Brocken Spectre

My shadow forming a Brocken Spectre

So Saturday wasn't just a brilliant reunion with old friends we witnessed a rare meteorological phenomena. It's called a Brocken Spectre and you see them if the conditions are just right. You need the sun behind you shining on to fog or cloud which is to the front and below of you. Then what happens is you shadow is projected onto the fog looking huge and not only that but your shadow has a rainbow halo around it.

The photograph above is of the one I saw when walking on the white horse at Uffington. I suitably spooky place to see one. Apparently in the past climbers would be terrified by seeing them. They're named after a mountain in Germany where sightings of them are common.

I sent my picture to the Met Office when they tweeted about fog this week and they sent me this information about them. There's also a great story about a sighting of one in the 19th century in Scotland. I wonder if these Brocken Spectres could have fuelled the Abominable snowman myth in mountain ranges?

Getting my photograph was difficult as my camera did not, in fact could not, focus on the fog. I had to set it to manual focus and force the camera to focus on the ground just before the drop. For us standing on the hill side the Brocken Spectre's halo was very obvious but as always not so much when you look back at the photograph. So I had to mess around with the saturation of the photo and bring down the white. But it's probably as good as I was going to get.

Reunion

Our 3 shadows 

Saturday just past, I met up with two friends who until very recently I had not seen in nearly 30 years. It was one of the most magical days of my life.

In November last year I met up with my friend Tess who I hadn’t seen in 27 years. Thanks to social media Tess got in touch with me about a year ago and we’ve stayed in touch this time. On Saturday Charlotte joined us for another meet up. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since May 1988, when I left Cornwall to move to Yorkshire.

Leaving Cornwall at 14 was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do. Although we had only lived there for 2 years and 3 months those months coincided with becoming a teenager, and all that entails for a girl. I was 11 when we arrived in Newquay and my head was full of smugglers and pirates and a childish hope for being somewhere new and beautiful. Instead I encountered so many strange things. I went from a school of 200, 9 -13 year olds to a school of over a 1000, 11 -18 year olds. For the first 6 months my life was spent in a bewildered attempt to fit in and be accepted or in a self imposed, dignified isolation.

But I eventually made friends with Charlotte and Tess and things began to change. We were the rejects. The group of girls who didn’t quite fit in with the rest. I was finally accepted for who I was and I felt like I belonged. By 1987 I was extremely happy. My life revolved around my friends. reading and writing romance stories, buying records, singing in the choir, hanging out in Newquay town or on the beach and the crushes we had on various boys (and embarrassingly one of our teachers.)  At one point we even formed a girl group! 

Then all too soon it came to an end when my Dad was posted to Yorkshire, which back then with out cheap phone calls or the internet might as well have been Mars. I tearfully bid farewell to my Cornish friends and had to go through the whole “new girl” thing again but this time as an angry 14 year old, Not much fun for my parents! Luckily Doncaster also produced some wonderful friends who I have in my life still.

Tess and Charlotte had been friends long before I turned up in 1986 and have remained friends ever since. I just popped up for a tiny amount of time. Yet, they still wanted to be friends with me then and now. I feel so incredibly grateful and blessed. When we met up it was as if no time had elapsed. We were so comfortable together, it was so simple and easy. We are quite different in some ways and similar in others, but I think we share a similar outlook, which holds true as much now as it did then. 

The path to Waland's Smithy through the trees

Our day together was so perfect I don’t think I can do justice writing about it. So I am just going to focus on one thing. After walking up and around the white horse at Uffington and a brief stop for a cup of tea in a local pub, we walked to Wayland’s Smithy. We took a detour through the trees and found a log to sit on to eat lunch. There we were three women in our early 40s, wrapped up warm, sitting on a log drinking soup which Charlotte and Tess had brought in flasks and eating cheese pastries I’d picked up at the station. It was freezing although the sun was slanting through the slender trees. We were chatting about our memories of school and our lives. At that point it was if the rest of the world had slipped away. It was just us, the trees and our laughter. I keep thinking we were like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings, meeting up again to recount our parts in the adventure and reminisce about our time in the Shire. That act of sharing each others food and company, comfortably, with out effort, with out drama, with gratitude and kindness, was precious and priceless. 

I just wanted to say thank you to Tess and Charlotte for welcoming me back. 

Wayland's smithy in the afternoon sunlight

Scott's antarctic expedition photographs and the poetry ambulance

Yesterday morning I read that some of the photographs taken on Scott's doomed expedition to Antarctica are going on sale. The Guardian article includes two of the pictures for sale. I was drawn to read this article for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was about photography but mostly because last year I read The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, which is his account of Scott's expedition. He was a young man on the expedition. The book was recommended to me under unusual circumstances.

Last June I joined my Mum and her best friend Angela at the Stoke - on - Trent Hot Air Literary Festival.  It was a brilliant few days. One of the initiatives they had there was a poetry ambulance. You could pop in for some emergency poetry treatment. The poetry para-medic was a literature lecturer at Keel University who also takes her poetry ambulance to nursing homes where she writes and reads poetry with patients who have dementia.

We had a lovely chat about what poetry and literature meant to us. After which she prescribed me three poems to read, quietly with a cup of tea. She also recommended reading the Worst Journey in the World.  I found the book extremely moving. A rivverting read of adventure and folly. Set at a time where modern technology was first being used, like the ill fated motorised sleds but being used by men who were Victorians. It's full of stiff upper lips and under statement, of bravery and friendship.

So the article about the photographs piqued my interest. The article mentions the Scott Polar exploration museum in Cambridge where I really must visit.

Of course at the Literary festival I did take some photographs. Here's one of my favourites from the opening celebration at Trentham Gardens. It's a sculpture of a sprite pulling a dandelion clock. I love how the sculptor  manages to create movement.



Then this morning I came across this article mentioning the Scott Polar Exploration museum again and a modern collection of photographs of the North Pole. The stunning images are beautiful but the photographer Timo Lieber says the images show global warming at its worst which is a terrifying thought.

What Great Disability Awareness and Service Looks Like

So I'm writing this post because I have just experienced some of the best customer service in a cafe or shop in a long time. It left me wanting to praise this member of John Lewis' staff publicly. It was only when I was composing my tweet to John Lewis that I realised that not only was it great customer service but a fantastic example of disability awareness. I had been helped in a way which actually made me completely unaware that the motivation for the help was because of my sight impairment. It was like ninja disability awareness!

When I sat down at my table in the John Lewis cafe in Birmingham with my coffee and sauasage sarnie I did so smiling because a member of staff had been so helpful. But as I thought about it I was puzzled. It was almost as if this member of staff knew I was partially sighted. But because I had my hands full with bags and a rucksack on my back, I wasn't using my symbol cane. How had this John Lewis staff member known?

Well the whole thing went like this.

I arrived in the cafe and made my way to the "hot food" stand. There was a couple waiting in front of me. The chap serving cheerfully greeted me and said "We're just waiting for some fresh bacon and sausages."
"Ok" I said, looking at the menus pinned to a board next to me but that menu was for lunch.
"Do you know what you'd like?" He asked.
"Um that's the lunch menu do you have a breakfast one?"
The chap in front of me indicated it was in front of him and moved aside so I could look at it. Of course I had to get up close to read it. I am guessing at this point our breakfast server knew that I couldn't see very well. Though he didn't let on.
Instead he casually started to tell me what was on offer.
"I'll have a sausage sandwich" I decided.

So the fresh food came out and the couple in front of me were served. Then it was my turn. After making up my sandwich the chap told me very clearly where the cutlery was and asked me if I wanted a drink. There was quite a queue at the coffee station so I asked him if there was somewhere else to get a coffee. Her replied
"Yes there is, we have a couple of machines, and it's the exact same coffee beans. Look I'll show you where it is."

And so he left his station and took me to the coffee machine where he made me my Americano. On our way over there he offered to carry my tray because "you have a lot of bags." I politely declined.

He made sure I got to the till safely and left me there after I had thanked him profusely.

Now that might all have been just good customer service and if so that's great because everyone will benefit from that. But in hindsight I think he was particularly attentive because he'd worked out that I couldn't see very well and might struggle using the coffee machine.

I know John Lewis provide disability awareness training for their staff and take customer service very seriously. It really shows when things like this happen. I'm usually not a fan of this kind of canteen / self service set up but John Lewis are clearly making sure that it works for all of their customers. If only other retailers could take a leaf out of their book.

New Camera - pictures of Lumpy cat

So over the years I have posted my pictures on this blog, sometimes more regularly than recent times, and I've also blogged about being a partially sighted photographer Well I have started a new journey with my photography. I have taken the plunge and got a proper digital SLR camera. A Nikon D7200 no less. I had resisted for a long time convinced that I needed the large digital screen, that digital cameras have, to be able to take photographs. My Nikon V1 camera meant I could have all the benefits of a digital camera with a digital view finder and try different lenses and different settings. The trouble was that after a number of years I had two lenses which broke and there just wasn't anything new coming out for the camera. It was like Nikon had forgotten about their V1 camera. Maybe they thought those customers who wanted more would just move to a DSLR.

Jason let me have another go with his digital SLR and I found that I could see through the view finder. What had seemed difficult before now didn't so much.  My eye sight hasn't got any better in the last few years so that's not making the difference. I think the difference is that I have now spent the last 6 years taking photographs and getting used to composing images through a small square. Even with the digital view finder and screen I would regularly take pictures which contained things I had no idea were there. I love taking photos of flowers and often I don't spot the insects or bugs on the flowers until I'm processing the photos on my computer! Often I use the zoom to look for bees using my ears to seek out their direction. I know that I must miss plenty of things other photographers wouldn't but when I do track down that bee using my ears and my zoom it's like finding rare treasure. I am sure the thrill is just the same for those photographers who capture a rare mountain lion.

Speaking of rare mountain lions. I have been using my tabby cat Lumpy as a model for some of my first photographs. So far I am finding no problems using the view finder, once I worked out that red rectangles mean it's not focussing and black mean it is. (My old camera had black meaning not focused green in focus.) Sometimes depending on the background the black squares don't show up too well but that's where being able to choose where I want the camera to focus gives me more control.

The camera has so many settings it's quite a job getting my head round it all. I downloaded Thom Hogan's guide for the Nikon D7200 to discover it had around 1000 pages! Thom Hogan does a great series of guides to cameras which are well worth checking out and buying if you have a new camera or are considering a new one. A little daunted by all of the detail in Thom Hogan's guide I also started watching a YouTube guide for my new camera by Tony and Chelsea Northrup They also have some snappy videos on YouTube which describe general features of digital photography right down to very basics. Jase has also been a real help, explaining things to me. I am not a patient student but he is a very patient teacher!

But it would have been useful to know when Jason changed the camera settings after borrowing it to test how it was working. He set it up to his usual settings, which is to slightly under expose everything. I didn't know this and went outside to take some pictures of Lumpy. It was a very dull day but not so dull that I shouldn't have been able to get a brighter shot of Lumpy than the one directly below.

Lumpy the tabby cat walking towards me - under exposed

When Jase got home from work I said to him I was worried the camera had a fault as it couldn't manage with low light even when I adjusted the aperture, shutter speed and ISO. It was then that he remembered what he had done! He had set the camera to take pictures at 0.7 of an F stop below what the camera was set to. So this under exposed all of the photos I was taking, making them look gloomy.

Of course I was able to adjust this once I was processing the photos. The picture below is after I adjusted it.  

Lumpy the tabby cat walking towards me - brighter this time

 Yesterday I started to practice changing how the camera focuses and took this photo of Lumpy sitting on a box in the garden. I focused just on his face and in particular his eyes.

Close up of Lumpy's face his eyes narrow

I'm lucky that Lumpy is a very willing model when he is in the garden. I have taken pictures of other things other than Lumpy, which I will try and share later in the week. I went to St James's Park in London to take photographs of the birds there. You can always check out my photos on Flickr which I upload regularly.