A Cockney family portrait

 

I have been trying to do a Marie Kondo on the house- see MARIE KONDO -in the past few weeks. After 51 years of marriage Val and I managed to accumulate a lot of 'stuff'. I am gradually sorting through it and last week I found a treasure trove of old photos in a cupboard some of which I cannot recollect having seen before. My regret is that I had not found them earlier so that I could have shared them with Val in the final months of her life.

Amongst the photos is this gem-a Cockney family portrait It is a small print and going by the dimensions it is a contact print from a 127 negative. It is a little damaged but still has a very period warm tone.

It shows members of my family and was taken, I believe, in 1948 in Marylebone in London. On the right is my paternal grandfather, Arthur. He was a knockabout guy-at various times a bookmaker's runner, a boxer-look at his nose-and many other dubious occupations. I love his flat cap and the cigarette drooping from his lips. 

The small child is me! Obviously I was dressed in my 'Sunday Best' for the photo and take a look at those sandals and the dinky white socks.

On the left is my mother. I remember her as kind and soft but she looks rather hard here. At the back is my paternal grandmother, Annie, Arthur's wife or as he would say in his often used Cockney rhyming slang, 'his trouble and strife'.

The photo must have been taken by my father using his Voigtlander camera which I owned until 2008 when I gave it away in an earlier cleanout when moving house.

It was a very hard time in the UK in 1948 especially in London where my family lived. Britain had won the war but was bankrupt and large areas of London had been flattened by bombing. There was widespread rationing and other hardships. The photo is an evocative portrait from a very difficult time.

Forbidden in the hermit kingbom.

 

Again Australia is facing a covid-crisis. One limo driver taking incoming flight crews to their quarantine hotel has become infected with the Delta virus variant and has very effectively spread it around in Sydney so now we have a total lockdown in Sydney and surrounding areas and state borders closed to NSW residents. Because our forever smirking, Pentacostal prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his crew of incompetent muppets have sat on their hands in a bubble of "no covid here" complacency and not actioned an effective and orderly vaccination policy Australia is now the 49th of 50 in ranking of the world's richest nations in terms of the vaccination rate.

We are rapidly turning into the hermit kingdom. Travellers and Australian citizens cannot come in and those of us who are here are forbidden to leave.

All this suits a substantial portion of the population who are all in favour of keeping us "safe" with closed  international borders-perhaps for ever. As Mr Smirk's only objective is to get re-elected and keep his fat Pentacostal arse in the white armour plated BMW 7 Series government car he's only too pleased to go along with this as it surely will be a vote and election winner. The rest of us are in despair. See Lack of Leadership  from today's Sydney Morning Herald.

It's time for the f'ing around to stop Australia. The government has to procure enough vaccine to vaccinate us all rapidly-no more rubbery figures on the vaccination rate. Also all the anti-vaccers and vaccine shoppers  ("if I have the Astra-Zeneca jab there is a chance I will die-I must have Pfizer") have to shut up and get inline otherwise we are all f'd and destined to live forever in a hermit kingdom with a shrinking economy and ruled by small minded incompetents.

And yes I am fully vaccinated. Two doses of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine and yet I still cannot go anywhere. What a fiasco. Find me the nearest guillotine and some handcarts.

Header-a photo from 2012. St Helens, on the east coast of Tasmania. A place in my own country I cannot visit currently due to the incompetence and lack of leadership of Mr Smirk and his team of muppets.

The photo is a Photoshop panorama stitch of two photos taken with my Leica X1.

The Squall

 An intense but small storm cell passed over Terrigal this morning producing a sudden squall and a really interesting sky and light. I had only a few minutes to pick up a camera and get outside on the top level of the house looking over Terrigal. A short time later and the squall was no more.

Morning Glow

Sunrise at The Haven, Terrigal

Early morning, Wyuna, Stockinbingal.

Tracks, Wyuna, Stockinbingal

 

Another glorious walk

 Early last Saturday morning I walked the coastal track on the cliff top from Bateau Bay to the Crackneck Lookout in the local Wyrrabalong National Park with my walking partner, Cheryl. It was another glorious winter's day and a great start to the day. 

This morning landscape photographer friend, Peter Enderby, and I did the same walk but at sea level. It was all new to me. I was unaware that you could walk/clamber so far up the shoreline at sealevel from Bateau Bay.

And again it was another beautiful winter's day. At first glance the shoreline looks ordinary but the harder you look the more you can see and in particular on the stretch directly beneath the Crackneck Lookout the beach is composed of tens of thousands of beautiful rounded stones which had significance the local Aborigines. This was in the time before white settlers came and murdered most of the Aborigines and filled the oceans with small and large pieces of plastic, plundered the fish stocks and committed thousands of other environmental sins. But at least we have had the good sense to stop hunting whales. A very rare win for nature and the environment.

So now at this time of the year there are literally tens of thousands of whales migrating up the east coast of Australia. We saw some on our Saturday walk and I was in Newcastle yesterday and saw whales and dolphins whilst sitting in the winter sun eating farmed fish and chips at the surfside cafe at Bar Beach.

Some of my photos from this morning's walk including a photo of Peter doing an Ansel Adams impersonation. You can view Peter's work on Instagram at #Peterenderbylandscapes. I used my Leica Q2 for the photos.

Special stones

Caution photographer at work

Perfectly formed natural "saucepan"

Looking south

Looking north, Bateau Bay.

 

 

 

Four Portugese girls sharing a coat

 Adobe have just announced a new Photoshop Lightroom feature, Super Resolution, which they describe as" the process of improving the quality of a photo by boosting its apparent resolution. Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution is an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details".

As I am now using a 42mp Leica Q2 I won't often have the need to boost the resolution but after reading the Adobe description of the new feature I tried it out on a photo taken with the Leica Q which "only" has 24mp.

 I gave a real world test by making big crops of a photo I took on a cool morning in Lisbon, Portugal, back in 2019 in the glorious time when we could all travel.

The top two photos below are the finished result. The middle photo of the trio is an extreme crop and the resolution is really holding up. Who needs a longer lens? And bear in mind that the photos have lost resolution when uploaded to the blog. The originals are better.

As well as the Super Resolution tool I have worked on it in Lightroom Classic. The original uncropped unprocessed photo is at the bottom. It is a DNG (RAW) file and was taken at 1/125th sec at f/1.7 at ISO 250. 

In my book this is a useful piece of software. It would be interesting to see how it performs on a photo taken with a less well specified camera. That's a test for another day.

I have recently been amazed at the quality of the photos from my iPhone SE Mk2 and the photos from the iPhone 12 are even better still. The phones use computational photography see- Computational Photography-to produce high quality images using very small sensors and tiny moulded lenses. Adobe's Super Resolution tool allows large enlargements/big crops from existing digital files so there are similarities in the results and probably the process.

A glorious winter walk

 Yesterday-Sunday-the weather here was glorious. A cold start to the day but beautiful and sunny and by late morning the temperature was topping 20ºC. Ideal weather for walking. Not too hot and crystal clear.

We left Terrigal at 8.00 and had a dream run down to Sydney via the M1, the Northconnex tunnel, the M2, the Harbour Bridge and the Cahill Expressway. It may have cost a few dollars in tolls but we were parked in the Domain car park close to the Art Gallery of NSW by 9.20. If only the traffic was that light every day of the week.

I decided that as it was a walking and talking day I was not going to walk all day burdened with a camera looking like a tourist. So for the day it was my phone, a sweater and my walking companion.

From the Domain car park we walked past the Art Gallery and after a coffee in the sun at an uncrowded  cafe on into the Botanic Gardens, through the rainforest walk and the fernery and upto a new structure, the Calix, which neither of us knew existed. The plant colour wall display of over 18,000 individual plants is really worth a visit.

From the Botanic Gardens we walked down to the harbour and on to to Mrs Macquarie's Point passing along the way a beautifully laid out engagement party where the guest were going to be seated on cushions on the ground. Some of the female guests arriving for the party must have regretted their choice of short skirts when they saw the set up.

We walked round the Point opposite Garden Island naval base and then back to the Opera House. When we set off from the car park at 9.30 there were few people around but gradually as the morning progressed there were more but nowhere near as many as we were expecting.The lack of tourists-overseas and local-was obvious at the Opera House where usually the steps and forecourt would be thronging with visitors on such a beautiful day.

We were even more surprised when we went down to the Opera House restaurant and bar area and were able to walk in and get a table right on the edge of the harbour looking straight onto the Harbour Bridge.We just could not believe it- a lunch table in one of the most iconic tourist locations in the world on a beautiful day and we walked straight in! There are upsides to the pandemic. Not many but this was one of them.

The lunch was good and the prices were surprisingly reasonable. There were families with young children having lunch and the whole place had a vintage Sydney buzz. This is how Sydney was 20 years ago-not overcrowded, friendly wait staff, no Chinese tour groups and no teeming hordes ashore for the day from cruise ships. I was certainly glad that I had not bought a camera-I would have looked like a throwback to 2019.

Fortified with some pasta and light beers we walked down to Circular Quay and then up onto the walkway beside the Cahill Expressway and then right across the Harbour Bridge. Two accidental tourists. The Harbour had never looked better. Sailing boats in a race further down the harbour. Ferries scuttling across to Manly. Climbers on the Bridge Climb above us. and at least three weddings on the lawns sloping down to the water beside Milsons Point. It was just wonderful. 

When we reached the pylon at the Milsons Point end of the bridge we turned round and walked back. This time we climbed down the steps to the Argyle Cut, then through the Rocks and back across Circular Quay. Another stop at the Opera House Bar for two more beers looking over the harbour. It was more busy by then but not impossible.

From there we sauntered back through the Botanic Gardens to the Domain car park. We had walked 12.5kms, 21,938 steps A full day's parking cost just $12. A bargain. The drive home on the same route was not as empty as the morning run but we were back in Terrigal tired but very happy for supper by 5.30. A wonderful day. My best day for many months. Thank you Sydney and thank you Cheryl.

I did use my phone to record a few snapshots of the walk. I make no claim to any artistic merit for them.

The Calix in the Botanic gardens. Cockatoos overhead

Part of the 18,000 plant colour wall in the Calix

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In the Calix

Big bugs in the Botanic Gardens

Engagement party by the Harbour. So lucky with the weather.

Harbour view

Look mum, no tourists.

Sydney you really have grown up. Part of the view at lunch

From above Circular Quay

From above Circular Quay 2

Cranes, everywhere cranes

Iconic view from the Harbour Bridge

Look mum, no toursts 2

Late afternoon, Botanic Gardens

Winter

 It has been a foul day here in Sydney and Terrigal. Cold, 14ºC-well cold by our standards-drizzling rain and gloom. Winter is here. However the forecast is for sunnier and warmer conditions tomorrow and over the weekend so I can put up with it for a day.

I smiled at the sight of people in England rushing to the beaches earlier in the week in a"heatwave" when the mercury "hit" 24ºC.

I went into Terrigal this afternoon to go to the post office and I should have taken a photo of what a miserable day it is -but I forgot. Anyway here's a winter shot-a photo of the sunset at Wallace Lake south of Forster in NSW. This photo was taken back in August 2018 on my Leica X1 and it is as shot. 

On the eastern seaboard of Australia there are only a few lakes and lagoons where you can see the sunset over water and Wallace Lake is one of them.