Crazy paving

Saltaire may be a great place to live but its streets are not paved with gold. Instead you'll find yourself tramping pavements made of good old Yorkshire stone. It can be slippery when wet but it has a nice patina, with all sorts of random marks and subtle colourations. I thought it would make an interesting pattern image.

Mono locks

Bright, contrasty sunshine isn't generally the best for photos but it does make for some interesting shadows and details. Here are some that caught my eye around the 5 Rise Locks. 

Gneiss beaches

Harris, day five
We spent the afternoon in Lewis on a couple of (very Gneiss) beaches, one stony and one sandy. The local rock is Lewisian Gneiss, a metamorphic rock that, at 3 billion years old, is reckoned to be the oldest rock in Britain and one of the oldest in the world, two thirds the age of the earth. See HERE for a more detailed explanation. It is very attractive, with multi-coloured layers and patterns. I love pebbles, there's something so tactile about water-smoothed stone and I was tempted to put a couple in my pocket. (I know you shouldn't!) It was mainly the thought of my luggage allowance on the flight back that stopped me!

Wherever, there are stones, someone will have balanced a few...

I was fascinated by the patterns in the peaty water of a small stream running across the beach to the sea.

Luskentyre patterns

Harris, day four
One of the motivations that had me longing to visit Harris was seeing, some years ago, a series of photos taken at Luskentyre that had been printed on pearlised paper so that they shimmered. They were wonderful. Our best opportunity to see the incredible patterns of tide and sand was on the morning of day four of our trip, from the high viewpoint on the Seilebost side of the estuary. The tide was partly in (though I could never work out if it was on its way in or out!), giving shades of turquoise, grey and duck egg blue against the very light sand. Strands of seaweed made darker counterpoints, as did the flocks of birds feasting at the water's edge. Without binoculars, they were a little hard to identify but some were oystercatchers, some lapwing and some geese, though there were a few much smaller waders scurrying about as well. Hopefully these photos give at least some idea of how beautiful it was.

Going dotty

Here's another layered image. It started out as two pictures of the pierced metal sides of a pedestrian walkway over a nearby road. My original images just look like the grey steel it is made from but by layering them and then boosting the saturation, subtle colours within it become much more vivid. It's fun to do but it makes me think that designing curtain fabric or wrapping paper must be a complete doddle these days. It only takes a few minutes to create something like this. Dotty!

Shadow variations

A brief spell of bright sunshine means shadows - and chance to play a little. This is one of the original Victorian fire escapes on the main mill building of the Victoria Mills complex, now converted into apartments.

I like it in mono but it also makes an interesting colour study, with the blue tones over-saturated.

More angles

These are some more of the images I took around the theme of 'angles' that didn't quite make the grade. Nevertheless, it is fun spotting potential subjects and a useful exercise in paying attention.

Threads

Bradford Industrial Museum - After some experimentation, I decided it seemed more effective to focus in on the detail in the museum. Being housed in an old mill, it has huge windows which give good light but also create reflections on the metal and glass and mean you are shooting against the light, if you aren't careful. I'm quite pleased with both these compositions, one relying for impact on colour and the other on pattern. The top one shows the value of my new(ish) longer lens for getting an effective depth of field, something I'm still working at perfecting.

Off grid

In common with many cities, lots of the newer buildings in Leeds have acres of glass that provide interesting reflections. Sometimes a view catches your eye. Here I was drawn to the colours, angles and grid lines. It can be quite hard to tell what is a reflection and what is a view through glass.

Quartet

Walking by the river recently, I noticed this curious pattern of tree branches splaying out from a central point. Reflected in the water, it looked a bit like the spokes of a wheel. Seemed like an image to play with... I tried a few different mono conversions using the Nik Collection plug-ins.

Leaf patterns

The sun comes out and I start seeing patterns....

Shadows - up Spook Hill!

It's a great delight lately to have one of those rare days when the sun shines brightly enough to create some shadows!

I've started having a very short lunchtime walk 'round the block' when I'm at work. It only takes ten minutes but the area around my temporary workplace is really pretty uninspiring and desperately lacking in places to go (especially compared to my habitual jaunt along the canal and around Salts Mill). However, even a brief foray outside to stretch the legs and release the mind, is, I feel, a good thing to do.

So it is: across the car park, up a bit of a hill (Spook Hill in my mind!), past the old but still functioning textile mill, through a 'dark canyon' between the old buildings where no sun ever penetrates, past the shabby but busy little sandwich shop (all those workers have got to eat), past the scrapyard that seems to extend across both sides of the road and onto the pavements too (marvelling at the way they can pierce a car windscreen with the prongs of a forklift truck to lift them on to a pile - and how a broken car windscreen appears to be made up of thousands of little turquoise gems), past a couple of old and beleaguered terraced houses (fancy living in the middle of an industrial estate and next to a scrapyard?), along a snicket beside the railway and back down to work again, enjoying a brief but interesting vista across the whole city, which lies in a bowl below the surrounding hills.

Even on such an uninspired walk, I enjoyed the shadow pattern created by a few spindly little trees and some railings.

The joy of commuting!

Since Christmas until very recently, I have been working from home, as my workplace was badly flooded on Boxing Day and has yet to reopen. Working from home has many positives. I am used to it anyway as for many years I worked freelance. I already have a comfortable, well equipped office in my home so I have not been trying to work from the kitchen table like some of my workmates. It's quiet and I can really crack on without any interruptions but on the downside, sometimes it's nice to be interrupted and I have missed seeing my colleagues and enjoying the usual banter of an office environment.  A once-a-week meeting hardly compensates for the lack of stimulation and the absence of people to toss ideas around with. However, it has worked fine for me. We are now being temporarily rehoused in an office near the city centre, giving me a hour's bus commute morning and night.  I usually have a short, pleasant walk to my usual office - and walking upstairs to work has been even nicer, especially when the sun shines!

Walk the plank

A plank bridge over a small stream that flows down to join the River Aire under the aqueduct at the far side of Hirst Woods. The strong spring sunshine made a very graphic shadow pattern.

Rainy day pattern

Rainy days and bank holidays (combined) always get me down.. so at Easter I took myself off to the Media Museum in Bradford to see an excellent exhibition: 'Drawn by Light', showcasing the archive of the Royal Photographic Society. See here for a review, if you're interested. It's fascinating to see the equipment photographers used in the early years and the quality of softness and grain in some of the early prints is beautiful. Quite different from what we're used to seeing today. The exhibition is well-curated and shows early photographs juxtaposed with more recent work from some renowned photographers like Martin Parr and Don McCullin, which in itself is thought-provoking.

A glimpse through a rainy window out of the back of the Museum provided quite an interesting pattern of lines.

People art

Looking down from the upper levels of London's Tate Modern gallery - the patterns people make are as interesting as the art works on show, I think.

Tulip Stairs

Isn't this exquisite?  It's a staircase in the Queen's House in Greenwich. It's called the Tulip Stairs because the wrought iron rail has tulip (or probably fleurs-de-lis) motifs in it. It soars upwards for three or four floors towards a glass cupola that lets the daylight shine right down. It seems to look even prettier in the photo than it did in real life, because of the spiral effect. When you are actually there looking at it, your eye more or less compensates in a way that the camera lens doesn't.  Apparently it was 'the first geometric self-supporting spiral stair in Britain' (whatever that means!) It is reputed to harbour a ghost, after a tourist spotted shrouded figures on his photograph in 1966... but  you won't see one on my photo.

Wild wind blowing

This photo was one of those 'happy accidents' that sometimes happen. I was setting up my tripod and somehow managed to take a photo whilst moving the camera. I was about to delete it but then I thought that with a square crop it makes quite a nice image.

Intersection 4

This is the photo I chose to enter for the 'Intersection' theme (see previous days). It's a very reflective office building near the rail station in Leeds. Where two blocks meet at a corner, the reflections create this riot of intersecting lines. It was a dark winter's afternoon and I was initially dismayed to find that the office lights were on - but in the end I think that lifts the image from being simply a pattern picture into something a bit more interesting.

The theme for January is 'Rust' - now that shouldn't be too difficult....!

Intersection 3

Another 'Intersection' attempt. I don't think this one works really, mainly because of the very light area on the left. I couldn't shift my viewpoint a lot as I was hanging over a balcony in a shopping mall!