Browsing through my photos of five years ago, it was soon clear that they were all local views. Scenes taken during my solo Covid Lockdown wanderings exploring every local path that I knew, and some that I didn’t. We’re limited by having a river near our house, with no local bridge. So instead of having a whole circle of walks at our disposal, it’s only a semi-circle. That didn’t stop me discovering woodland I hadn’t explored, hitherto uninvestigated quarries and farmland, secret tracks near the river. I didn’t always take my camera, because I preferred being ‘in the moment’ as I tried to identify birdsong, enjoying clouds, grasses, emerging blossoms and flowers.
And just one from our village, where families got busy confecting scarecrows celebrating all the keyworkers who kept on working while we all stayed at home.
Beningbrough Hall is one of our local stately homes. An English Baroque masterpiece, its real delight lies in strolling round its gardens. Let’s do that now, for Dawn‘s turn as host of Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.
There are tulips …
…. and magnolias …
… and apple and pear blossom …
…. and so much else besides. But I’m keeping it simple today. I may take you back there another day.
Let’s have a bit of fun this week. Let’s spy on the photographers we spot, and take snaps of them as they do what photographers have to do. The featured photo was taken last summer near Bamburgh. These people with their cameras and all the tackle were actually twitchers, in pursuit of some bird that had fetched up there – I can’t remember what.
Here’s another image from there, and then another, also from Northumberland: the Baltic in Gateshead, where one eager visitor was taking shots of the bridges on the Tyne.
Or there’s that photographer’s paradise, Whitby Goth Weekend.
Or sometimes a TV photographer turns up. Much more impressive.
Or even what passes for film crew, spotted in Brick Lane.
But we’ll end where we began, with shots of photographers being snapped. A friend and I enjoyed playing around with this once-upon-a-time camera shop in Newcastle, and if you look very hard, you’ll see me in the second image, looking for that perfect shot.
Night photography isn’t really my thing, so Elke, this week’s host for Monochrome Madness, provided me with a real challenge when she proposed Night time as her theme.
Unsurprisingly, towns and cities provided me with a few ideas. Let’s go on a quick tour. Let’s visit Albania, England, Spain, France, South Korea and Poland…
Really though, Country Mouse prefers to dodge big cities. My featured photo is of the moon as darkness fell recently, while the photo below was taken just at the end of the road.
For this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, Ritva has chosen to focus on portraits. Difficult. Because it IS difficult, and many of the few I do take are of family, whom I don’t usually feature on my blog. There are the images I secretly take whilst out and about, but few of those quite measure up as portraits so much as someone-doing-something-or-just-walking.
Then I remembered York Viking Festival, which I recently featured on one of my posts. So back we go, to a day when photography was not only permitted, but encouraged.
Tips on how to bump off your enemy, Viking style.
Tips on throwing a clay pot, Viking style.
Tips on working in wood, Viking style.
This last set is for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness, because she invites us to take one photo, and crop it three different ways. So – two solo portraits, one two-handed portrait, all for the price of one shot of a Viking and his slave industriously working together.
Even though over the last few days the weather has reverted to winter chill with a vengeance, I think it’s definitely the week that Spring has Sprung. The daffodils have suddenly burst forth into golden glory. The grass is lusher. Dandelion and daisies crowd the verges. Spring announces itself in an explosion of colour, in contast to the muted browns and greys of winter with its dull skies and overabundance of mud.
So is there even any point in ‘doing’ spring in monochrome? I thought I’d find out, and chose four images where it’s not just spring flowers telling the story, because they’re complementing the buildings they grow near.
Perhaps these aren’t part of the story, because snowdrops show their faces from early January. But they’re white, so may not suffer so much in monochrome.
Primulas on a traffic island near York Minster.
Tulips overlooking Knaresborough Viaduct.
Part of my own difficulty is that I don’t enjoy tinkering with photos. What comes out of the camera either works, or it doesn’t, and then I’ll junk it. At most I’ll level the picture up, maybe lightly crop it, even – slightly – fiddle with brightness. So my translations into monochrome are crude at best. If I want monochrome – and I’m increasingly choosing it over colour – I’ll shoot in black and white. And perhaps follow up with a further version in colour. I admire those photographers who use editing tools with discretion, so what we see is the original shot – just enhanced in subtle ways. I’m less keen on dramatic editing. But in a diary that is already over-full, I guess I don’t feel like giving this particular skill the time it needs to learn to do it well.
I’ll finish with Fountains Abbey as it is now, its grounds carpeted in daffodils. Black and white as my featured photo, and – my much preferred version here – in the above-mentioned Glorious Technicolor.
Leeds is a Victorian industrial city that has vigorously embraced the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll explore a tiny part of the central area, as we did with the London branch of the family at half term.
We’ll start in a modern shopping centre..,
… and wander through the late Victorian covered market, stopping at one of the fish stalls.
The Corn Exchange was built at much the same time as the market, to trade corn. These days it’s the home of independent vendors selling to those looking to while away a pleasant hour or two finding something out of the mainstream.
We’ll wander down some older streets …
… then onto the newly developed banks of the River Aire. Industrial grot has been replaced by both student and up-market flats, and the featured photo shows the view of Leeds old and new. The Royal Armouries Museum was supposed to be our destination, but at half-term it was way too busy, so we didn’t stay long . Here’s a taster, showing that even horses and elephants can get togged up for war, and that swords never seem out of fashion.
Tired now. We’ll wander back along the Aire, spotting a couple of cormorants on the way. That means there must be fish to be had these days. It was a filthy river in the bad old days.
We’ll be back another day. I hardly recognise the city I called home until about twenty five years ago.
This week, Patti has invited us to explore colour photography, as against black and white for her Lens-Artists Challenge. She’d like us to present the same image both in colour and in monochrome. Because I do very little post-processing, I’ve used the fairly limited options offered by Google Photos.
What to choose? I decided to pick images that I thought were sure to work best in colour, and see what happened if I imposed a monochrome palette on them. I was quite surprised.
First of all I looked at my images of Vitré, the charming French commune I shared with you a couple of weeks ago. Surely it’s all about the colour of the gaily painted houses there?
The Old Town, Vitré
I surprised myself. I liked both – perhaps because there’s a bit of an expectation that half-timbered houses, in England at least, tend to be in black and white. What gives the coloured image the edge in my eyes though, is the lucky chance of that figure in bright red strolling down the street. It just lends an extra focus to the shot lacking in the monochrome image.
Then I went to familiar stamping grounds. Brimham Rocks.
Brimham Rocks, North Yorkshire
I’m pretty happy with both. Those puffy cumulus clouds help to lighten the sky in the black and white image. It might otherwise have been a little uniformly grey. I’ve just popped another image in as the header photo. The rocks as seen through a conveniently sited picture frame. Trust me. The colour image is barely any different. It was a very overcast day.
The last image is of the simply appalling ferry we took from Rome to Barcelona the other year. Those rusting chimneys have their visual appeal, but the rest of the ship was like that too! Would they work in black and white? Let’s see.
Our Grimaldi lines ship. Avoid.
Hmm. I think it’s OK. The rusty pipes have sufficient contrast to work even without colour. In my opinion.
So there we have it. Are you a fan of colour, monochrome, or both? And do you have any strong feelings about what works, or doesn’t, here?
I decided to include this post in Leanne’s Monochrome Madness challenge. She can close her eyes to the colour versions.
This last month, I’ve seen a lot of the sea. Travelling under it, to get to France; living beside it in Premià de Mar; and sailing over it to return to England. I’ve seen it in all its moods, and I’ll show a selection here for Sarah’s The Sea Challenge for Leanne’s Monochrome Madness.
There’s the sea when it isn’t there, because the tide’s out…
Heysham, Lancashire.Dumfries and Galloway
And when it’s placid, even in the middle of the North Sea …
The North Sea
When it’s a little bit frisky, whether in Saltburn or Spain…
SaltburnSpain
Or limbering up for a storm, in Staithes or Saint-Malo….
StaithesSaint-Malo
Or just making a statement, as it is here in Igidae …
I haven’t got a truly stormy picture of a truly stormy sea. These pictures taken at Sandsend near Whitby, and at Igidae on a very windy day will have to do. They were bad enough for an unwilling matelot.
Here in the UK, we know a lot about clouds. And at this time of year, we know a lot about grey clouds. Looking out of the window just now yields an unending vista of smoky grey, darkening over Mickley way to gunmetal and slate. No cotton-wool puffs of cumulus for us.
So let me whisk you to a day in June, when the plane transporting me from Barcelona to Leeds offered me a constantly changing cloudscape below me, with tantalising glimpses of beaches, landscapes and the Pyrenees, the Atlantic coast, and then crowded old England. The featured photo shows us just leaving Barcelona – hardly a cloud in the sky. And then …
Mist rather than cloud, to start with.The foothills of the PyreneesWell, who can tell?Cresting the Pyrennean peaksOver the French coast now…Here too.Still FranceNearly homeEven more nearly home.
Although generally a big fan of monochrome, on a grey day like this, I’m not sure I like these clouds and vistas in black and white. My memory of that summer day was of clear bright and optimistic colours. But needs must. This is for Monochrome Madness, and hosted this week by Brian, of Bushboy’s World.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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