I like to take photographs, which I sometimes post about here. I use an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, which is great, but come on, phone cameras are also great. I post my photography more frequently to Glass, which costs money to join but you can subscribe to my account’s RSS feed, if you’re interested.
We took young Roddy to visit his mum, Maple, and sister, Scout. Maple is mostly beyond puppyish play, and honestly, Scout is too, but that didn’t stop Roddy attempting to get her to leap around the garden with him. He didn’t succeed.
A major landmark where I live is Kelston Roundhill, a circular patch of trees at the very top of the highest hill for miles around. When driving from the west, it’s the first sight of home, even if we can’t see it from home. Anyway, me and Roddy walked up there this bright February morning. At the top, you can see Bristol sprawling to the west, Somerset blanketing the south, Bath nestled into the valley in the east.
I didn’t have a lot of time to take photos on this work trip and the sub-zero temperatures made for uncomfortable camera-handling with my dumbly gloveless hands, but Stockholm looked beautiful under frost, brief sun, and long darkness.
A beautiful day. Falling leaves, slanted sunshine. Yellow, red, auburn. A joy. And 18 degrees. So pleasant to experience, and yet utterly unnerving for mid-November.
A very long time ago, while I was at sixth form college, I took a GCSE in photography. I loved it. I learned how to develop film, taking out a roll from my camera in the pitch dark, all by feel, and winding the film onto a reel. I learned about aperture and shutter speeds, using an old Nikon SLR that my dad gave me. I learned how to expose photo paper and burn in and dodge areas to make them darker and lighter.
I took a few rolls of film on a First World War battlefields trip and created a highly original piece of coursework featuring a lot of graves. Then I went to a local cemetery and took some more pictures of graves and made a piece of coursework which included the lyrics of the Smiths song, Cemetery Gates. I doubt I was aware of its pointed message about making original art.