Category: Photography

Heading home from a camping trip in North Norfolk, we had vague plans to visit an RSPB reserve in the area but sidled up to the second largest of the broads, Barton Broad in Barton Turf. The broad was apparently only accessible by boat until 2003 (when a boardwalk was piled and constructed to get you to a viewing platform) and is alleged to have been a splashing ground of local boy Horatio Nelson. It was acquired by Norfolk Wildlife Trust in 1945.

From the viewing platform in late August 2017, cormorants winging it on pontoons, lots of great crested grebes and a few gulls, roach with their red fins in the water, but more intriguing a couple of swallowtail caterpillars on the milk parsley readying themselves for pupation at the foot of the reeds where they will overwinter and emerge next Spring.

Also sighted a couple of reed warblers and various dragonflies, and an orange flower that seemed quite whitespread in the darkest recesses of the area surrounded by the Herons’ Carr Boardwalk, Facebook friends identified it as an invasive species, orange jewelweed (Impatiens capensis).

Earlier in the trip sandmartins and lots of cormorants on the North Norfolk coast, at least one meadow pipit with a mouthful of crickets and dragonflies and an exotic-looking sycamore moth caterpillar in the less exotic Mundesley car park, oh, and a somewhat exotic alpaca farm (all females, apparently).

You can check out various other arty farty fotos from our most recent trip to Norfolk on my Flickr page.

Apparently, magpies (Pica pica) are invoked in Christian allegory because they look like a composite of a white dove and a black raven…they were alleged to have perched on the prow of The Ark during the Biblical flood and to have cackled and laughed whilst the world drowned…

Then there’s the nursery rhyme, made famous for British children of the 1970s by the ITV rival to Blue Peter, Magpie. The theme tune for the show perhaps usurped earlier, traditional versions of the nursery rhyme from our collective psyche.

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret,
Never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a bird,
You must not miss.

There are versions that begin:

One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral
And four for birth

and

One for sorrow,
Two for mirth
Three for a funeral,
Four for birth
Five for heaven
Six for hell
Seven for the devil, his own self

Why the magpie gets such a raw deal in mythology and folkore is perhaps down to the sound it makes, the cackling laughter, and perhaps also because it ties together white and black, day and night, good and bad, light and shade…either way it’s just a bird, a corvid, or crow, albeit a clever one.

Listen:

I tried the Prisma app when it first launched, a year or so ago, but then quickly forgot about it. A few friends have been playing with the app recently though and producing some nice filtered photos, so I thought I’d have another play. I picked a recent closeup of a greylag gosling I snapped in Milton Country Park north of Cambridge.

It seemed to be the perfect sort of shot to apply the various mosaics and filters that go by the quite esoteric names of Thota Vaikuntam, Wave (Hokusai-like), Mononoke, Mondrian, Femme (Picasso-like), The Scream (Munch-like), Roy (Lichtenstein-like), Heisenberg (ink sketch) etc. Top left in the contact sheet is my original photo, the others are various Prisma treatments picked to taste from the first few and applied with 100% of the processed image showing rather than blending with the original

Although this is a mobile app I ran an Android emulator known as Blue Stacks on my Windows 10 desktop machine and loaded the app in that to make it easier to pick and choose and to save files rather than messing around with the tiny mobile phone screen and shuttling files using the cloud. Montage was made with “paint.net” and my “dB” logo applied, as ever with Paintshop Pro. having mentioned a hack for uploading photos to Instagram from a Windows desktop machine, Blue Stacks is another alternative, run Instagram as an app within BlueStacks.

The Heisenberg filter, emulates an ink pen sketch and is styled for that TV programme, Breaking Bad

If you’re watching a sunset or a sunrise, occasionally you might see a green flash or green rays from the edge of the sun just as it disappears from view or begins to peek over the horizon. This a purely atmospheric, optical phenomenon, nothing to do with surface activity on the sun. By pure chance I seem to have caught a bit whilst photographing a sunset on the North Norfolk coast recently (one of the only places in the UK where, in the middle of summer, the sun both rises and sets over the sea on the “east coast”. I don’t remember noticing the green flash whilst taking the photos, it’s only now in scanning through the files that I spotted it.

Earthsky has as interesting explanation of the phenomenon:

The green flash is the result of looking at the sun through a greater and greater thickness of atmosphere as you look lower and lower in the sky. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs the yellow and orange colors in white sunlight, and air molecules scatter the violet light. That leaves the red and blue-green light to travel directly toward you. Near the horizon, the sun's light is highly bent or refracted. It's as though there are two suns — a red one and a blue-green one — partially covering each other. The red one is always closest to the horizon, so when it sets or before it rises, you see only the blue-green disk — the green flash.

UPDATE: It’s definitely not a dolphin in Cottenham.

Who else has noticed the large “fish” leaning head down against the back of the legs of the serviceman featured in Cottenham’s War Memorial? Friend of the blog Patrick Coughlan certainly has and he wonders what it’s all about..

According to one web site it perhaps alludes to the designer’s naval past. However, another suggests that it’s not a fish, but a dolphin, a mammal frequently associated with the Grey Funnel Line (the Royal Navy) and marine regiments. Indeed, Cottenham’s war memorial is similar to the one in St John’s Churchyard, Stokesay, Shropshire, which has a large dolphin at the serviceman’s back. Locals there say it is indeed an allusion to the sea but perhaps also to the mythology of dolphins bearing dead heroes in the afterlife.

UPDATE: If you don’t want to or cannot use the hack described below, then simply install a plugin or browser extension that acts as a user-agent switcher. Such an extension basically lets your browser pretend it is an Android phone, an iPhone or indeed any other type of browser. I tried uploading to Instagram with this user-agent switcher extension installed under Chrome and it seemed to work fine.

You have been able to access your Instagram account from a desktop browser for quite some time but you cannot post a photo without a workaround. The workaround is quite straightforward. You simply log into Instagram on your desktop browser, switch to developer mode (right-click “inspect” in Chrome) and choose a mobile device view. Full instructions are here.

I just tried it successfully with my recent kingfisher photo…seems to have worked. Saves me having Instagram running on my phone as it drains the battery really quickly even with the app supposedly “inactive”.

Developer or “inspect” mode in Chrome lets you make your browser look like it’s a mobile browser running on a Galaxy, Nexus, iPhone, iPad etc. If you want to see what a site looks like (perhaps testing your own for instance), this is a useful tool. I’m sure there are mobile only sites out there that people use, this is a workaround for that too, so you don’t have to use an actual mobile device. (I assume it’s simply doing a user-agent switch within the dev mode, which reverts to normal browser when close the dev window). It’s a tiny bit more complicated for Safari on a Mac, but the instructions are in the link.