Southend Skies

 

The Met Office said it would be sunny with the odd cloud all day, but it turned out like this for most of the morning. However, the clouds and the light really was quite special. The pier is 1.3 miles long, and looking at a Maps App shows you to be in the middle of the Thames with no visible means of support. We walked out and took the rattly-clattery train back. Of course we did fish-and-chips on the seafront.

Candid Snaps

 

I love snaps like this: it's the range of things going on. The concentration of the delivery driver, the expression on the passenger's face, the foliage, the glimpse of sea front, and the White Cliffs in the distance. And that intrusive level crossing barrier.

iPhone SE vs Fuji X-E4

Take a look at these photos.

The first is from the X-E4. The colours are rich, the details and sharpness are out of this world, one can zoom in and get all the details. But the sky is blown out. That might be me being incompetent, but I don't think so. That's what happened with film, and Fuji are all about making digital photos feel like film. So the sky blows out.

The second you will have guessed is from the iPhone SE. The detail is almost all there, the colour is almost all there, but it doesn't have the presence of the Fuji photo. It does have, however, a detailed sky with clouds and blue bits. I've noticed this before: my iPhone camera seems to be good at not getting blown out by skies, and I'm thinking that's because the iPhone is a way more powerful computer than the Fuji, and the camera software can identify and treats skies differently to the rest of the photograph.

Thing is, call me old-fashioned, but I find the iPhone picture almost unrealistic. That's not how I saw the scene, as I was concentrating on the loco, not the background. I don't want all that background in such detail - it's a distraction. I deliberately have my lens at f4 (f8 equivalent 35mm) to blur the background for that reason. The iPhone gives me detail all the way back. (There's probably an app for that, but I don't have it.)

I didn't do these consciously as an A-B comparison. So maybe if I had filled the iPhone frame with loco to the same extent that the Fuji frame, the iPhone would have blown out the sky.

Beyond that, there is something about iPhone photos, or at least those from the SE. They just don't have the weight or the depth of a real camera, and I grant that's partly because the Fuji has about four times as many pixels. I hadn't been able to see it quite so well before.

Fresh Local Fish

The hut with the sign has fresh fish, the converted container is where they serve the cooked stuff. It's about a ten minute walk from Dungeness Station. Worth every step. There's a reason there was a crowd. 

Into The Sun - Away From The Sun

My grandfather, who was a mainstay of the Sheffield Photographic Society back in the day, used to say that one should never shoot into the sun. All sorts of bad things would happen: blown-out skies, over-dark shadows and the like. However, sometimes it works.

Sheerness

My Nana (grandmother on father's side) lived in a tiny terraced house about a hundred yards from the seafront in Sheerness. Sis and I used to spend a week in the summer with her when we was young, while my parents did whatever parents do when they drop the kids off with the grandparents. Nana had a background that stopped one generation into North London, Mr Nana was a mystery she never talked about, but he must have left early, because my father couldn't remember him well. She had dark olive skin, and paid half her bills on her winnings at cards. Or that's what everyone told me.

The main employer on the island must be the port, through which a large proportion of imported cars arrive. Also fruit and meat. And timber. There isn't a lot of industry, the tourism is mostly day-trippers during the school holidays, and there is one large school. I think back in Nana's day, the kids went to school on the Sittingbourne bus.

Look up "backwater" in the dictionary and you'll see a picture of Sheerness.

Anyway, we went there recently (no matter your route, you will change at Sittingbourne for the shuttle service). The pleasant promenade with its open steps from the street has been replaced with a nasty lump of concrete, and the amusement arcade half-way along the walk into the town along promenade has all but disappeared. Nobody was selling candyfloss, but we might have come too late for that. There were a couple of bunches of lads playing football, and a lot of old people (which now means 60+ but in bad nick from hard lives) hanging around the streets having old people arguments. Also a couple of girls taking their younger sisters out in the pram ("That must be her sister, right" - The Eels). The seafront looked almost exactly as it did (cough, splutter) years ago, except a) the Council have let the tidebreaks rot, and b) on some of the beaches have been turned into hump-and-ditch "defences", whereas in Nana's day, all the beaches sloped into the water.

There were some geezers fishing, a few people walking and some cycling, but all were locals.

The Robert Montgomery is still out there somewhere, still allegedly capable of producing the largest conventional explosion the UK has or will ever see, but if there was any sign of it, I'd forgotten.

Across the river is Southend and its extension down to Shoeburyness. Not only across the river, but also in another economy.

Southend Pier

(Southend Pier is the longest in the UK, because the Thames Estuary is very wide and very flat, and the pier was to disembark passengers from the London boats. There's a train from the land to the end of the Pier. It's all pretty neat and way more chill than Brighton Pier.)

The Big Day was calling the council to come collect the bed. I have to get it into the front garden, so it's a good thing the mattress is a bit flimsy (though "orthopaedic") and the base is two boxes made out of wood that takes the weight but not if you stood on it directly. The decline in the quality of our lives is hidden in such details. I had to clear the hallway to get the bits down - because I was Thinking Like A Designer and planning ahead. I moved the bases and mattress into the hallway the previous evening, and woke up at 06:00 the next day to wrangle them into the garden, covering them with some plastic against a light shower. They collect between 07:00 and 15:00, and showed up at 11:00. I spent the afternoon clearing the back bedroom and laying plastic sheeting over the fitted carpet, before laying sheets over the plastic. Because I was going to put a second coat of white over the walls and ceilings. I'm not really a pro, but I have learned some of the tricks.

Epping Forest Pond (Reduced Glare Version)

 

With glare it's just a Meh landscape. Like this... it has real presence.

Joy-Rides at Epping Forest

A recent trip to Epping Forest found us passing by a collection of joy-rides. The sky was half-overcast and the light was diffused. I took some shots anyway because... "this sure is a bizarre sight in the middle of this s**t" as the movies says.

Both shots are cropped. There is a lot more sky in the original, and the camera weighted accordingly, so that the land is darker than one would want.

I twiddled around with the light settings in Photos. Cranking the Exposure up brought everything up, but turned the sky grey. Instead I cranked the Brilliance and Brightness up, which gave much the same effect but kept the sky blue. Then I took a little Saturation out and cranked up the Vibrancy for the colours.

The trees have stopped being a lumpy dark green mass and now have shape and texture. So does the grass. The colours are slightly lighter. The overall effect is a little bit post-card-y. But it's a useable image. The original is just Meh.

Deep In Epping Forest

 About halfway round the Holly Trail there's an area of what may be marshland if it gets wet. They don't want you riding horses over it. This scene is part of that. Heaven knows where the water comes from: the area around it is bone-dry.

Royal Airforce Museum - Lancaster

Sis and I took a trip to the RAF Museum in Colindale (Northern Line and take the bus). It's free and it is well worth the visit. They have the bi-planes and tri-planes and jet planes and the WW2 stuff. And then there is this mofo. It's big. Nope, it's bigger than that. Only the Vulcan is bigger, but not even the Vulcan has the sheer presence of this beast.

If it was 1944 and you saw a sky full of these things, you would not want to carry on with a war. The Lancaster is brutal. It has no other purpose than to leave the target in unrecoverable ruins. Carrying on when those things were dropping bombs was just crazy. Read Len Deighton's Bomber, if you haven't already. It describes the havoc those things could wreck in unsparing detail. 

Tech note: not my finest shots, but doesn't blur look better in B&W?

Epping Forest

We west-London-suburb people think we have the best parks: Richmond Park, Bushey Park, Virginia Water, Hampton Court. All terribly royal.

But we don't have Epping Forest.

How has it taken me so long to go there?

Because I'm for sure going back.

I met Sis at Liverpool Street, we took the Overground to Chingford, turned right outside the railway station, walked through the bus station and so help me it's right there. Open parkland and forest stretching into the distance.

For our first outing, we stuck to the east side, walked up to Connaught Water and turned right to go to Loughton to pick up the Central Line. Nice little walk. We'll do the big stuff off to the west on the next trip.

(Shots like these are the benefit of fancy cameras. This picked up all the detail from quite shady scenes.)

Hastings

Sis and I went to Hastings recently.

OK. Stop rolling your eyes. We didn't know, okay?

A day or so afterwards, I started to wonder: what am I taking photographs for anyway?

The camera-phone stuff I took on my way to work was basically pretty. Striking buildings, blue skies, odd contrasts, reflections in office windows, the sort of scene that makes your day feel a bit better.

Hastings... is not pretty.

What I wanted was a "nice day out" and some pretty photographs.

Didn't happen.

So I took a few shots and gave up.

I look at these now, and you know? They're they're not great, but neither are they bad. The hotels going diagonally across the frame; a perfectly serviceable joggers-on-the-promenade shot; the shops underneath the hotels, and that long iron-stain on the front of the Palace Court. You get some kind of feel for the place.

Then there were these decay-as-art shots...

And here's the pretty one to end with. A study in greys worthy of Whistler.

The next trip to the coast we make will be prefaced by enough research to ensure sandy beaches. With sunshine.

If I was a real photographer, I would make trips to Kent Coast towns with pebbly beaches and take well-framed shots of tired 1890's buildings, closed shops, unsightly modern developments, and whatever attractive views there may be.

But I'm a tourist. I want a nice day out and some pretty pictures.

Which is sort of an answer to my original question, but now I want to add: is that all?