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