Puplet's Pontifications

Back soon

2008-07-22T00:39:00.002Z

A terabyte of storage has its uses, including making for a very useful step when calibrating one's monitor that has red-shifted over the months I've been away from here. Of course, colour calibration is not the most useful thing when you're a small dog with limited colour vision. But it makes for more accurate black and white conversions if nothing else.

Not much typing being done...

2008-02-03T12:27:00.001Z

... but that's not to say I don't know how :-)

89 words

Touch Typing online

A handful of Bagpusses...

2007-12-15T01:35:00.000Z

New camera, which is as tiny as church mice and miniature, stripey pink cats...

Donna Nook

2007-11-05T21:02:00.000Z

Nature red in tooth and claw ... can also be intimidatingly frisky it seems.

An unusual bed...

2007-10-24T16:05:00.000Z

...for Fran, with novels by Douglas Coupland, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett just a paw's stretch away.

In Memoriam

2007-10-19T10:23:00.000Z

Walking around Beverley yesterday, I was shocked to discover that John Hillman, the butcher who ran Ye Olde Pork Shoppe, had died. I didn't know him very well at all but I liked him: the way he didn't say much; the way he had supreme confidence in the meat he sold; and the way he always seemed to mistake me for someone else whom he'd been keeping things aside for.

The longest conversation I ever had with John was about forerib and how nice it was. It was a short conversation, just a few quiet grunts, a few nods, and a universe of enthusiasm.

So thanks for all the beef, John. And thanks for letting me in on the joy of pig tails.

Jane Brocket's The Gentle Art of Domesticity

2007-10-10T15:16:00.000Z

We came back from town today with an absolute treasure of a book, Jane Brocket's (a.k.a. Yarnstorm) The Gentle Art of Domesticity, brimful with lovely things to make, eat, read and hibernate in, and all lovingly illustrated with her own photographs (taken with a "magic sensor" Fuji F30) to boot. The afternoon, with its warm, autumnal light, its freshly-brewed coffee and its box of yesterday-baked Yarnstorm flapjacks, seemed a perfect time for sitting in the garden and having a thorough read of this much-anticipated book. But Susie, after duly reminding us of the differences between domesticity and domestication (briefly delineated in the introduction of the book), had other ideas, mainly revolving around cat food.

Rejoice with me!

2007-10-04T18:51:00.000Z

For I have found the coin...

My very first royalties cheque arrived in the post this week, to the sum of only a rather modest amount, to be sure, but it had an Author Code, and a breakdown of UK/Export Sales, and all sorts of interesting ledger information which made it almost as interesting as if it'd been for a gazillion pounds. While it's not made me a rich little dog, it has made me feel warm, fuzzy and writerly inside, which is nice.

Fujica 35EE (1961)

2007-08-26T13:31:00.000Z

Occasionally, a camera comes along that is just wilful but brilliant in its design. The Fujica 35EE is one such camera:

At first glance, it looks unassuming enough. Clearly a rangefinder camera. The grid-like square suggests some kind of batteryless selenium-based exposure meter. There's dials round the lens, probably for focusing and aperture:

Closer inspection, oh look, there are the aperture settings - not phased at all. I set an aperture, take a look through the viewfinder. How do I set the speed of the shutter? and where do I find information about what speed to set it to?

Yes, that's right, the shutter speed dial is built into the lens and the exposure meter readings is given in a little window on the top of the camera. There's no focusing mechanism on the lens though. How do you focus? Ah ha, it turns out it's done with that little metal thumb wheel which simultaneously rotates that little disk with all those numbers on it - yes, that's right, there's a dedicated dial to display depth of field values at any given distance and aperture... Gosh...

And, now, I've focused, selected my shutter speed, selected my aperture, and am ready to take the shot. I gently squeeze the shutter button next to the exposure meter. It doesn't fire. Of course, you have to wind on the film. Where's the wind-on lever?

On the bottom...with a built-in reminder dial about the kind of film you've got in it. There's a cute little frame counter next to it to. And a tripod mount. Handy. The reminder dial reminds me that I've not set the ASA speed. Where's that?

And, yes, that is the film rewind crank sticking out of the side of the camera... Did I mention that you get shutter priority mode, despite not having a battery? That said, there may, actually be a battery compartment somewhere that I've not found...

I can't help but reminded of a certain crab...

Spartacus; or, Nothing New Under the Sun

2007-08-12T08:48:00.000Z

In 1997, Apple released the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, codenamed: Spartacus. It retailed at $7,500, and shipped with a 250mhz processor, 32mb of RAM, a 2gb hard-drive, and a 4x CD-ROM. All this was reasonably high-spec at the time but the TAM's unique selling point was that it was an all-in-one desktop with a built-in LCD screen and thus looked very, very futuristic indeed. To make things even more futuristic, Apple took one of their laptop keyboards and turned it into a full-sized peripheral. Low-profile keys, you see, meant futuristic. Ooh...
(Photo: Wikipedia)

The low-profile keys are back, with the shiny new iMac:

Except this time you get a numeric keypad. Unless you go for the wireless keyboard option. In which case you don't. Because, you know, wireless is futuristic - and, as we saw in the TAM, the future doesn't do numeric data-entry. No, the paranoid android in the corner takes care of all the numbers :-)

Palimpsest

2007-08-03T00:56:00.000Z

Given that the epistolary form is, necessarily, a performative genre (with its explicit audience, and, often, its participation in a distinctly public discourse); and given that it is well known that, when we tell stories, the need for grand narrative effect often jostles with - and shouts down - the need for objective, verifiable truth ... I feel no compunction at all in having written to Amateur Photographer magazine with a lovely picture of me and my tiny Olympus XA2...

Feeling crafty....

2007-08-01T17:31:00.001Z

And, for my next encore, I made a hard aluminium flight-case for the lenses currently scattered precariously round my room.

Case: £3.35 (£10 for 3), B&Q
High density foam: £5.50, Dunelms
Time: 1.5 hrs
Bear: Winnie by Bears of Eastwood

Transplant

2007-08-01T17:22:00.000Z

Take one dead iPod Mini. Crack open. Remove 4gb Microdrive. Insert Compactflash card from digicam. Re-assemble. Result: working iPod Mini with longer battery life and no moving parts to make music skip when jumping around!

Let us eat cake!

2007-08-01T17:16:00.000Z

Even if they weren't as helpful and kind as they are, even if the quality of their books wasn't absolutely fantastic, Ashgate would still be one of the loveliest publishers in the world. Why? Because, at conferences, while others are offering crappy discounts and free ballpoint pens, Ashgate realises that you may have had a long trip, and may be tired and hungry. So, instead of stuff you don't want, they give you a muffin.

Flood

2007-07-01T02:17:00.000Z

This isn't a picture from this week's flood. No, this is a picture from the week before, before there were surfers in Chanterlands Avenue; before there were 100 people camped out overnight in the City Hall; before rubber dinghies became legitimate forms of street transport.

And where was I this week? Safely tucked up at home, avoiding the cold, the broken sewers, the Dysentery from contaminated water. Hardly the action of an adventurous photographer with a weather-sealed camera, I know. But, hey, the flooded streets were flooded with cameras and, now, I think I understand local 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell a little better:

Let others tell the Paradox,
How Eels now bellow in the Ox;
How Horses at their Tails do kick,
Turn'd as they hang to Leeches quick;
How Boats can over Bridges sail;
And Fishes do the Stables scale.
How Salmons trespassing are found;
And Pikes are taken in the Pound.

(from Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax)

"Let others tell" ... yup, Marvell didn't like to get his paws wet if he could help it either...

A week after my favourite Coleridge quotation...

2007-06-14T00:18:00.000Z

Okay, so I knew that there were fairies in Scotland. And long-leggety beasties also. But long-leggety fairies? Someone's having me on, right?

In times gone by...

2007-05-28T15:00:00.001Z

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and wat’ry depths; all these have vanish’d.
They live no longer in the faith of reason!
But still the heart doth need a language, still
Doth the old instinct bring back the old names."

From Schiller’s Piccolomini (II.iv.110ff), translated by S. T. Coleridge

In times gone by, you could stand outside Happy Snaps, press your nose to the foul-tasting window, and watch photographs appear as they were being developed, trundling, in a long, unbroken strip, up a conveyor belt to be dried, diced, and parceled up for their owners. who'd come in an hour, a week, or a day. Occasionally, a picture would break the mould of satisfactory, passable pictures, and a bored-looking lab technician might stick a sticker on it, giving standard advice about using a flash, or a tripod. But, very occasionally, there'd be a picture for which there was no sticky explanation: a strange, torn, half-image, and incongruous double exposure, or, perhaps, something had gone horribly, horribly wrong the lab's C41 processing drum, and prosaic things like colour balance had been thrown to the wind.

The age of digital doesn't allow for such mysterious pictures that exist beyond the power of all mortal photographers. At least, that is what I thought until this morning, when I successfully recovered every single one of the 200 images that I took yesterday on a single memory card, which, inadvertently, in a state of tiredness and slight drunkenness, I'd formatted. Twice. And recorded video over:

Magic light...

2007-05-18T22:44:00.000Z

With the barest fractions of nature's resources, it transpires I can create magic light. In any direction. On demand. Does that make it less magic?

Three photos, all alike in dignity...

2007-05-10T01:00:00.000Z

Three duck photos, all of them personal favourites from the cute-fest that was the past week. One of them was taken with an Olympus C-5050, a four year-old digicam that's worth no more than £100 these days. The other two were both taken with my aged Olympus E-1, but one was taken with a slightly battered lens from the 1970s that cost £65; and the other used not one but two modern lenses at the same time that, combined, have a high street value of £1000 (provided you're foolish enough to shop on the high street - what's the matter with thee? hast though not heard'st of the inter-net?).

But which is which is which? and does it really matter?

This week, I'm beginning to think that perhaps every camera has its unique points, has its place in the world. Except, maybe, this one. No excuse for this at all in a modern and cultured civilization.

Tiny

2007-05-09T01:48:00.000Z

ickle

Feather duvet...

2007-05-09T01:27:00.000Z

Sigh...

Revisionist History

2007-05-06T00:30:00.000Z

After watching the excellent 300, I've been thinking a lot about the Battle of Thermopylae, 480BC, when King Leonidas of Sparta funneled the massive army of Xerxes I into one narrow pass, thus taking the edge of the military advantage off Xerxe's superior numbers. The historian, Ctesias, narrates that, on the first day, the Spartans fought a force of 10,000 and only suffered a handful of losses. Herodotus mentions that on the second day, Xerxes sent 10,000 of his finest troops, known as the "Immortals", who were most afraid as they came up against walls made from the corpses of those who'd fallen the day before.

A new fragment, attributed by experts to Herodotus, was discovered this week in the Great Library of Alexandra collection. Having lain unread for thousands of years, the new papyrus fragment finally yielded its secrets to archivists armed with the latest in mass spectrometry and infra-red equipment.

Remarkably, it suggests that contrary to previously known accounts, the Immortals may have come up against, not a wall of human corpses, but a wall of very fluffy ducks, living and breathing, and looking tremendously, tremendously adorable:

Well, the movie took liberties with history - why can't I? :-)

Big and Small II

2007-05-01T18:26:00.000Z

This week, various shops across the globe started stocking Olympus's new camera, the E-410, a gently updated version of the E-400 that enjoyed a Europe-only release back in September.

Whether or not it's better than the E-400 remains to be seen. Certainly, it has a larger buffer, faster autofocus, all things that make it good. But I wonder whether we've seen the last of a breed with the E-400, which had a lovely but expensive and rather scarce 10 megapixel sensor made by Kodak, similar to that used in the illustrious E-1. The E-410 sensor's a bit like the Panasonic one in the E-330, which seems to yield slightly more muted images.

The forums, this week, were filled with the usual chatter: people who found themselves incapable of holding the camera because it didn't have a grip on the right side (digital newbs); people who had the hands of giants grafted onto them at birth who couldn't operate the new miracle of rare device; and the usual nay-sayers telling folks like me that we'd wasted our money on a dead-end digital system that was to go the way of the dinosaurs.

A whole bunch of other people, however, rather cautiously welcomed the little camera and were eager to find out whether they could get away with carrying a little less gear if they got one. But then came the advertising, over at the specially constructed olympus-wonder.com site. And then the same people started wondering whether they had, after all, been lusting after a girl's camera.

Because, look, the well-known Japanense actress, Aoi Miyazaki, stars in the advert. And she's little, and quirky, and talks to small children, and giggles at dogs.

Having decided the E-410 was, indeed, a camera for young women, the community moved on... "Fworgh", they said in unison, "Would you just look at that strap?"

And, then, they wondered whether, if they bought the new camera, Ms Miyazaki would like them better.

If I was a camera designer, I'd be rolling my eyes right now. Presumably, they'd been running around, sourcing new sensors for the new global camera, presumably they'd been stressed about putting the finishing touches on the E-410's new cousin, the E-510, presumably there were software modifications to the end with the new TurboPic III image processing engine which promises less digital noise at high ASAs without sacrificing too much fine detail, presumably they'd been wondering how to cram all this in into the smallest digital SLR ever made in the history of photography.

And, all that time, they could have just impressed the world with crochet.

Indecisive Moment II

2007-04-30T01:04:00.000Z

For a split-second, everything was perfect. The clouds parted and an isolated beam of sunlight fell through the window, onto our ordinarily rather prosaic landing, transforming it, momentarily, into something more dynamic and theatrical. Susie Cat, ever the sun-worshipper, planted herself firmly in this spotlight, looking, in my eyes at least, even more regal than usual. My camera-brain, the one that lets me know when modern technology might fail me, was whirring like clockwork and, unlike later in the week when I'd get really muddy, was giving me useful, faultless advice.

I pre-focused my increasingly trusty Olympus C-5050, visually checked composition on the LCD screen, and gently, gently, depressed the shutter.

But the C-5050 isn't a digital SLR. Like most digicams, there's a tiny lag between the moment the shutter is pressed and when the picture is taken. Some reviews record that this lag is around 0.2s in length. And, somewhere, in that fraction of a second, in the way that some people in group shots must blink, Susie decided to stick her tongue out at me...

Talk about comic timing.

2007-04-22T22:31:00.000Z

The Olympus XA, first manufactured in 1975, was a stroke of genius from the mind of Yoshihisa Maitani, the man who brought you the path-breaking Olympus OM series. Maitani has always been obsessed with small cameras: the OM cameras were 35% smaller and lighter than any of the competition; you could fit the half-frame Pen camera into a shoe - and still have room in there for several interchangeable lenses; the pocket-sized Olympus Mju was one of the most successful compact cameras ever.

The XA is the smallest 35mm rangefinder camera ever built. You can manually focus it, select film speed and apertures, attach a flash and, most importantly, it had a radically, phenomenal six-element 35mm lens on it. It was also kind of fiddly and though that appealed to some people, it didn't to others who had SLRs for fiddly work and wanted something simpler, without compromising on quality, for their shirt-pocket point-and-shoot.

Enter the Olympus XA2 in 1980. It shares the same iconic shell design, the same feather-light electromagnetic shutter which does a fantastic job of minimizing camera shake but, instead of aperture priority, it offers a simple full-program mode and, instead of rangefinder focusing, it's got a simple, three-step focusing scale.

It's puppy-sized and lovely, and I'm looking forward for a good, bright day, when I'll be taking it out on the streets, loaded with a roll of monochrome film. What is making me giggle most nerdishly, though, is in the care instructions at the back of the manual:

Drop it in water, and angels will pray over it; drop it on the ground, and it will hurt its leg...

What?

In the garden...

2007-04-04T02:00:00.000Z

...There are ladybirds, shuffling in the emerald grass. If you listen closely, you can almost hear their footsteps...

There are tiny birds, with delicate plumage, tweeting for the joy of spring:

And a certain little cat takes an interest in all these things:

Except maybe not so much the ladybirds...

Seal

2007-04-02T17:59:00.000Z

On Saturday, I found wallabies, a bus-ride from my house. And, today, I found this little guy, a forty minute train journey away, on a beach at Bridlington...

Well I never...

2007-04-02T00:50:00.000Z

I never thought I'd see wallabies in Hull
Lounging in the park like teenagers
at an open-air concert...

Kittenworld Evolution

2007-03-22T15:35:00.000Z

Fran...

2007-03-10T03:35:00.000Z

...17 months and 3 metres from where we first found her.

Catnip Revisited

2007-02-25T14:24:00.000Z

Oh, Soots, will you ever learn?

Beyond Words

2007-02-21T01:46:00.000Z

Germany

2007-02-17T01:43:00.000Z

Occasionally, in this house, we hear murmurs about Germany. I didn't go over Christmas (owing to an unswerving duty of care towards cats) but I'm getting intrigued... One of the things I hear is that the women on pedestrian crossing signage all have very distinct hairstyles...

And goodnight...

2007-02-14T02:59:00.000Z

[Do nut adjust your screens: I'm just being post-processing indecisive.]

Going to bed...

2007-02-14T02:03:00.000Z

...and what should I see but Fran and her new friend, having a terribly amicable, not-in-the-least-confrontational chat about, oh, the weather and things like that?

Genetic Experiment Yields Previously Extinct Dodo

2007-02-04T00:39:00.000Z

Genetic scientists in the quiet village of Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, revealed, today, the first fruits of a secret, ten-year project to reconstruct the DNA of Raphus cucullatus, a bird more commonly known as the 'dodo', that became extinct in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

Splicing DNA fragments garnered from the skin of the last known stuffed dodo - currently housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford - with those of a swan, the team led by one Dr Donald Canard, successfully engineered a swan-dodo cross-breed, called a 'swodo'.

Like the extinct dodo, the swodo is a flightless bird that weighs approximately 25kg. And, like the dodo, the swodo has a small but plump body, a short neck, and a relatively large head. While its feathers and beak continue to resemble those of a swan, the team are certain that all of the swodo's internal organs are identical to those of the dodo. The team now plan to selectively breed external traits such as the dodo's distinctive grey plumage back into the 'swodo', and are confident that, by 2010, they will be releasing significant numbers of dodo back into the wild.

Bird of the Day

2007-01-16T20:18:00.000Z

Wilhelma Zoo, Germany.

Forgoing Bratworst

2007-01-04T01:36:00.000Z

The opportunity for an international jet-setter trip arose today, a flight to Germany, the home of bratworst, das Land meiner Traüme... But, today, I also heard of what happens to cats when they're left unattended for a week. They unscrew all the lightbulbs and replace them with red ones:

They raid the catnip cupboard and get stoned:

And and they stick out their tongues at one another when they quarrel about food.

Have you ever seen anything so utterly, utterly barbaric?

Christmas Food...

2006-12-28T00:01:00.000Z

This Christmas, the kitchen abounded with all sorts of interesting food. The fridge bulged for the first time in months; the drinks cabinet creaked under the weight of its exotic cargo (Welsh whisky - I kid you not), like the sea-soaked timbers of a pirate ship. And, in the finest tradition, we drank, ate, and made merry.

The cats liked it too: they enjoyed very much their scraps of duck and roast beef, as well as their own little can of celebratory tuna, which came, this week, with no hidden foul-tasting pills, the way it normally comes.

And they seemed perfectly, perfectly content. But, last night, I noticed that Fran had an air of conspiracy about her:

Yes, she alone had made a precise inventory of the Christmas supermarket shop. And she alone had noticed that something very large had been stowed away in the deep freeze, left uncooked and uneaten...

Not just for Christmas...

2006-12-21T00:47:00.000Z

I'd officially like to take this opportunity to welcome young Seraphina to the household. She's a very, very little guide-dog, and she has her own lead and everything. Her favourite hobbies are drawing with Swiss crayons, revelling in Alice Meynell's poetry, and nattering away to Winnie Bear in the early hours of the morning. Barrabas likes her very much, as do I, as does Sandy Dog.

Happy Feet

2006-12-19T23:55:00.000Z

For the last few days, I've not been taking any photographs at all. Rather, I've been restoring and digitizing slides from the early 1960s, taken by a member of the British Antartic Survey.

The slides were found in an attic. They had mould and condensation damage which cleaned up very nicely with some strangely addictive PEC-12 Film Emulsion Cleaner and, once they were remounted in archive quality slide mounts by Gepe, scanned in with a trusty Microtek scanner borrowed off a friend, and post-processed for those particularly stubborn bits of dust, they looked rather nice. Or, they should look rather nice by the time I finish. So far, the project's taken £70 and 30 hours. I've still got 110 pictures to zip under the all-seeing magnifying glass of Photoshop but cleaning snow is fun and, somehow, appropriate for this time of the year.

Something tells me, though, that I wouldn't have even thought of being so thorough had I not seen Happy Feet last week - and then picked up this slide...

Sootie

2006-11-28T11:26:00.000Z

Half-asleep but always defending the hotly contested territory that is the blanket by the radiator.

Quoque Magnus Mihi Teneo

2006-11-10T16:58:00.000Z

I used to fantasize about small cameras with insanely great optics, something that would fit between my little paws, that I could document the world with, something, actually, not unlike the Panasonic DMC-FZ7 with its 12x optical zoom endorsed by Leica, that Postie brought to my door this morning.

And, though it's beautiful and often surprising in its capabilities, I'm beginning to think that, somehow, inperceivably, I've got used to the world being considerably bigger than me, got used to it not fitting. And, actually, it's becoming strangely comforting. Like a baggy sweater. Or an Olympus E-1.

In Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), George Lazonby masquerading as James Bond told us that his family motto was 'Orbis non sufficit' ('The World Is Not Enough'), a fine sentiment, for sure, but not one for the likes of me. So today, just a week before the new Casino Royale movie premieres, I thought I'd get me a motto of my very own: 'Quoque Magnus Mihi Teneo'. It, is of course, a translation of a line from Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, and it means 'Too huge for me to hold'.

On Velociraptors

2006-10-23T20:56:00.000Z

So we know the theory - birds are the direct descendents of our favourite Jurassic/Triassic period dinosaurs. We've all watched Jurassic Park, and we've all heard Sam Neill tell us that even 'raptor' means 'bird of prey' (which makes the Raptors in Battlestar Galactica a bit more sensible - here I was thinking they were called raptors because they were obsolete technology (dinosaurs) without computer networking capabilities)...

But there is another possibility. According to Fran, cats - not birds - inherited the earth when dinosaurs stopped ruling it...

Her evidence? I must say, it's sort of compelling.

Let's return to Jurassic Park. Cast your mind back to when Sam Neill says THIS.

The six-inch killing claw looks like this (picture courtesy of the Sam Neill site):

(You can even buy your own raptor claws from HERE...)

Now, here's the kicker... Look, just look at what Sootie Cat shed yesterday...

I must confess, the similarity is uncanny. Unless...cats descended from birds? Heresy!

Anciene Dainty Cake Excavated

2006-10-19T15:02:00.000Z

Pastry history was made this week when building contractors carrying out routine repair work on a student accommodation complex in Hull inadvertently discovered the oldest surviving dainty cake in Europe.

Upon discovering what he thought was tasty-looking rubble, Mr Wilbur Ateham, head of the building team, immediately alerted curators from the Institute of Modern Pastry who, after lengthy laboratory anaylsis, discovered that the cake dated back to the early eighteenth century and was, most likely, smuggled out of the court of Louis XV to be reverse-engineered by British cooks.

"It's an astonishing find", explained Professor B. King, "To find any cake at all from this period, completely intact, is amazing in itself - our knowledge of this period comes only from mere fragments, crumbs [...] You can imagine our surprise - and delight - when our laboratory technicians confirmed that wht we had found was nothing less than the earliest Commercy madeleine, until now a cake that only existed in legend, myth. I broke a little bit off the corner earlier: it's quite tasty."

Once it has been cleaned, the cake will exhibited for all to see in the Institute's Isabella Beeton Wing.

My blog as a flower

2006-10-19T07:41:00.000Z

'Twas pretty, watching this being built HERE, unfurling like a fern, or a cautious travelling snail. But I'm not going to read any significance into it whatsoever, because that would just be silly.

f1.4

2006-10-16T09:58:00.000Z

It looks weird, doesn't it? An Olympus E-1 camera which has more electrical gubbins than you could fathom in your wildest imagination, paired up with a manual-focus Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens, not a new one which costs £229 from Microglobe,
but a cheap (£38), mechanically identical thirty year-old one which a French ex-pat living in Japan sent to me this month.

It's the culmination of my adventures in low-light photography. It's been two weeks and a year since I first posted a half-way decent low-light picture of Emma Rugg on this blog. An entire DVD of Emma pictures wiser, I find myself tackling the challenge of low-light photography very differently indeed.

Everything, now, has gone back to basics: full manual exposure control, metering-by-guesswork, shooting RAW to bypass the image-processing engine, and black and white conversions to eke out every pixel of available information. An old-fashioned lens made before either Den or I were born, mounted onto my camera with something that was most likely cobbled together in a shed, seemed the natural thing to do, more natural, at any rate, than paying extortionate money for the nearest modern-day equivalent.

So, here, a year on, are my latest attempts at photographing musicians in the dark: two of McWatt, an accordion and flutist duo who featured on the Seeds and Bridges festival:

- and, just to give Den the chance to show he can deliver the goods after his last incredulously bad attempt, one of Fonda 500 also.

Tiny Planets II

2006-10-11T01:56:00.000Z

Okay, so in the episode "On the Right Track", Bong clearly has a laptop-sized PDA:

Which, with its characterful swerve and magnetic latch, is clearly modelled on Apple's G3 iBook:

Now, the good folk at Pepper's Ghost released the first Tiny Planets DVD (don't even get me started on the second... Hayley, I'm sure you're a nice girl-alien but really - NO-ONE EVER TALKS TO YOU! YOU'RE NOT WANTED!) in 2003 and the episode aired a year or so before that... So, assuming it's several years on in a post-iBook era and you wanted a cool, well-specced machine with a big, big screen for Bing to look at pictures of flockers on, what would you go for? That's right, a 17" G4 Powerbook...

And, oh, what has Imogen Heap got?

I'm no conspiracy theorist but I see a pattern emerging...

Tiny Planets

2006-10-10T00:33:00.000Z

Bing and Bong of Tiny Planets fame have a fluffy white sofa, one which they eat, sleep, and travel to the stars in...

Rummaging through Imogen Heap's website this evening, I discovered that she, too, had a fluffy white sofa:

Maybe, just maybe, underneath that book, there's a button...

Imogen Heap II

2006-10-03T11:42:00.000Z

Two days later and I still can't quite get over how amazing Immi's music is...

And that see-thru piano, filled with Apple Mac goodness...

I Megaphone

2006-10-02T15:04:00.000Z

Years ago, I bought I Megaphone, the debut album of a young singer-songwriter called Imogen Heap. It was by far the most fantastic album I owned, and sitting as it did alongside the Rankin Family, easily the coolest. I don't know why I bought it, but it's never been one I've regretted, not that buying a bad CD is something to mourn over for all eternity.

But, then, Imogen Heap vanished. And, then, she came back with a band called Frou Frou. And then she recorded her second solo album, Speak for Yourself. Securing the spots at the end of The Garden State, Shrek 2, Chronicles of Narnia and the season finale of the OC soundtracks catapulted her into the stardom she always deserved. And, last night, I got to see her in concert.

Awesome.

Immi was sometimes mysterious and sultry:

...always impassioned...

...occasionally angry...

..and had a far quirkier sense of humour than her music will sometimes have you believe!

Maus

2006-09-28T17:44:00.003Z

Once, there was a mouse, as small as a fag end...

And Fran the kitten caught it and threw it up into the air...

And then danced the hula in triumph...

Curious

2006-09-26T23:45:00.001Z

There is something curious about the underside of swans or, rather, how swans look when they're practically on top of you. Being a tiny puppy is very useful on such occasions - small means unobtrusive, which means getting shots that other people couldn't otherwise get, you see...

And, once a swan almost walks on top of you, it becomes a different bird entirely. Gone is that graceful neck, turned - humorously I think - into something far more stubby...

And that signature yellow-orange beak just looks like something that could, if it wanted to, kebab all the elements of your precious and, now, increasingly rare Zuiko Digital 14-54mm.....

Yup, that was a really close one...

Hotal California?

2006-09-25T09:50:00.000Z

This week, I went to Haworth, and stayed here. It was a really nice trip. And, yes, those are framed postcards of the Brontë sisters hanging on the wall. Funny, how one can have fond memories of a place that looks so inhospitable in photographs...

Tattoo

2006-09-24T09:25:00.000Z

Perhaps I was being a tiny bit over-sheepish in my last post:

This morning's huge mound of fortnight-old post-processing reminded me that, sometimes, I do photograph people without even thinking of my own embarassment or even personal safety. Like the other Thursday, when, approaching midnight, we fell in with a group of loud, drunken men on Beverley Road and not only persuaded them to take their clothes off -

- but also got them to compare their tattoos...

Indecisive Moment

2006-09-22T11:16:00.000Z

For a split-second, this had the potential of being a perfect image. The two nuns in their habits were strongly backlit by the semi-opaque wall of Leeds Railway Station, a place as secular as any yet strangely replete with crosses and crucifixes if you look hard enough.

But I stalled. I was tired. And I felt a little embarassed about photographing nuns from the other side of the platform. And I hesitated. And, consequently, I missed the shot. A decisive moment - that perhaps only I witnessed - lost, forever. I am very, very sorry.

The moral of the story? If you're obsessed enough to carry your camera around with you on the off-chance something photographable comes your way, be obsessed enough to use it when the time comes.

This is my camera. There are many like it, but this one is MINE. My camera is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My camera without me is useless. Without my camera, I am useless. I must fire my camera true...

Big and Small

2006-09-15T23:54:00.000Z

It need hardly be reiterated that we're a big fan of small here (babies, baby vegetables, genetically-altered miniature giraffes, 12" Powerbooks) so the news that Olympus was launching a new digital SLR, the E-400, was excitedly received. Why? Well, partly because I think their E-1 is the most fantastic camera on the face of the planet but also because the E-400 is by far the smallest digital SLR ever produced.

It looks bigger in the photo but, actually, it's pretty much the same size as Olympus's much-esteemed OM series from the late seventies. Which were very small indeed.

Now, Olympus made the curious marketing decision to limit the release the E-400 to Europe only and, needless to say, this has made America not a little unhappy. There are American photographers all over the net, livid that they'll have to import something from Europe for a change; that they'll have to pay European prices AND get kicked in the teeth by postage, custom duties, and handling fees; that it's all so, so unspeakably unfair.

It does seem a little odd but presumably there are legitimate manufacturing and marketing reasons underpinning the decision. That said, there is something of a poetic justice to it. America is, after all, the land of big, the land of supersize. And they thrusted upon the more unsuspecting of us, the desire for cars like this:

And there were madeleines...

2006-09-08T08:33:00.000Z

And now they've all been gobbled up. But there will be more shortly.

Madeleine

2006-08-26T12:02:00.000Z

Here are madeleine-shaped holes which, all being well, will be ripe with warm, tea-dunkable madeleine sometime this afternoon. The "dough" (read buttery, sugary, almondy goo) is resting in the fridge and so I'm trying to discern how on earth a pilgrim's scallop differs from a layman's or an agnostic's scallop.

This is not just a box...

2006-08-16T16:48:00.000Z

This is a mid-tan, small packet-postable, single-corrugated cardboard box, precision-cut by a papermill in Hampshire, carefully transported 350 miles by a private, trackable signed-for courier service.

It costs 52p, including delivery.

This is not just a box, it's indicative of a world gone totally, totally cuckoo.

Deconstructionism

2006-08-15T22:50:00.000Z

This is the beautiful Bridlington crab, dressed by Mr Moo, that I - first photographed - then ate for lunch the other day.

Undoubtedly, it is a significant improvement on the original axiom/design for a crab which is both cumbersome and wilful.

Fran-kitten thought so too.

Woolfest II

2006-08-12T22:50:00.000Z

An evening (more about that another day) with the excellent folk of Knit Club reminded me that I had yet to do a second post on Woolfest. The title "Woolfest I" does, after all, imply a sequel if not a trilogy. So, here's a felted pig they had...

...and a Picasso-esque (pair of) deconstructionist ram...

and, also, rabbit which can, with a deft hand and a pair of scissors, also be sheared to make wool...

Pirates

2006-08-08T19:55:00.000Z

Today, we went to Bridlington, to eat lobsters tails and fish 'n' chips on the harbour where, on a whim, we also seized upon the opportunity to take a ride on a pirate ship. Of course, it wasn't a real pirate ship: the captain was not schooled at Eton; the sails did not billow menacingly; and it was not manned by cursed sailors doomed to serve there for an hundred years in a state that fell between life and death...

But, in the middle of all this pretence for over-excited children, there sat a rather elderly man. Of course, he looked like an unassuming pensioner but there was something in his steely blue eyes, something in the way his body adjusted constantly to the gentle waves, something in the way his hands gripped at imaginary rope, that spoke of his true nature.

When he paid his fare with a galleon rather than a pound coin I knew for sure he was a pirate. And, as he looked at the decidely unscary Jolly Roger, a silent smile betrayed a lifetime of swashbuckling, canonfire and rum.

Collective

2006-08-04T23:19:00.001Z

There was a typo in one of my earlier entries in which I referred to a 'kimble of kittens'. In fact, it was more than a typo, it was a malapropism. Haven't done one of those in a long while! What I meant to say, of course, was 'kindle of kittens'.

The good folks at Wikipedia have a selection of interesting collective nouns but I rather like, in no particular order:

a church of squirrels
a bury of rabbits
a crash of rhinoceroses

On another note, the entry from the OED was taken with my camera phone which I've struggled to actually find a use for ever since I got it. Why aren't phones more interesting? they have lights, and gadgets, and programmable features... they should be more fun than they actually are...

Does my tush look big in this?

2006-08-04T15:42:00.000Z

My camera, the ever-wonderful Olympus E-1, seems to have multiple exposured itself overnight. What ever am I going to with them?

Sociable photography

2006-08-03T17:16:00.000Z

Can a photograph ever be overly stylised? This week, Den went round to the house of local singer-songwriter Emma Rugg where - as one does - he had a few drinks, played a few tunes on the guitar, and took a few pictures. And, putting them in my Photoshop paws last night for post-processing, this is what we came up with: grainy, high contrast, fashionista moodiness that betray entirely the nature of the evening which was intimate, laid back and great fun...

Does it matter or, in the end, is the image everything?

Madeleine

2006-08-02T17:02:00.000Z

This week, I have an incurable hankering for Madeleine. This is not about France: I didn't see - let alone eat - a single one of these scallop/space-ship/boat-shaped treats while I was out there this year. But I have a hankering for them all the same: I want to eat lots of them, checking each bulb for alien life-forms; checking the underside for algae and barnacles, as I do.

I also feel an irresistable urge to make them. The madeleine pictured here were bought in a shop. But, today, I ordered madeleine tins, so the next madeleines to appear on this blog will be made by me. Meanwhile, I have to be content with photographing them in the style of Yarnstorm to create at least the illusion of homemadedness.

The little things in life...

2006-07-31T17:11:00.000Z

When it comes to babies, some of us almost instinctively feel the need to decide whether they'll be pretty when they grow up, whether they'll be clever, or witty, or charming; whether they shall play the piano, or take ballet classes, or be interesting to boys. The truth is, though, that, when you give birth to anything (metaphorically or otherwise), you never really know what you're going to get, even if you think you do. These things are beyond you, exist separately from you, have a life of their own.

So, who knows how my new little friend will turn out. Personally, though, I think she's plotting something...

France II: Remembrance of Drinks Past

2006-07-29T12:50:00.000Z

Thanks, AltitudeZero, for reminding me of this picture (or at least a less processed version of it) of me. Drinks are different in France. Pastis while gazing on, with friends, at the fine women of Toulouse is hard to beat, but even the little mid-afternoon coffees of St Gery's Le Chabrot - served with a grumpy humpf, a mournful half-sugar cube, and, two-to-one will get spilt on your Billingham camera bag - are something of a little treat.

And then there is glistening, slightly bubbly, yeasty beer like Leffe, so overpriced in England but so much an incidental feature of a hot day in France, like punctuation:

Even not terribly interesting drinks, like those served in a once-interesting Indian restaurant, become more palatable as the day grows darker, and cooler, and the streets come alive with people and conversation, take on a tiny magic:

Good night, you princesses of Yorkshire, you queens of England

2006-07-27T11:41:00.000Z

Last night, I saw Weezer again, together with her new kimble of kittens: Io, Artemis and Leah.

Of all of them, Io is the one who most resembles his mother and most consistently sits closest to her:

Artemis looks almost identical to Fran, her sister. But she's a lot more adventurous than Fran ever was when she was little and was the first to burrow her face into a pile of sardines.

Leah, who looks like none of Weezer's previous kittens, is the shyest of the three, and has a habit of sitting slightly away from the rest of them, preferring instead, to sniff a hedge or an interesting brick than play follow the leader with the others.

It's strange to think of Weezer, and her kimble, not being my responsibility, in the same way that she clearly was last year. As I lay on the wet pavement last night, there was still something of that old relationship and trust still, an expression that said, 'Thanks for all the fish'. And that was nice.

Good night, you princesses of Yorkshire, you queens of England

Where is Fran? A Haiku

2006-07-25T09:33:00.000Z

Fast Food

2006-07-24T12:05:00.000Z

In books such as Fast Food Nation, or documentaries such as Supersize Me, fast food outlets are often conflated into one doughy, stodgy, inedible, undifferentiated mass. As a food enthusiast, I find the findings of such books and documentaries shocking. The idea of eating a burger made from several dozen different cows, or fries that never go mouldy, or drinks poured by the victims of highly exploitative work practices are not nice at all. Bizarrely, none of these things actually stops me eating junk food from time to time. Perhaps this is half the problem. But the other problem is a love that dare not speak its name: fast food, for all its faults, has an aesthetic logic of its own that can and should be appreciated.

Those of us who eat this stuff will know that there is good fast food and bad fast food, even when it comes to the same franchise.

Take the Kentucky Fried Chicken on East Road, Cambridge. It's okay but, sometimes, it's a little cold and nasty. But the KFC on the first floor of Sheffield train station? I've never had a dud meal there, ever. When renowned film director, Ang Lee, says that his wife takes him to KFC whenever he's feeling overwrought about work, I like to believe that he's getting the finest KFC on the planet: KFC that is more like Sheffield Station (or, indeed, like High Street, Oxford - that's another good'un) than East Road, Cambridge.

McDonalds, 5th Avenue, New York, tucked in a little side street just in front of the New York Public Library's main entrance (of Ghostbusters, Spiderman and The Day After Tomorrow fame). You'd expect it to be the finest on earth, yes? Think again. It's awful but the good news is that the one up Broadway, permanently occupied by the Bijoux Lady from Titanic, is far, far superior in every way. (Buy her some fries if you see her: she's crazy but harmless.) But the best is in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong.

And what of Burger King? The worst I've ever had is on King Edward's Street, Hull. It's an abomination, even to a junk-meat gourmand like my good self. I uesd to eat there when I worked in town and hated myself. But, interestingly, the best Burger King I've ever had is also in Hull, on Clough Road, in fact, wedged amongst warehouse outlets like B&Q, PC World, and Pets at Home, and a number of small light industry units. And let me tell you, it's good, it's very good. It's better than the Burger King off Platform 1 of Manchester train station even, which is very good indeed.

If we're to have junk food at all in this world, then at least let it be the best.

If we're to have KFC, let it be KFC fit for creative geniuses, chicken the good Colonel would himself be proud of.

If we're to have Burger King, then let it be food fit for kings. And as fast as this Lotus Elise that belonged to two guys who obviously knew a very good thing when they saw Burger King, Clough Road, Hull this weekend.

But there are small things in Hull

2006-07-24T01:59:00.000Z

...this is also true. They don't possess the same, lazy buzzing, chirruping, submarine frog audio qualities that their French counterparts do, this is true, but they are still small. And these little things - bees, dragonflies - also assume a strange, myopic fantasy character, if you let them.

And if the sun is beating down on your face at the right angle.
And if you're photographing them for the girl you love.
And if you have the 4kg of camera equipment trained on their every move.

France I

2006-07-21T07:50:00.000Z

The hot weather we've been having has made me think of last month in France. The difference is that the heat takes on a dusty, quiet stillness there, and the smallest things grab the attention, assume a life of their own.

One for Napoleon...

2006-07-21T02:14:00.000Z

...because he likes watches...

Our watch is rather chipped - because, after a debaucherous evening in Philadelphia, we dropped it onto the marbled floor of our lovely room in the Ritz Carlton, a tasteless hotel which charges far, far too much for ethernet-based broadband access. Next time I go, I'll be taking an Apple Airport with me, so I can spread access around the entire city. Power to the allotments!

Fonda 500 was so hot!

2006-07-19T13:08:00.000Z

So hot, that this was the only shot remotely worthy of posting that Den came away with when I asked him, very politely, to snap of photo of my favourite bassist, the beautiful and talented Bod, of Fonda 500 fame. It's not a great picture but, let me tell you, it was hard to find amongst the 1gb of jpegs he brought back with him. Yes, an entire gigabyte. One shot. In jpeg. I reckon a monkey could do better. With a typewriter. And not one of those fancy typewriters with built-in webcams either. Here he is in person to apologize.

Hello, there. I'm very sorry, Pup. It was very hot:

I realise that this is no excuse for my appalling photography and I feel like this boat:

This trolley:

And these drowning traffic cones:

Oh, that's alright, Den. No hard feelings, eh? By the way, I do like your use of Adobe Photoshop's "Smart Sharpen" filter. Do I detect shades of Mark Johnson at RadiantVista knowledge? I hear he sells an incredible e-book...

South Bank... and the biggest panoramic in the world...

2006-07-18T00:57:00.000Z

Well, maybe not the biggest in the world, but certainly the biggest I've ever constructed. Poor laptop, it was making strange noises earlier as it tried to open twenty odd images all at once and stitch them together... Aww... If you upload this image, make sure you see all of it. It took ages.

Emma Rugg, Tiger's Lair gig

2006-07-15T17:55:00.000Z

This week, I decided to revamp my entire .Mac site, in preparation for my book launch in October and, also, because I'm too cheap to pay for a pbase account (link to be posted here once it's ready). But, for now, here's a few pictures of Emma Rugg's latest gig at the Tiger's Lair, Hull, just to keep her die-hard fans happy :-)

Swanling

2006-07-05T22:17:00.000Z

Woolfest 2006: Part I

2006-07-03T16:56:00.000Z

So, this weekend, I went to Woolfest. In a car. Which is silver-coloured. Silver is interesting: it has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal...Cars are also interesting: the very first car, for example, had just a 4hp, two-stroke motor and was considered something of a novelty which people called 'horseless carriage'...

I don't really want to write about Woolfest. I really enjoyed it, and a lady dressed as a medieval nun let me have a go at weaving and was very complimentary about the pitiful little patch I produced. And I liked the farmer who led the sheep-shearing demonstration, too, who sheared sheep as easily as the rest of us peel oranges, and who looked like she wouldn't take any crap from anybody. I liked the consumately smiley Lithuanians; and Debbie the button girl; and Jenny, who felts camel-hair and turns it into three-dimensional sculptures of pigs, or mallards-not-of-this-world...

But I went with Susoolu, and blueadt,and they met up with a whole bunch other people, like WoolyWormhead (whom you'll hear about another day), and Mother of WoolyWormhead and, if there are two things these folks have in common, it's knitting. And blogging about knitting.

What can a little dog possibly have to say that's interesting about Woolfest, when it's already being covered by so many widely read blogs written by die-hard knitters? In fact, I'm a little worried that I'm mentioning Woolfest just once too many times. There could be Googlebots, crawling through this site and directing would-be knitsmen and knitswomen to this very blog! (Memo to self: check Technorati to see if this comes up under Woolfest 2006. And stop mentioning Woolfest.)

You see, for those of you who don't know any knitters, knitting to knitters is as noble and as simple as religion:

And Woolfest, a veritable temple of knit, was brimful with the most single-minded knitters to ever grace the face of the earth, knitters 'high and solitary and most stern' who wore wool and woolen accessories, on their wrists, in their hair, on their feet, inspite of th'heat'o'th'sun.

But, now I think about it, I remember that there were animals there, plenty of animals. And, being a little dog, I knows lots about animals...

Layer Cake Cahors

2006-06-25T22:53:00.000Z

Years ago, when digital photography first met the amateur enthusiast masses, people looked upon Photoshop with more than a little suspicion. Breathtaking in its ability to manipulate digital images, it threatened to impose a new world order on us all, one complete with blue roses, relatives with three eyes, holiday snaps with our favourite celebrities... It threatened, in short, to dilute the perceived truth of the photographic image, to take untampered with moments of captured time, and smeer them with trickery and disingenious conceits.

Many ran away from image-editing technology, fearing that another glance at it would have them erasing the embarassing zit from their teenage daughter's debutante ball portrait; but there were others who looked upon it as a dormant new art form, one that could, with an arsenal of processor-intensive cross-layering, hue and saturation, erasing tools, eke out immortal works of art from even the most mediocre holiday snapshots. Kind of like this:

For a brief while, it looked as if it could work. Such montages tuned into the modernist preoccupation with fragments, into the postmodern preoccupation with the fissures that existed between layers of explicit, officially sanctioned meaning. Those who dismissed such efforts could be written off as establishment fuddy-duddies unable to see beyond nineteenth-century technology... There'd always be a problems with sales, of course - being digital, one print would be identical to the next - but such were the teething problems a new and radical art.

Of course, when it came to the crunch, no-one could actually sell things, particularly not for 80 Euros. Or can they? Altitude Zero and me came across a little exhibition in Cahors this summer, where one photographer was trying to do just that, and that's when we got thinking... Perhaps, just perhaps, we could get together a little exhibition of our own for the Cahors photography festival next summer...

Les chats froids de France

2006-06-19T17:06:00.000Z

Last week, in good ol' Lot 47, I got to hang with some pretty cool cats. There was Mouse Killin' Wilber who'd lost his shades a while back but still looked cool, sitting outside his house, protectin' his turf, an' squintin' in the heat o'th'sun:

And then there was he good pal Portland, who liked nothin' better than to sit on the dirt in the cool an' watch the world just going on by its daily business:

But somethin' was happenin' to the cats of Lot 47. Everywhere, in the towns and the to-or-ist shops, there were all manner cats to be had for a pocketful of Euros: bag cats, shelf cats, brooch cats, wooden cats, fireplace cats, cement cats even - you name it, these lads were sellerin' it. "Strange," I thinks to myself, "Ain't it strange that all these cats should look kind of spooky..."

And as I puzzled this to myself, something in my mind reminded me of back home. Yup, once I saw the connection, there was none gettin' away from it: these cats were catnip-stoned...

Kilroys woz ere

2006-05-26T22:37:00.000Z

Funny, but I always thought taking pictures of two fine dogs was reward in itself. This week, it transpires that you can also get paid for this...

A Tale from the Crypt

2006-05-19T00:19:00.000Z

I could a tale unfold, of murder most foul, most horrid. Last week, our little house was graced by three excellent furry friends, the most innocent, the most trusting, the most loving of all the creatures that are undreamt of in your imaginations. I talk not of spirits - though spirits they could as easily be for the characteristic selflessness with which they treat one another and, indeed, all those in need of friendship - but of creatures known as Fimbles.

Fran and I played in the garden all day with these curious Fimbles, and, by evening, as we ate dainty cakes and drank delicious cordial, they each regaled our company with the most excellent stories and song. And, when the sun finally set, they reminded us that they had much to do and would be taking their leave before any of us were awake the next morning, and then they went to sleep, curled up in a fluffy heap beneath the stars.

That night, my sleep was broken by disturbing dreams. I dreamt of a phantom, with eyes of fire, and long, foot-long knitting needles for fingers. "Soft," the phantom hissed, in a voice that was petrifying to hear, "sssso ssssoft. And what beautiful, beautiful colourssss..." I dreamt I saw her hover over the fimbles, sleeping in the darkness, oblivious to the danger that faced them. In vain, I tried to cry out but by no sound came from my throat... And then, as the clouds parted, allowing a moonbeam to fall onto the midnight garden, I saw a glint, of a blade - a knife? no, it was scissors!

It was at this point that I awoke, feverish with fear. Whether the scream that rang in my ears was my own, or that of the dream-phantom's hapless victim, I know not. I climbed out of my bed and looked out into the garden. There were no fimbles to be seen. I returned to my bed, thinking they must be have already set off. But wait! From the corner of my eye - what was it that hung over the radiator? a sodden mass: a yellow and green bag, recently felted. Surely a coincidence, I thought, and thought myself foolish for even entertaining that idea that anyone should kill a fimble to make a bag. But, as I chastised myself for my silliness and paranoia, I turned the bag around. Oh horror, dear reader, it winked...

Kitten at the Window

2006-05-14T19:16:00.000Z

There is something tremulous, something slightly eerie about windows and the people who have a predeliction towards hovering round them all the time. I reckon it's something to do with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) in which the eponymous heroine's irrepressibly passionate nature manifests, in childhood, in her fondness for bay windows, 'clear panes of glass, protecting but not separating me from the dreary November day'.

And why do windows inspire such strangeness? Because they are at once inside and outside, because they form the glassy boundaries between a reined-in, measured domesticity and boundless, stormy, unmediated forces of nature. A child of passion like Jane Eyre gravitates towards windows because they're not made for domestic life.

Bronte gives us a viewpoint from the insider: we read about Jane Eyre looking outwards. But, sometimes, in art and literature, we see such figures from the outside, and they still invoke a sense of uncertainty and unknowableness. This happens most famously in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) in which the figure of a woman at a window signals to us that everything is not quite as it seems...

Fran, whose core identity turns on the central contradiction of being a once-feral kitten who now has owners, explores the fragile ambiguity of windows in this, the third of her series of self-portraits,'Kitten at the Window' (named, incidentally, after T.S.Eliot's similarly named poem). She's such a thoughtful bundle at times.

Sleeping with loose change

2006-05-13T11:16:00.000Z

This week, Fran heard news from Ute (pictured below, far right), that her fellow kitten friend, Dixie, had swallowed a 5p piece - an act of frivolity and silliness that cost £500 in vet's bills to correct. Bolstered by much talk of the Hull School of Art and Design's enf-of-year exhibition last night, Fran woke us all up at 6.30am, to demand, not only food, but an audience for her own pontifications about kittens and coins. For all the gusto with which Gustav Klimt depicts the kitteny Danaë, being seduced by Zeus in a shower of golden coins (ouch!),

it is, decidely, far better to not be pelted by money that one might inadvertently swallow as one sleeps.

2006-05-12T14:47:00.000Z

The other the day, the Guardian - or one of the other weekend newspapers - ran a little photoessay all about how wonders of inadvertent multiple exposures, done either in-camera or during laboratory processing. With the rapidly declining use of film cameras, the article lamented, such accidents were never going to play a part in our photographic lives again. Well, yes, but there are plenty of other happy accidents to be had, this odd flash picture being one of them. I can't quite work out what happened - I think my flash wasn't charged and then decided, during an awfully long exposure, that it was charged after all and fired, a bit like slow-sync flash but completely unpremeditated...

Winnie Bear

2006-05-08T01:19:00.000Z

It's been a while since she moved in, but this is Winnie Bear's first hello. She's a beautiful 16-inch mohair bear made by the sorceress who makes all the other Bears of Eastwood, with the most scratchable nose and the cutest little hat with holes in them for her furry little ears. Because of her penchant for hats with holes in, she's proving to be a great help on Project Paddington, the working title of an ambitious new film project by yours truly... (More on that later...)

It's taken a while to settle in, but Winnie's finally decided that she lives on top of the laser printer and has figured out how to sit on it "just so", so she can watch the paper come out and not tread on it in any way...

Through rose-tinted spectacles...

2006-05-07T01:02:00.000Z

This week, as AltitudeZero and Book-of-Lee embarked on their little ‘Red’-themed photo competition, I just so happened to stumble across – would you believe it? – a red dandelion! Yes, it was red! As red as a red, red rose; as red as an ebullient reindeer’s nose; as red as a … Lancastrian’s waistcoat.

Okay, okay, I’m telling porky pies – the whole thing’s a mammoth piece of Photoshop trickery – but Andy already photographed J’s red car and made his head look all Zaphod Beeblebrox in it - and all I could find in the garden that was red was guttering – and who wants a photo of guttering? So, until I come up with something better, this is my offering ☺

Tyger tyger burning bright...

2006-05-04T00:02:00.000Z

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Like pretty much all of his poems from the time of the French Revolution, William Blake's 'Tyger' is about, well, revolution.

Whether he'd ever admit to it or not, Blake was a reformist deep down, rather than a revolutionary. Human progress was, for him, all about people coming up with different ideas, and sorting out a path through them together: clods of soil sorting things out with pebbles, that kind of thing. 'Without contraries, there is no progression'.

His tyger, the twin-brother of the revolutionary spirit that swept through every corner of Europe during the 1790s, is a different beast entirely. Rather than being a dualistic force (clod and soil; innocence and experience; black and white), Blake's Tyger is unreadable, preternaturally symmetrical. It is, perhaps, an unnatural, devilish creation forged in the furnaces of hell. Alternatively it is a divine creation, akin to a fearsome angel, the loyal servant of a vengeful, angry, and jealous God. Blake doesn't know, can't see, can't tell, and that he finds rather worrying.

The spirit of the French Revolution was awesome, a law unto itself, a strict ultiamtuum with no room for negotiation or compromise. By the nineteenth century, it was also apparent that it could never quite deliver what it promised. Rather than lighting the way to a truly egalitarian paradise, the revolution revealed, in the misery and bloodshed it caused, the darker side of humanity. For all its strength and bravado, the revolution was never in control of itself. Behind its brave face of intimidating, single-minded resolve lay a sinking feeling that, actually, it didn't have a clue what was going on...

A hundred years later, Henri Rousseau would refigure Blake's almost mythological tyger in his painting, 'Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)' (1891). The title, with its 'tropical' setting and its vernacular 'surprised!', gives us a clue as to what he's up to: he wants to show what mythological tygers, revolutions, are really like, in their natural habitat, beneath the propaganda or political spin. And, what he finds, is that even the bravest-looking creature cowers like a terrified kitten.

This week, Fran wanted to complicate this centuries-old dialogue still further in her self-portrait, 'Kitten, kitten burning bright' (2006). Here, in this exciting new work, Fran explores the possibility that, actually. kittens have the capacity to - and, indeed often look - defiantly unterrified. Oh, she can, by the way, behead worms faster than a guillotine can behead aristocrats.

Remembrance of Cows Past

2006-05-02T00:12:00.000Z

...Bank Holiday weekend draws to an end and the butcher's isn't open for another nine hours... Sigh... Such is the life of a carnivore pup...

The Lamp During the Day

2006-04-17T08:02:00.000Z

There is something rarified about the Lamp during the day, in my mind at least. Maybe it's because I'm more accustomed to seeing it later on in the evenings but, during the day, as sunlight peeps through the frosted windows and the dusty skylights overhead, everything takes on an almost otherworldly quality. The mumbling old man who props up the bar looks like a figure from a painting by Hopper; faces dazzle, momentarily, as they get snatched by odd, little pools of light; suddenly, out the corner of your eye, you glimpse children who clearly don't even like alcohol; oh, and the floor looks dirtier...

Shoe!

2006-04-15T13:48:00.000Z

One can often find Andy taking pictures of his shoes and, after a couple of Wold Top Mars Magics, Den thought he'd have a go too. There's such a stark contrast in their different shoes: no two shoes could, in fact, be less alike: Andy's Emerica Tilts in the 2005 black/fuschia colourway and Den's Crockett and Jones Oxford-Connaughts in the now-discontinued tan calf leather... Strange that they should share such similar tastes in dSLRs and bassists...

Emma Rugg: Something Bunny This Way Hops

2006-04-14T11:19:00.000Z

And that something is, of course, young Rufus, the latest addition to Emma Rugg's impressive menagerie. He enjoys carrots, and biting straws half, and dislikes chewing electrical cabling and being mounted by bi-curious guinea pigs.

Bovine Joy

2006-04-13T23:57:00.000Z

Say it with cow. And excellent wine. Apologies to my vegetarian readers, sort of. I am sure the good Mikol will post an interesting plant-based alternative to this food of the gods, just as soon as she thinks of one.

Six million dollar kitten

2006-04-08T17:56:00.000Z

Swanky Fran, doing a spot of boxing.

What on earth?

2006-04-05T16:44:00.000Z

Puppy's back. (Nice cameras, Den.) Readers will be pleased to know that Winnie is feeling a little less under the weather this afternoon. She tells me (in her tiny, tiny voice!) that she's not quite well enough to have her photo taken for this blog but isn't it strange that the very cool bassist in Fonda 500 should have a dress that precisely the same colour as her coat?

Cameras we have known...

2006-04-05T11:07:00.000Z

[I'm away today, looking after Winnie who seems to be just a teeny bit sniffly and headachey. In lieu of me, I thought I'd hand you over to Den, my photogapher's assistant, amanuensis, and, when I go abroad, the guy who makes sure I don't get lost...]

Gosh! What an honour! Cheers, little dog! Pup and I have jointly owned a few cameras now but my history-in-cameras stretches right back to the mid-eighties when my elder brother owned a Pentax MX and I had a Chinon CS. M42 screw-mount, mechanical shutter, with a little needle on the right-hand side of the viewfinder, it was the perfect camera for a small child to learn the principles of photography on. I say perfect with two caveats: 1.) in those days, film and film processing where prohibitively expensive and 2.) this thing weighed a ton and the shutter had a kickback as mighty as a large shotgun - I was four-foot tall or so, and it's hard to get inspired about photography when you're struggling with your camera. Still, I persisted and even got a little cheap (highly subsidised, DX-coded - never understood why they bought it rather than loaded it themselves - ) Ilford FP4 film from the Photography Club in my primary school. It was there I also learnt about darkroom processing in an unventilated cupboard, filled with six other children, where we took it in turns to process our "best", i.e. least blurry, shots, and get acid all over our school uniforms.

A few years later, my father, espying a bargain in the Classifieds of the local paper which he scoured constantly and constituted his preferred reading material on any given day, bought me a Nikon FG-20. It's a fine camera - these days, I maintain that the FG/FG-20 are the most underrated of all of Nikon's manual focus SLRs, the smallest they ever made, the second lightest, with all the features of the more expensive counterparts like the FE, FM, FM2... The trouble was that, by this time, my brother and I were complete camera nerds. We'd memorised the specs of every camera on the market in 1988 (info courtesy of a huge tome written by Amateur Photographer) and, what should have been my ticket to easy-shooting, quickly grew into a bagful of budget lenses which weren't great and, eventually, weighed me down. Wanting to take pictures, rather like Andy's I suppose (though I didn't know him then), I swapped everything for a Minox 35ML.

Ah, the Minox 35ML, a piece of precision engineering surely, laden with miniature technology straight out of Cold War Germany. Designed by a guy who carved out the perfect-sized piece of wood and then decided to make a camera with the same dimensions and stick on an absolutely fabulous Minotar 28mm f2.8 which collapsed into the body when it wasn't in use. Well, it would have been a fabulous piece of engineering if it'd ever worked properly. Part of my problem was user error. The Minoxes are range-focussing cameras - you basically estimate focusing distance and hope you're right. It's not too bad with a wide-angle which gives you a lot of latitude that way - but, coming from SLRs, I never really got the hang of it... The other problem was that my particular Minox wasn't very good. The metering had a tendency to go completely do-lally, and only come back to its senses if you shook the camera... So, despite a few pleasant years service, it eventually had to go.

And go it did, traded in (once it was shaken about and then gingerly taken into a photography store) for the original Canon IXUS, with its funky APS film. The IXUS is a modern classic because it spawned countless generations of credit-card sized silver cameras. It had a pop up flash which whirred to life like something out of Edwardian science-fiction. Clearly, then, it was a Minox for the modern-day photographer. Except it wasn't. APS was awful (though, as a format, it shares much with modern digital sensor sizes); the lens was a crappy, dark affair and, very soon, they found out that the flash was liable to break off at any moment. Mine never did. It was so small that I lost it, sometime in 1999. Fortunately, my household insurance gave me my money back.

And I didn't buy another camera until the summer of 1999, when the insurance company chased me up on whether I had actually used the money they'd given me to buy another camera or not. Enter a hastily bought Nikon F65: a lovely little thing which got me all interested in SLR photography again, especially now film was cheaper, and I was going interesting places all the time. For the first time ever, I took to the streets, photographing everything, everyone, just for the sheer pleasure of it. Then came the digital revolution and everyone seemed to be trading in their cameras for whatever they could get for them, for digital SLRs. So, I upgraded to the far superior F80. For no money at all, and was rather happy with it. So was Pup, whom I'd met up with by that time.

But I couldn't resist the charms of digital forever. Nor could Pup, so we picked up a Fuji F810, just to test the water with. And then we took 8000 pictures, more than I'd ever taken with all my previous cameras combined. And this we did in a matter of months. Pup's such an inspiration that way. Digicams are great, especially the F810, with its IXUS-esque metallic body, and its shutter/aperture control - not often found on a point and shoot. You can take them everywhere: but then, Pup in particular, started getting upset with the lack of depth-of-field (because of the ultra-wide focal length of the lenses), with the barrel distortion that kept curving our New York cityscapes. So, we sold everything, and bought our Olympus E-1, from a kindly little shop in Swindon. And that was the end of that :-)

Wilberforce Celebrations 2006

2006-04-04T00:56:00.000Z

The Wilberforce at the University of Hull is a fine example of Sixties archiecture, with a volume of concrete, pressed to look like wood, that rivals even the National Theatre. Utilitarian zeal confronts you everywhere you turn in this building, not a penny, it seems, was wasted anywhere, and this brutal sense of economy plays into the building's overriding aesthetic, which is one of bold starkness, constantly contrasting verticals and horizontals, and, yes, Andy, a profusion of sheer, sheer ugliness.

Coffee is my catnip

2006-03-22T13:16:00.000Z

It is only very seldom that one catches one's postie sniffing your parcel before he hands it over and makes you sign for it but this is what he did this morning - and that can mean only one thing: post for the Coffee Fairy Fox!!!

Our kitchen here is a wonderful place - messy but never food-poisoning inducing, and equipped to the nines with all things sharp, all things stainless steel; every permutation of pot, pan, strainer and drainer; herbs in abundance, exotic spices by the dozen, and mugs decorated with Moomintrolls.

There is, however, one corner, by the fridge, that above all holds captive the attention of our visitors (see entry 19): the coffee corner, home, not only of Jeri the giraffe, but also the Coffee Fairy Fox. We've not seen her (feel free to email me with a picture though) but we know she's there, benevolent, doting thing that she is.

Here, in coffee corner, the merest touch of an unmarked button makes machinery lurch into life, makes it gurgle, wheeze, grind, growl, clack, bubble a cofee into existence. No-one knows quite how this is done: clearly, though, it is some kind of alchemy, some kind of wizardry, the nature of which we may never discern but darkly.

This morning's rare sighting of CFF's post brings us a small step closer to that unknowable truth, and I am humbled by even an imagined glimpse of that grander vision.