Egidio, for this week’s Lens-Artist Challenge asks us ‘Where does it lead?’ He invites us to be literal, with roads, footpaths, animal tracks, waves and railway tracks, or not-at-all-straight-down-the-line metaphorical I’m going stolidly literal.
‘The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.’ GK Chesterton.
But pushing a route up a mountain demands even less direct route-finding.
Hairpin bends in Cantabria, Spain.
Roads over a thoroughly under-populated chunk of Russia. The ony signs of human intervention – apart from little-used roads is that line of wind turbines. Some of those roads seem to lead nowhere much. Quarries?
But this road is FAR less remote, and also features a a wind farm. We’re in Spain again.
I’ll finish with memories of a dreadful walk with friends. We could have done with some kind of path – any kind – leading across this dreadful field. I hope you feel suitably sorry for us.
A well-placed footpath sign would have helped. The happy wanderers in the featured photo above probably had one. Or at least a good map.
I thought it could be fun to see what my camera thought worth recording on 14th October over the last few years.
Last year we were coming to the end of our holiday in Alsace. Mooching round Munster, we spotted this stork standing guard over the hotel of the same name.
Two years before that, our area’s very first crop of sunflowers was drying out. I thought the flowers had prospered, but the farmer can’t have thought so, because the experiment hasn’t been repeated.
And three years before THAT, we were having a bit of break from Lockdowns. I must have had a moonlit walk.
Three years before, in 2017, we were entertaining friends from France. We took them, among all sorts of places, to our local Himalayan Gardens: featured photo above. The French appreciate their funghi, so we were pleased to show them these …
Finally, in 2015 (none from 2016), here’s some street furniture from La Rioja in Spain. We’d been there with my son, daughter-in-law, their baby son and her parents. Baby grandson is now in high school.
Continuing my From Dirty to Clean theme with windows, here are some to hang your washing from. All but one are from Spain. The odd one out is our very own washing line. Which one though?
PS. British Readers for the use of. I’m very taken by an app I’ve come across. It’s called The Washing Line Index. Supply it with your post code or allow it to use your location, and it will tell you how wise it would be to hang your washing out today. How likely is it to rain? How warm will it be? How hard will the wind blow? It’s brilliant, ad free and … free. As a confirmed hanger-out-of-washing-in-nearly-all-circumstances, I love it.
This week, for the Lens-Artists Challenge, our host John invites us to share waterscapes: scenes where water has changed the landscape, perhaps changed lives. In six images or fewer. Well. That IS a challenge.
Here’s the beginning of the story for so many of the world’s great waterways: a small insignificant waterfall, tumbling downwards, eventually to become a brook, a stream, a tributary, a mighty river, coursing its way towards the sea. This one’s in Cantabria in Spain.
One of the many waterfalls in the Cordillera Cantábrica, Spain.
Soon, these little watercourses gather strength and character. Here’s stage two, in Swaledale in the Yorkshire Dales.
As it journeys on, the river becomes slower, deeper, lazier. It ploughs a straighter furrow and may even threaten to overflow its banks unless contained. The Thames in London was tidied up and forced to conform in the 1860s and 70s, under a scheme devised by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. But that wasn’t enough. The sea caused problems from the other end, surging and flooding, often every winter. So eventually the Thames Barrier was built, about a hundred years after Bazalgette’s efforts upstream. Here it is.
TheThames Barrier at Woolwich
Of course some rivers do have coastal flood plains. The Júcar and Turia rivers, near Valencia together form a deltaic flood plain which is a wildlife haven, a fishing ground, an important rice growing area … But I’ve decided to make this shot my featured photo. Look at the top of the post!
Which leaves me with two more shots. Round here, gravel extraction is an important local industry. As each seam is exhausted, the company reponsible does a pretty decent job of allowing the area to flood to become a nature reserve. Here are two grateful local residents.
An egret and a heron at Nosterfield Nature Reserve ignoring one another.
Finally – human intervention again. Not too far from here is an immense reservoir, built early last century to provide water for the fast-growing city of Bradford. Scar House changed from being hilly moorland to becoming hilly moorland surrounding a huge lake. I haven’t been there this year, but we were there at the end of the last summer when drought had hit the area, and hit it hard. I can’t imagine what it looked like this year, which was even hotter, even drier, for even longer.
A drought-stricken Scar House Reservoir, Nidderdale.
A brief tour indeed. I’ve shown you no ponds, no canals, no seas, no oceans. No boats and ships. No fisherfolk, sailors, or other workers-round-water. No pleasure-seekers or holiday makers either. But only six photos? If that’s the limit, you have to trim your sails; limit your horizons; keep your feet on the ground; lower your sights, and other relevant clichés.
Sad, maybe. But windows in as bad a state as these are always have me wondering about the tales they could tell and their history, whether humble or grand.
For these images I’ve been just down the road, as well as to farthest North Yorkshire; Leeds; London; Seville; Catalonia; Korçë in Albania. Which are which, you may wonder …?
Today, I have just a few everyday windows (and doors) from my daughter’s and family’s town in Catalonia. Plus windows-within-a-window as my featured photo. You can tell from the colour of the sky that these were not taken last week, during Heat Wave Central. Nobody in their right mind was walking round then, as daily ‘feels like’ temperatures regularly hit 42 degrees
How very British is that? The photo just above is of the quietly flowing Ripon canal, upon which the rain is gently beating down.
More man-made flowing water: A lock on a different canal, the Leeds -Liverpool Canal, near Gargrave: and a detail from a different lock – er – somewhere else.
No waterfalls on a canal. To find those, you need to find trainee waterfalls, like this little torrent in Cantabria, or these jumping, weaving and bumbling ones on the River Wharfe at Grassington, and the River Swale near Muker.
Then there’s the sea: a winter sea here, at West Wittering: and a summer sea at Premià de Mar. All that equipment tells you the sea had been flowing rather too much, and nicking the beach. The citizens wanted their sands back.
But if you’re going to do this, or any other challenge, what you need most is a photographer to record these images for you. Here he is. I can’t use his photos, because he went off, unidentified, taking all his images with him.
You know the sort of day. When things just go right. When, perhaps unexpectedly, you have your camera with you just when one of the flighty, nervy Neighbourhood Squirrels is posing nicely, as ours was one day last week.
When, camera in hand, you manage to point-and-shoot at just the right moment. These images come from a long-past day in the Farne Islands when the Arctic Terns, frantic to protect their young, wheeled and dive-bombed overhead, giving chance after chance for action-packed shots even to a strictly amateur type like me. We had no idea where their nests and babies were and certainly weren’t going to go looking.
There were those red squirrels in Málaga, who managed to forget me for just long enough for me to whip my camera out …
Or that heron in Córdoba. It wasn’t so much the heron I was afraid of losing, as this collage of evening light.
Patti invites us, in this weeks Lens-Artists Challenge, to consider the shots we take – those which have a foreground – perhaps introducing the scene; middle ground – perhaps what the shot is ‘about’; and background, setting the shot in its context, and rounding our ‘story’ off.
I’ve chosen three watery shots. The first, the featured photo, is so freighted with memories of a calm, peaceful November evening at l’Albufera, Valencia, full of peace and joy that I can’t really judge it on its merits. I like the swell of the rippling water in the foreground. The middle ground merely has a bird (I can’t any longer remember what kind) pausing on that pole: for me providing a little context. And the background is surely that dramatic evening sky?
My second is also an evening shot: a beachside walk in my daughter’s home town in Spain. There are seashore strollers silhouetted in the foreground. The Mediterranean itself provides middle-ground context, with no action whatsoever. And there’s Barcelona in the background. Or is Barcelona part of the middle ground, with the sunset providing the backdrop?
I come closer to home for my last shot, to Knaresborough. The raven perching on the wall is a surprising visitor to the photo, perhaps acting as compère, describing the scene behind: the quiet River Nidd and riverside houses. Behind is the commanding viaduct. Is this background feature actually the dominant part of the image? Three sides of the shot are framed by trees, giving a slightly bucolic air to this urban scene.
This was an interesting challenge, Patti. I think that in some ways the techniques you describe start to become more instinctive the more time one spends with camera in hand. But it’s good consciously to revisit them and think about them anew. But looking out of the window at the rain, I think I may give photography a miss this weekend!
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