I look at my blog and realise that it has been nearly 4 months since my last blog, so breaking all the rules of successful blogging, namely, keep it current, informative, and mostly, GOING.
The trouble is, for a budding photographer, the winter months are only passing fair.
Photography is all about Light, and a good photographer thinks not just about the subject, but about the light. So where you might have twilight, daylight, moonlight, as photographers, we have a few more up our sleeve. There is the Blue Hour. This is the hour before the sun rises, where, thanks to the modern DSLR and its amazing sensor, you can put a camera on a tripod when it's practically dark outside, and see what your eyes can't see. Then there is the Golden Hour, this is around dawn, or dusk, when the sun is low in the sky and casts long golden shadows.
The trouble is, in Leeds, you also get an awful lot of the Grey Hour. These are the hours, commencing quite early in the day and running right through the Blue Hour and Golden Hour, the midday hour, and the evening hour, where an overcast sky and an obscured sun lead to what they call 'soft light', or rather, 'grey light', or as we photographers call it, DULL Light. All Day.
The trouble is, grey light is not all that photogenic. No moody shadows, just rather dull twigs, flat landscapes, and rather miserable looking people. I'm not selling it, am I? And in Winter, whatever you may say about winter landscapes, there are an awful lot of grey days.
However, come February and March, we also get the odd random bit of snow, usually in huge unpredictable bursts, and usually wildly over-promoted by the news channels. And if you get up early enough, you can get pictures of it before it melts.
Esther is my Handler on the Independent Visitor Scheme. Technically her title is Independent Visitor Scheme Co-ordinator, but I prefer to make her sound more like a kind of spy co-ordinator, it adds a lot of glamour, which let's face it, is quite difficult to generate in Leeds.
Independent Visitors are volunteers who are matched up with a young person in the care of the local authority, a kind of adult 'buddy' who is there just to be their constant friend, no matter what. Esther has done a pretty amazing job supporting me and the young person I look after over the years.
I've been seeing him on a fairly regular basis for the last six years, and by happy accident, on one occasion when we were meeting to go to the park, I put a couple of cameras in my bag, just to see if it would interest him. I'm proud to say that he took to it like a pro, and several years later, I still have a picture of him with that first camera. Since then he's entered competitions and even earned his first commission before he was 10 years old. At some future date I hope I'll be including some of his pictures on this blog, if he will sell them to me. He's pretty good with money, hence the commission at the age of 9!
So in conversation with Esther, she asked if she could see some of my pictures, so, Esther, just for you, here are some shots of Temple Newsam, taken in the recent snows. Really early in the morning, in the freezing still dawn air.
Which is also why I currently have a terrible cold. What we photographers do, eh?
Click on a picture to see it In Big.
And here are a number of photographs I took another early morning in Temple Newsam, as the snow was falling...
And a few shots of Roundhay Park in the snow...
Cormorants in Roundhay Park
Seagulls on an ice sheet, Roundhay Park, remarkably uninterested in the coming of their Messiah. Perhaps I over-did the highlights? Anyway, that's seagulls for you...
And now, off to bed to nurse my cold and dream of blue light, golden light, summer light, spring light, anything but grey light...