This year I have taken many photographs with my trusty digital camera. As I have mentioned before, I like to contribute to a website called Geograph which continues to capture images of the British Isles. In August, the website logged its two millionth image. In an average week, Geograph receives around 8,000 images and every week fifty photographs are selected for a competition shortlist. You can imagine that to even make the shortlist of fifty is a great achievement - statistically you have a one in one hundred and sixty chance of doing that.
I am proud to tell you that so far this year I have had ten photographs in the site's weekly shortlists and, as I recall mentioning before, one of my photos was even picked to be the "Photo of the Week" back in February. So here are my ten shortlisted pictures:-
Power Station from Willingham-by-Stow
Wicken Fen - WINNER - Week 7
Holmesfield Common
Near Treeton, Sheffield
Samuel Holberry's Grave, Sheffield General Cemetery
Allotment Hut at Meersbrook
King Harry Ferry, Cornwall
Endcliffe Park, Sheffield
Stanage Edge, North Derbyshire
Near Brookfield Manor, Hathersage
Don't you agree that digital photography is a wonderful invention? Even now I can only dimly remember the tiresome business of buying films, loading them, winding them back, unloading them, taking them to the chemist for processing and then a few days later ripping open those amber Kodak or Agfa envelopes to be underwhelmed by my prints. Digital photography is much more faithful to whatever we see when we press that button.
Digital photography is and will be truly wondrous until a solar flare, or a magnetic cloud, or some kind of thing that always assailed Captain Kirk and the Enterprise comes along and wipes all our hard drives. Or maybe Michael Rennie and Gort.
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed your photos immensely. I am still using the heather picture as my screen saver. In the meantime, but I'd like to know if there are any places in England that are NOT scenic, green and beautiful.
You guys are to be commended and admired for preserving your country so well.
The photos are lovely, YP. You certainly have a good eye. :)
ReplyDeleteJAN England is a green and pleasant land. Many of my fellow citizens seem to forget that this is so. Of course, to get green you must have water! Rain! Though I do take urban pictures, I am more drawn to rustic scenes so I guess I may have given you a somewhat skewed view of what England is. Geographers will agree that our island is too crowded.
ReplyDeleteJENNY Thank you. But what is wrong with my other eye may I ask?
Your photographs are wonderful,YP. Congratulations on your well deserved success. x
ReplyDeleteThey're all great images and you well deserve to be in the top ten. I like the convenience of digital, but I still like the 'look' of film (Kodak Ektachrome slides, to be precise). I also like to potter about with B&W film that I develop myself. There's something organic about taking a picture and then seeing the image emerge from chemicals rather than pixels. I have also recently had my Mac die on me, taking about 2000 pictures with it to the grave. Fortunately, most were scans of prints or slides - so I have the hard copy backup.
ReplyDeleteIf I had a jealous bone in my body, your photos would make me jealous, YP! All of them are wonderful, and it's easy to see why they made the short list.
ReplyDeleteMichael, I've never heard of a Mac dying and taking stuff with it. The documents and the hardware are separate entities and the documents can pretty much always be retrieved, it's not like a Windows machine. I hope you didn't give up too soon.
ReplyDeleteMICHAEL Unlike you, I guess I am a rather lazy, amateurish photographer. I like it to be as simple as possible but I do recall the delight I experienced as a lad of eleven or twelve, working with my father in a dark room to see our magical images emerge in chemical baths.
ReplyDeletePAT ARK. Thank you. If you lived next door I'd ask you round for a cup of tea and an English muffin.
JAN Have you ever visited Michael's superb photographic blog in which he continues to capture Australia in often wonderful images? Perhaps you could drop him a comment about the Mac issue as you are clearly a computer whizzkid.
Am reminded, by looking at your smashing photos, how grand our countryside is...how lucky we are.
ReplyDeleteWell done. What camera do you use?
LIBBY Camera: Hewlett-Packard HP PhotoSmart C945 (V01.60) Very simple to use but a couple of notches up from your usual small compact digital camera.
ReplyDeleteyou have a wonderful eye for composition
ReplyDeletelove the allotment shed
I love digital cameras. We have some wonderful photos of the UK from our holidays there . I must look into that site , it sounds like fun.
ReplyDeleteCheers
Helen
Meant to add that I really loved your photos - and recognised some of the subjects too!!
ReplyDeleteHelen
HELSIE/HELEN I know you are a bit of an Anglophile and that you have enjoyed your visits over here so I think you will also enjoy exploring Geograph. It will bring back memories and it would be lovely if you could post some of your own photos IF you can locate them on maps. That's often the hard bit.
ReplyDeleteI think digital photography is grand. Big Bear keeps asking why I take so many pictures and I tell him that there might be one "winner" and the rest can be deleted! Super!
ReplyDeleteI remember when we used to go to the photo shop to pick up our 8 or 16 prints and we had to look at them right then and there. And, the disappointment if they were bad. Oh my!
Lovely photos! - - - er, that's all! It's late at night and my wits have left me.
ReplyDelete