SNAPS

RANDOMLY SELECTED

A moon. By night. (No Wiccans were harmed in the course of getting this shot—nor astronauts or any lycanthropes.) Moving on before I need shave again …

A grass, and a bit of a leaf.

And now, a shot I may have posted earlier—

—a visually challenging shot from a small bridge looking downstream (Fawcett, eat your heart out) (and nary a piraña in sight!).

Miss Bessie Bunny, on my desk, getting between me and the screen again. She’s always keeping an eye on what I’m up to, honestly, it’s like having two wives …

AND NOW

back to reality.

Winton main street in lockdown. I had to wait ages for a car, and then got four in a row

TO AMERICA

and all our turkey friends …

 

Wishing you all the best on this very American occasion—we’d celebrate with you too, but (other than in Parliament) we have so few turkeys …

SO, THERE I WAS

HOOFING QUIETLY ALONG

on my walk … when in the sky I perceived a flying thingy, which I cleverly (by a process of deduction and elimination) concluded was an unidentified flying aircraft. I took a photo or two then finished my walk at this computer with a cup of coffee and an interest in finding out more about celestial visitations. Not one of ours, ‘cos anything from Invercargill wouldn’t be that high, that fast, or that insouciant.

So I used a program called ‘Flight Tracker’.

And in no time at all it produced this—

—wee screenshot from the bigger picture.

And by now that beast is oodles further out to sea and well on its way to Santiago. If you are interested enough to want to identify flying things close to you, just click the image above which should take you to the Flight Tracker itself (you do your own thing from there).

Good luck and happy spotting~!

And Bessie Bunny says to say  “Hi~!” (Who would I be to refuse her?)

PS

Just checked … that craft is now at 33000 feet and doing 566 knots …

POLA, or not—

I swear by it!

COMPARE THESE TWO

snaps below (actually, these are possibly quite adequate a demonstration—any more is simply gilding the lily) (as it were):

DEMO SHOT No 1

Hand-held in the arcade before its final closure (don’t ask, I’m very bitter about it). In this snap we’re looking at a shop window and natural lighting.

And now, a wee twist of the wrist taking mere squillieseconds—

—and suddenly some reflections are removed; all on camera in the field. A polarising filter can work magic especially when peering into water, or for deepening the blue of the sky at some angles. And where your colours are a bit washed out by glare, removing that glare with a polariser can greatly benefit your capture.

I can never get enough of Miss Bessie Bunny

DISCLAIMER

No little yellow-eyed penguins were harmed in the making of this post; likewise bengal tigers, southern right whales or little furry things in the bush that go squelch when you step on them. No politicians either, sadly …

WITH NO REFERENCE

TO FELLOW BLOGSOMANIACS

Oops—

—first, let me set the scene:

The Spouse brought me a wee gift. She loves rabbiting around in charity shops. You know, those places where all the goods have been donated for sale by voluntary folks, with all proceeds supposedly going to fund Charities. The Sallies (Salvation Army), the Red Cross, the Hospice, and St Johns Ambulance spring to mind.

We donate mostly to the ‘Habitat For Humanity’ ourselves, further out with smaller chance that we’ll buy our own stuff back; and they too do a damned fine job. (We? Yep—I love ’em too)(but not so much these days since they all went professional and cleaned their acts up. A lot—you used to be able to poke through dusty shelves, brush away the spiders and occasionally find a treasure—not so now, they’ve all gone upmarket. Dammit …)

ANYWAY, THERE I WAS

blogging away when a wee statuette was shyly shoved onto the desk. And of course I had no option but to lose my train of thought and look over…

…and immediately fell in love. I named her ‘Bessie’.

Why Bessie? How the hell do I know? Alliteration, perhaps, or maybe in a previous life I had a ladyfriend called Bessie? Any way, here she be—

My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and Others, may I present

MISS BESSIE BUNNY

—other shots will be following when I shoot her again, by daylight.

FOR BESS+

SOME MORE

POPPIES

—and if you find ’em useful, go for it~!

Boom boom!

—and with apologies to anyone who may find them a bit ‘single-minded’ …

Dammit … don’t stop me now, there’s oooooodles more~!

FOR BESS

ZEN ART

I love the little Zen art I’ve experienced. It gels, it rings my bell; and any damned poseur trying to explain it obviously doesn’t understand. He misses the bus—at best he is a simpleton or at worst he’s out to impress others. (Yes … I do realise what I’ve just said …)

Zen art … simply is.

Good. That done, let’s get on with the post. Bess posted a shot of a work-in-progress which from my perspective seems most excellent just as it is. Without having gained permission and knowing what artists can be like (I married one! Boom boom~!) I shan’t purloin what I saw on her blog (lovely poppies, Bess~). But—

—it certainly seems in the zen mood.

Zen artists, we’re told, capture the spirit of the moment. And in as few brushstrokes as it takes. The greatest swordsman that old Japan ever produced was one Miyamoto Musashi (in WW2 Japan named a truly fearsome battleship after him) and he was also a most excellent Zen artist—

—capturing his subject with little fuss (Audubon, eat your heart out).

Like these, for example (above and below):

I could wax lyrical here, and babble and burble, which would NOT be in keeping with the theme of—

—unpretentious honesty with as few brush-strokes as it takes.

Capture the moment … and

Bess’s poppies certainly seem to do that.

 

 

 

SWORDS INTO

PLOUGHSHARES

and as they say “The beat goes on”. Life is eternal ‘re-purposing’, and, as the ancients noted, nothing endures.

An ancient … (selfie) …

The topic (of a recent ‘back and forth’) was an old church now for sale in New Zealand’s small town of Gore. I promised some snaps to a en exurbanate Gorian (think ‘expatriate’ but on a smaller scale) and went on from there—

And from Invercargill’s St Johns to the ‘third city of the Empire’ (so to speak); these from Winton:

One of which I took but the other was just a bit before my time—

—the passage of time fascinates me. (What the young Maori lad of Victorian times might have thought of an almost naked pakeha damsel strolling blithely towards him I leave to the gods.)

 

 

AUTUMN

FALLs upon Southland. There are subtle hints, like the golf course changing colour in places—

—and cute little mushrooms popping up all over … some to die for, others to die from—

I was on my knees by the highway way out in the countryside, snapping the above when there came a loud squawk of bike brakes and a woman’s voice intruding upon my reveries—

“Are you okay?” with genuine concern.

She was about my own vintage and decked out in modern cycling gear which must surely have added to the discomforts of ancient biking. Seems she’d seen my butt sticking up out of the ditch and concluded (location, circumstances) that I’d had an accident; which was neighbourly of her—normally old dears advise me solemnly “not to eat those!” (I don’t. Brrrr …)

Later, in the golf course, I nearly achieved an ambition (no, not a hole-in-one)(I don’t play, I just keep finding lost balls—I gave away over a hundred and since have saved up about a hundred and thirty more) … I very nearly had a fantail perch upon my extended hand. No kidding—they are very flitty birds and quite friendly. S/he kept coming closer so I held my arm out; and just when it looked like it might actually land on the Spouse texted me …

This next is from a ‘bark garden’ car park just outside Queens Park in town.

These things love bark for whatever reason and don’t mind the traffic at all.

And within the park the management had forgotten to turn off the lighting on the rotunda again, which suited me nicely—

—I love that the modern camera can be set to record in B & W plus a single selected colour; this time blue.

IT HAS BEEN

a bumper autumn so far for mushies, I’ll post some more soon (and try not to throttle the next sweet old dear that solemnly tells me not to eat them) …

EXAMPLE

just one of the reasons why a

POLARISING FILTER

can sometimes be handy when snapping snaps.

It’s useful also for peering into water to see where your lost keys went (klutz!) or where the fishies are lurking. The polariser not only does weird things to surface reflections, it’ll often make colours richer, deeper, more vibrant; as in blue skies being bluer (in places).

SO ENOUGH

of my babbling and on with the show—

—I stopped in Dee Street (Invercargill … other end of the world from you) and snapped a vacant shop window.

This one—

—and then mere squilliseconds later I half-twisted the filter, and snapped again—

—scoring this. (Who the inquisitive passer-by is I have no idea … they just seem to pop out of nowhere whenever I point a camera) (you get over it—learn to adapt and just go with the flow). Moving on—

—this old building is superfluous to requirements so it’s being demolished to make room for a new hotel.  The shot above is effectively un-polarised—

—while the one below

—is achieved with a ninety degree twist of the filter—you get proportional effect for different amounts of twist.

One of these babies is well worth the investment.