I am … unhindered by talent

Apparently they’ve had snow back in Morris, but we’re not likely to see any of the white stuff here in Colchester. The leaves are turning with enthusiasm, however, and it’s definitely crisp when Sub-Evil and I walk in together in the mornings. We’ve even seen a little frost. Hats and gloves are good, but a sweatshirt with rain shell is sufficient outerwear if you’re walking.

Colchester is one of the drier parts of the UK as it has about the most land west of it of any location on the islands. We’ve walked in some intermittent drizzle, but I’ve yet to walk any distance in real rain. (Sub-Evil’s not been so lucky, however, and got drenched one day coming home.)

The photo is from a nice park/green space in Colchester (see map) that was the Quaker cemetery from the mid-1700’s to the mid-1800’s. Sometime after they quit using it as a cemetery, they donated it to the city. Remaining head stones were moved to the edges of the space, leaving a wonderful little park.

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Posted on Flickr by Pierre J.:

These are four scanned pictures of hardcopies I possess of the French nuclear test codenamed Licorne, which was fired on August 24, 1970 . The French army had those pictures taken on site.

Those pictures were readily available at the time at Tahiti and Moruroa military base, and mine have been quite degraded. I scanned them and tried to restore them.

Thanks to Your Daily Awesome for the pointer.

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We walk along a lot of neat old brick walks here in Colchester. The tops of many of them are covered in moss, which has obviously "gone to seed" in the last month or so. Thus there are these tiny "forests" along the walls, which I could spent forever trying to photograph. Here’s one :-).

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One of my goals for our sabbatical year is to figure some things out about my photography. I really like taking pictures, and I don’t completely suck at it, but it isn’t my job and it can consume a lot of time and money. The massive ego part of me would really like to see my photographs published, hanging in galleries, etc., etc., etc. That, however, takes work, and really isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing with my days (either here or when we return home next summer).

So I’m trying a really low impact option, namely selling prints via ImageKind. They connect in nice ways to Flickr, which makes it easier for me to move images into their universe, and then they provide nice printing and framing services, sending me a small piece of the action on any of my photos that they sell. I’ve started with a small gallery of six images, and will add more in bits and pieces over the next few weeks.

I can attest to the quality of their printing and framing. I used them to print and frame one of the images I have hanging in the Horizontal Grandeur show at the Stevens County History Museum. The print was very good (probably not quite as nice as what we get from AutumnColor, but AutumnColor charges quite the pretty penny for their work), and the framing was very nicely done.

I don’t ever expect to make any real money at this, but if I’m lucky there might be enough in it to buy a new tripod :-).

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As well as taking endless photographs of flowers over here, I’ve also had the opportunity to capture some wee beasties, mostly spiders and their unwilling companions. The fellow on the right, however, is actually a snail up close. It turns out that the house in Wivenhoe was host to quite the army of snails, which would come out at night and (literally) crawl all over the house. No idea what they were searching for, but it was pretty weird to come back at night after a session of internet in the office to find them all over the front window of the sitting room.

The Wivenhoe house was also home (right at the end of our stay there) to this nifty spider. One evening I just noticed it hanging there near the ceiling in the kitchen, so I of course took a ton of pictures of it. (Conveniently, it just sat there posing through the entire session.) It disappeared a day or two later, but WeatherGirl found that it had moved (for inscrutably arachnid reasons) over to the front of the clothes washing machine.

Given that I have no real history of photographing spiders, I rather assumed I was done with the whole spidie thing for the moment, but ’twas not to be true. In one of my first walks around our apartment complex, I ran across another spider, with a large, complex web that quite obviously successful at trapping meals. There were several “finished” critters in evidence, and the unfortunate fellow to the right still struggling weakly (and I assume futilely) against its bonds. There was a light breeze, which made it harder to photograph up close than it had been in the kitchen. At one point I accidentally bumped the web, and the spider scurried from its throne in the center of the web up to the top, where it adopted a ball-like post and watched over its domain. Not sure whether it thought I was lunch or a Bad Guy, but it never did come down again while I was there.

In fairness, however, as cool as our monsters have been, they don’t hold a candle to the amazing sightings of Cory and Mrs. Q among their many adventures in these fair isles. They have some really excellent photos from their trip, and a visit is definitely recommended!

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CoryQ of the venerable Monkey River Town, and also a source of photographs strange and wondrous on Flickr, graduated from UMM nearly a decade ago. Among his many accomplishments at Morris was his many and varied contributions to the campus radio station (KUMM). I’ve only seen Cory once since he graduated, despite the fact that he lives and works in the Twin Cities, just three hours down the road.

So instead, we’re going to meet over here, in London.

Tomorrow.

At noon.

In the British Museum.

At the Rosetta Stone, one of the most amazing artifacts in human history.

Kind of like Cory. (I’ll spare you the stories.)

Wow.

It’s so cool that I’ll get to see Cory and wife again, and in the British Museum to boot! Be prepared for too many pictures…

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Yesterday I had the happy experience of finding out that my photos were being used in two rather unexpected (but cool!) ways.

The first was completely out of the blue. I got a nice note from the on-line editor of Moreover letting me know that they had used one of my photos (”Alice, and her beside book of birds“) as the starting point for a new banner image (above) for their website. I don’t know anything about the blog than what a quick look around would indicate, but it seems a reasonable blog of book commentary and review, as part of a (new?) magazine (Intelligent Life) owned by the Economist magazine. They presumably found my photo through a search on Flickr (probably looking for books), so thanks to Flickr, and thanks to Mary and Larry, whose house the photo was taken in.

The second was a little less suprising, but still cool. Dad’s an active member of the Benton County Master Gardeners group in NW Arkansas, so I showed him my notes and examples on photographing gardens that I put together for a garden and art tour earlier in the summer. He then asked if he could share them with his group, and what were really just some rough notes have subsequently turned into the lead article in their monthly newsletter! Dad had told me that they were probably going to use some of my notes, but I certainly didn’t expect them to feature so prominently, or to be included in toto (over two issues).

Hee, hee, hee…

And just a few hours after posting this, I found out that a photo from our previous UK sabbatical is being used on the Tate St. Ives Wikipedia page!

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Tomorrow we leave on our grand adventure in the UK! The house is mostly packed up and we’re pretty much ready to go. We’ll be spending some cool time with WeatherGirl’s mum for a few days, and then head down to Colchester to find a place to live and school for Sub-Evil Boy.

The official purpose of the sabbatical is to do computer science research in evolutionary computation with cool people at the University of Essex in Colchester. I’m sure I’ll also be working on my blogging and photography quite a bit as well, and hopefully being a better on-line citizen (more time for comments and such).

This is the poster I made to hang by my office door for the year away to remind people why I never seem to answer when they knock. I wrestled quite a while with this because I kept trying to make a text document with a few pictures added. Lying in bed the other night it finally flipped and I realized that I wanted to make a document that was mostly pictures with a little text added, and voila! Probably comes from reading Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding comics this summer, but it was fun!

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Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in a Garden and Art Tour by giving a short talk on photographing gardens. The talk was today, and as part of prepping I went out yesterday to the Vorhees’s beautiful garden (where I would be speaking) and spent about 1.5 hours looking around and shooting. I started at the same time as my scheduled talk (4:30pm), and arguably the sun was still a little high and harsh, but I did have the good fortune of several insect and avian visitors, including this fellow who stayed put for quite a while as I walked towards him, clicking all the way.

It was very hot and humid today, so there weren’t big crowds, but I had a very engaged and enthusiastic audience who sat and watched me sweat talk about photography for about half an hour. Here’s hoping that they got something more out of it than just heat stroke :-).

The perversely curious are welcome to check out my notes for the talk. They’re ragged in places, but usable, although I doubt there’s anything there that’s new for my Flickr friends. Suggestions for additions and improvements, however, are certainly welcome.

Completists can also check out the full, unedited set of 260 photos from yesterday on my events account.

I’ll obviously try to clean and post some of the more interesting ones to my “real” Flickr account as time allows, but with only two weeks before we move to the UK, things are totally nuts here and I suspect very little of this will be attended to anytime soon. Sigh.

Thanks again to all the great photographers here on Flickr! You folks continue to both energize me and push me to raise my game. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been asked to do this without the opportunities that Flickr has opened for me, and I’m sure my tips list and talk were full of things that I consciously and unconsciously picked up there.

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Magnum has an excellent retrospective of Elliott Erwitt’s work. The whole photoessay takes something like half an hour to go through, but is definitely worth the time. I’m not thrilled by all the photos they’ve chosen (some seem a bit too clever), but there are some wonderfully evocative, insightful images in the set, some (like this one) that are extremely powerful, and more than a few that are just hilarious. His voice over and stories are also very cool. Most certainly recommended.

Thanks to John Naughton for the original pointer.

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