Saturday, 7 February 2015

Photo-mags, our howler shots and beaten into a retreat



7 February

Saturday afternoon and it’s a rather grey old day out there. I was wondering about going into town and doing some photos but with the flat grey light it’s hardly worth it. As it is, when we got up Mr Postie had been and dropped off my copies of AP and NPhoto. AP is now read and it’s a good issue all round this week. It’s out in the shops on Tuesday if you would like to try it. NPhoto has been glanced through and I shall make a start on that later.

It struck me just how good the images are in these magazines, again; I mentioned it to Jan and as she said, ‘They wouldn’t sell many if the images were not good. But I wonder … it’s all well and good giving us readers something to aim for, but why not show some of the real howlers that we all make at times. Then the lessons would perhaps be able to show how to improve the images that we have messed up. Just an idea like … … …

NPhoto has a column called NPhoto Apprentice where a reader is taken out by a pro and given a day’s one-to-one instruction. This month Damien Demolder takes Paulo Carvalho out along the South Bank for a street-wise shoot. Street photography is one of my favourite genres and today’s little trip into Dorktown would have been mainly for that. I am minded throw my name into the mix so that I can learn more about general shooting, but from my scooter. I wonder how that would go down with readers. I’ll think it through a wee bit methinks.

The other week when we were in the Merry Hell Centre, we had a look in the Virgin store there. What I’m after is a mobile that I can use with an office suite. The guy we spoke said that they only do one handset that will do it, a Nokia Lumia 735. I am aware of course that other provider’s may well do other sets, but we have an account with Virgin for all our comms and TV and so on. Jan has just called them and it seems that the handset isn’t released yet but will be on Monday. So they are calling us back on Monday morning. It’s a tad annoying really; surely the guy in the shop should have known that. It would have saved us several phones calls over the last couple of weeks!

The very first novel, actually, the only Charles Dickens novel I have read is Hard Times. I had to read it as part of my foundation year with the OU. I actually enjoyed it really, even though my tutor said that life was far too short to read again. I keep meaning to have a go at some more of his novels but the only one I tried was Pickwick Papers, which I found a tad boring. I shall give it a go again later. Now here’s the thing; it was today in 1812. Momentous year that, Old Napi from French France got his bum handed to him in Russia and an overture was written to celebrate Napis’s retreat.

I wonder what Napi would have made of the subject of today’s photo … 

An Abbot slef-propelled gun. Actually, I wonder what he might have made of a photo of him during his defeated retreat?

Today’s funny …



carrot1

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