted, displaced by what appeared to be a railway car.  It seemed to hang in the air for several seconds (actually nearer to a second) before performing the largest belly flop ever.  It was, of course, nothing to do with railways, but was a humpback whale, and was nearer to the size of a largish sailing yacht. I'm sure you get the idea.  This was repeated two or three times.  It was a humpback full of joy!

But at that moment, something strange happened.  The silver gulls, normally pugnacious little beasts, suddenly scattered and disappeared.  A large, (and when I say large, I mean big) solitary bird gracefully swooped down and plucked a large fish out of the water with its talons.  This flying nemesis was a White-Bellied Sea  Eagle, which has a body up to 90 cm (3 feet) long, and a wingspan of nearly 2.5 metres, (about 8 feet).  There are some good videos on Youtube of these birds catching sea snakes in North Queensland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VLvqgfuZOk8

I stayed longer than I meant to, and the young whale spotter offered me a lift down the hill to the nearest town of Manly.  On the way, he stopped the car, opened the door, and asked me to listen.  i could hear birds noisily roosting.  "They're Little Penguins" he said.

Later I reflected that I had seen humpback whales, including one up fairly close.  I had seen a very large eagle.  And I had heard the local penguins.  All these amazing creatures in the wild were only about 5 miles (8km) from the city centre of a conurbation of 4 million people!  

Sydney really is a rather special place to be.

I was reminded of this today, as my wife and I returned home after a morning's shopping.  Without flapping its wings once, an enormous bird soared a thousand feet out of Berowra Creek, sideslipped high above the main road which runs along the ridge, and sank gently towards Cowan Water.  It is the fourth one I have seen locally in the last two months.  Pure absolutely unadulterated joy!

No other birds were to be seen.  Only 50% of its diet is fish.

Butch's Story

As many of you will know, Hornsby Heights Camera Club won our AV interclub trophy last Tuesday at Castle Hill.

This is the You tube address of our production.  We should also probably show it at our next meeting.


http://youtu.be/civA4O6b-M4

Who Needs a Camera?

When I was a small boy, I lived in the South West of England, and like most small boys who were lucky to live on the edge of a small country town, I played in the fields, climbed trees, made "bridges" over (actually in) the local stream, and looked for pirates at the local pond.
I also used to "help" Farmer Steele harvest his mowing grass. 

As a result, before the days of Health and Safety Officers, I almost stepped on a harmless but large Grass Snake (which has given me a phobia for the last sixty-odd years),  I fell out of trees, I got "shoefulls" of stream water, and several times I fell into the pond.  Mr Steele taught me swearing, and I discovered quote marks.  "Mr Steele said that he wanted the bloody wire on the bloody fence not across the bloody field" But I didn't say that, Mum, Mr Steele did! 

By play and adventures, I got to know about the natural history of the area.  Yes, I took birds eggs, and fried small fish out of the stream (disgusting) and a gypsy boy showed me how to cook a hedgehog, which was surprisingly good.  Thanks to Farmer Steele, I also learnt about flowers.  I can hear him now, saying to me, "Now that's not a bloody buttercup 'cos it loves damp ground.  It's a bloody celandine"

And then a catastrophe occurred.  My father's job took us all to Bournemouth, a seaside resort almost forty times bigger than Tewkesbury.  At the start, I knew no-one, I felt homesick, there was no Farmer bloody Steele  to verbally perfume the countryside.

So, I used to go for walks by myself, but there were few trees, no streams or ponds, and a large river, the Stour, which was way too wide to even think about bridging it using branches of willow.  I wandered along the path through the mowing grass, and picked dozens of wild flowers, many of which I already knew, and some that were knew to me.  (Incidentally, it is now illegal to pick wild flowers in the UK!).  Besides buttercups and celandines, there were purple loosestrife and St John's wort, Ladies' slippers, Jack-go-to-bed at noon, parson-in-the pulpit, vipers' bugloss, butterfly orchids and lesser spotted orchids, dog roses in the hedge, hips and haws and elderflowers, and many many more, with butterflies to feed on this rich flora.

I used to pick a bunch and take them home, where I carefully put them between folded blotting paper, arranged the "parcel" inside the pages of a book which was weighted down with a brick or two.  After a week, I would reverse the process, and put the pressed flowers somewhere safe.  I still have those flowers, almost sixty years later.  Their rich colours have faded, but I see them as they were.  I can't name many of them anymore, but I'm amazed that they all came from two adjoining fields.  It was before the days of monoculture, when the milk that we drank changed subtly through the year as the cows ate different plants.

But enough of this old man's reverie into his boyhood.  Let's talk photography.  How can you get recognisable pictures of objects without using a camera.  There are probably several ways using digital means, but I have only tried one.  If you have a scanner, and flat objects, you have potential pictures (but please, PLEASE, don't sit on a photocopier and press the button!)  The pressed wild flowers gave me the clue, and my first picture  was of a piece of flat parsley.

Later, I graduated to a cockatoo feather.

 

It is advisable not to try and use a whole cockatoo, as you will experience difficulty in flattening it sufficiently, and you may not get the photo that you wanted.

If only I had been able to use a scanner on all those wild flowers.  They would never have faded in my pictures.  Of course, anything flat can be scanned, and the second picture is of airline luggage labels that I have acquired over the years.

 

 

You will notice that almost without exception, I only have to travel with an airline for it to close or be taken over.  Ansett Australia; Pan American; Canadian Pacific International.  All gone now, like many of the wild flowers of long ago, which possibly have only been scanned by a few.

 

If you have a "wet lab" or dark room, the possibilities of image making without a camera increase considerably.

 

Such as, if you have a negative, a fun thing to try is leaf photography.  For this you will need a live tree.  Chlorophyll is the stuff that makes leaves green.  When the sun shines, the chlorophyll breaks down the starch into sugars which feed the plant.  So, if you fix a 35 mm negative to a growing leaf, and leave it outside in the sunshine for several days, the clear part of the negative allows the sunshine to get the chlorophyll in the leaf to convert the starch into sugar.  The black part of the negative blocks the sunshine so that the chlorophyll can't convert starch into sugar.  Now comes the interesting part.  You put the leaf into alcohol. ALCOHOL IS INFLAMMABLE, but fortunately it boils at 79C.  Water boils at 100C.  Therefore if you heat the water to boiling and then add the alcohol and leaf in a smaller container, the chlorophyll gets leached out of the leaf, so that you end up with a white leaf.  Tincture of iodine (if weak enough) makes the areas where the starch is to turn blackish blue.  There is no colour change where the sun and the chlorophyll has turned the starch into sugar.

 

Another method, which personally I have not tried, is to sandwich a flat object between two sheets of glass and some photographic paper.  After a few days in the sun, the paper can be developed and an image produced.

 

And finally a footnote on the very first cameras.  They were made of wood and had an oiled paper screen.  They were used by artists.  Many famous artists used them, including the French Impressionists, who painted "en plein air" (outside in the fresh air!)  We call them pinhole cameras, and they have a virtually complete depth of field.  The easiest way to make one is to get a can with a removable lid, like an old golden syrup tin.  Paint the inside matt black.  Drill the thinnest hole possible in the centre of the base of the tin.  Place a piece of greaseproof paper over the open end, and move the camera (probably on a tripod) until you can see the desired scene.  Then carefully remove the apparatus, go into a darkroom, and jam a sheet of film between the lid and the can.  Choose a suitable exposure (a couple of hours, perhaps), and then take everything into a darkroom and process as normal.  OK, you have used a camera, but you have taken a photograph in the same way that the very first pictures were taken, and if you are lucky, you may end up with a photo that looks as though it was taken in the 1840s!

Official vandalism in the name of . . . what?

When people around the world think of Sydney, they think of the Harbour, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the Sydney Opera House.  When they arrive in our city, they add the Queen Victoria Building to the list.  The QVB was saved from developers, (who wanted to turn it into a car park), and today it stands as a jewel in central Sydney.

A whole suburb, Woolloomooloo, was saved several years ago by Jack Mundey, a Union boss, who adopted a green ban, which stopped development of this pretty dockland area, by stopping all building work indefinitely until the developers changed their plans.  Even the blue rinse Liberal ladies of Hunters Hill consulted him to block plans to get rid of a park because developers wanted to put up more buildings which would have destroyed their wonderful and expensive views of the Harbour.

Recently, the inner city is being radically changed.  There is a place called Barangaroo.  This was originally berths for ships in what was then a working harbour.  Then it became a terminal for up to two large cruise ships.  At one time, car carriers used to unload their cargo there; and it was there that the Pope, on his sole visit to Australia, held a Mass for International Youth Week and canonised Mary McKillop to be Australia's only Saint - Saint Mary of the Cross.  So you can see that Barangaroo has taken and is taking an important part in Australian history.

A couple of years back, a significant Sydney developer wanted to build a casino on Barangaroo.  He has breached the rule of only having one casino in Sydney, by buying the licence of the one that is already open.  He has breached the building line regulations, and he is building a gargantuan building (it is not for me to judge its architectural merit or otherwise) at Barangaroo, which had been earmarked by the previous State Government as a park.

You can get some of the idea of the scale of the development from the first photograph.  Not very distinct, I'm afraid, but other pics later.

The buildings are of a very unusual style, possibly even unique in Australia.  They are called "Filigree style" houses.  They are old (almost 150 years, which is very old for Australia) and were the homes of ordinary dock workers.  They are also Heritage Listed.

They are located in High Street, Millers Point, which is on the Western side of the Rocks (not the eastern tourist side where there are souvenir shops and expensive restaurants).

The western side is quiet, like a small village.  The roads are not at all busy, there is a preschool, and a couple of pubs, a cafe, a park, and a few local shops.  

Above all, there is a marvellous sense of community which has been developed over about a century.  There are residents who were born here over sixty years ago.

These are not large houses; they are two bedroom flats, but they are NOT high rise.  They are a little bit of the Nineteenth Century in a Twenty-First Century world.

This is a marvellously mixed community.  When I was down there two days ago, I was introduced to several friends and neighbours, and met two of them in the corner cafe.

The thing is that these are what we in Britain are called Council Houses, but in Australia are called Authority Housing.  The State Government has already issued notices to quit, and are ready to rehouse the inhabitants elsewhere.  A long way elsewhere, where you have to go everywhere on a bus, and the buses are infrequent.  There is no effort being made to keep the community together. 

The local council, spurred on by the State government (the same government which has been found guilty of corruption and taking bribes (illegal election payments) from developers), is evicting the inhabitants because of this, which is portrayed in the next photo.  These two bedroom flats have water views, and still will do even after the casino is finished.  

In the Sydney Morning Herald today, a modern flat with harbour views with one bedroom and two bathrooms is up for sale for $ 1 000 000 !  No wonder they want the tenants out!

There is also a preschool in the street.  Goodness knows what will happen to the children if those facilities are destroyed

The residents will be holding a picnic in the local park on Sunday, September 14th, and a petition will be available to sign.  Why not come along to meet the locals?  Bring food and non alcoholic drink.  This is not political.  It is about natural justice!

If you got this far, thanks for reading it, and now back to photography!