On the wing
A male Goosander takes to the sky and flies away, tail feathers all fanned out and wing tips just a blur.
A sign of the changing times
The surprising thing regarding this picture is not the fact that another building is empty and derelict in a small UK town, but that the wire-meshed window glass appears to have had a gun’s bullet blasted through it: no doubt a sign of the changing times to come…
*Shot on a Panasonic Lumix FX9 6mp compact camera with settings at ISO-100, aperture at f/2.8 and an exposure time of 1/320 seconds*
Honeysuckle in profile
A Honeysuckle flower peels back aubergine-coloured petals and reveals its pollen-bearing stamen to the waiting world, wafting out such a wonderful aroma that even we Human Beings stop in our tracks to sniff at the surrounding air.
Blues and Twos
A speeding Police car whizzes by on the way to some emergency or other, its luminous checker-board bodywork appearing to glow in the diffuse twilight of the arriving night.
The forgotten Matriarch
Covered in moss and lichens, this dislodged gravestone to someone’s Mother, someone’s Sister, someone’s Daughter, now lies abandoned to Time’s grasp and Nature’s encroachment.
Horse Latitudes
“When the still sea conspires an armour
and her sullen and aborted
currents breed tiny monsters:
true sailing is dead.
Awkward instant
and the first animal is jettisoned;
legs furiously pumping
their stiff green gallop.
And heads bob up,
poise
delicate;
pause
consent.
In mute nostril agony,
carefully refined
and sealed over…”
Horse Latitudes (lyrics by Jim Morrison)
From the album Strange Days by The Doors (1968)
Fiddlers Ferry power station from Tandle Hills
A silhouette shot of the Tandle Hills’ monument in Royton, Oldham with the Fiddlers Ferry power station situated in Cheshire off in the distance. Although the power station is located on the north bank of the River Mersey, between the towns of Widnes and Warrington nearly 35 miles away in another borough, you can actually see plumes of white smoke drifting from two of its huge cooling towers!
Bokeh doughnuts galore!
Using a 500mm mirror lens with a set aperture of f/8, any picture you take will have an extremely narrow depth of field (DOF) which usually means major issues when trying get a subject in sharp focus. Another problem is the dreaded ‘bokeh doughnut’ effect that mirror lenses tend to create, which can be seen above. This shot of dew-splattered grass highlights the thin DOF perfectly, with just a sliver of grass in focus and the water droplets on the grass either side of this sharp-spot have now been rendered as light rings.
For most photographers, this is a ruined shot and a failing of this type of lens. However, I consider a photo like this one as interesting as any other and believe it’s captured the surreal and wonderful effect of ‘bokeh doughnuts’ that no other lens can come close to replicating: for this reason alone, I think I will keep hold of my mirror lens for the foreseeable future…
Winged electric blue
A Blue Damselfly rests upon a reed, its neon colour contrasting against the green chlorophyll of its chosen perch.
Mother Nature’s own
Mother Nature wastes no time in reclaiming what is Her rightful space…
Stretch the Horizon 