Who Knows Where the Time Goes*

Here we are almost two thirds through the first month of the year and I really don't know where the time has gone. It's certainly not been eaten up by me making images because I've hardly had an opportunity to get out and about... and the weather's not been that inspiring. Still, I've one or two images to tinker with over the coming days.


But I have had a little time to trawl through my archive and bring you yet another shot of Pen yr Ole Wen, which really is a majestic lump of rock. This was taken last Easter from the banks of a perfectly calm Llyn Ogwen. Shortly after I made this shot the wind got up and the mirror calmness disappeared. 


I played around with various crops and edits before settling on a black and white conversion in ACR 5, a tiny, tiny bit of post-conversion work in Elements and no crop.

Click on the image for the bigger picture

*Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention from the album "Unhalfbricking"

Makeover...

I've decided that the black design on my blog wasn't a good look and have given the place a bit of a makeover. I've selected the grey theme because several photography books suggest that the best background on which to view digital images is medium grey.


There's also been a few minor tweaks behind the scenes and I've expanded some of the text of earlier entries to give a more details about the subjects pictured and reasons for taking them.


I hope you like the new look. Please let me know what you think.

French Street Photography

It was a good Christmas with lots of fun, great food, lovely people and some super gifts. On the photography front I had another external hard disk for my ever expanding archive, a bean bag pod to support cameras, an Ansel Adams calendar and two excellent books, both by Henri Cartier-Bresson: 'The Minds Eye', which is a collection of his essays, and 'A Propos de Paris', which is based on the catalogue for his 1984 exhibition 'Paris at a Glance' (thank you Men, Lisa & Matt and Nik!). 

Getting the Paris book was a real treat because it was so unexpected. I have always liked Cartier-Bresson's work particularly his street photography, something that the French seem to be remarkably good at. I really have enjoyed looking at the photographs so much so that I also dug out my little book of Robert Doisneau's images, another accomplished French photographer whose most famous work is probably 'The Kiss' taken in Paris in 1950. There has been some debate in recent years whether this picture was posed rather than a candid snapshot. It matters not because it is a great image.

I was lucky enough to visit France in the summer of 2010 and took some street photo's wandering around Cahors, a delightful and very photogenic city. Trawling through the images  I found a picture that evoked the work of both Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau both of who captured French couples kissing. I didn't quite capture the kiss but it's close enough and, I think, an intimate shot.

'Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville' by Robert Doisneau (Paris, 1950)

Click the image for the bigger picture

My image (above) is not posed! Converted to black and white using Adobe Camera RAW and cropped to 5x5.

This picture doesn't fit within the thirty minute rule and I hope you'll excuse me stretching the rules by which my blog usually abides by.