a Photo Blog, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to dear dirty New York
The notorious Dartmoor Prison maintains a museum!
HM Prison uniforms. Note that women are not issued shoes.
The prison camera and the sitter’s chair for keeping bums in seats, requires the patience of the Buddha. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.
That same afternoon (16 May) we had a tour of the Thomas Hardy cottage. It’s been decades since I read Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and I scarcely remember them. The guide told us a lot about Hardy’s life and his family’s history in the area. I took a few pictures – click any of them to see them enlarged to full size.
Lyme Regis is on the Jurassic Coast, according to Wikipedia, “a World Heritage Site on the English Channel coast of southern England. It stretches from Exmouth in East Devon to Studland Bay in Dorset, a distance of about 96 miles (154Â km), and was inscribed on the World Heritage List in mid-December 2001.”
After dinner we walked along the beach and saw interesting stones, possible fossils and seaweeds. Click any image to enlarge them all and see the captions.
The Jane Austen House was mere minutes away. There was a lot to see and a lot of information to read. Here are a few impressions. Click any image to see them all enlarged and captioned.
Garry Winogrand is reported to have said that he photographed things to see what they would look like in a photograph. Sometimes you see something that just looks interesting or treats light in a special way and you just have to see if somehow you can capture some quality of the light that has struck you. Such was the effect this broken glass in a vacant store window had on me. Is it a punctum (pricking my individual interest only), or a studium (of more general photographic interest)?
We had a fantastic camera-building workshop with Peter Renn a couple of weeks ago. I had bought a cheap 135mm, f/4.5 projector lens in a charity shop for £10 and brought in a shoe box to mount it on. The first two pictures show the final product. The cardboard flaps in the first image allow one to slide the imaging screen backwards and forwards to focus. The next picture shows the inside, a focusing screen which is simply some tracing paper in a cardboard frame. The next 2 pictures I took with my phone through a hole in the back. I made the hole the size of my Fujinon 23mm lens so I can photograph what’s on the focusing screen and maintain a pretty good light seal. The 5th picture is a shot my classmate Marilyn took of me using the camera and the bottom right picture is the first image I took digitally. Click any of the pictures to see them all full-sized.
Back in the High Street, we visited the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge. While in America we tend to revere the Magna Carta (statues of them above) for expanding the rights of the people, in fact, the Barons were wresting power from the King with no regard for the ‘people,’ beyond their own right to exploit them.
Once again, I confronted a museum mirror, this one with a sign encouraging photography adjacent. What else could I do? Click any of the pictures to see them all big.
Next we walked down Church Ln to Stour St. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was born in Canterbury (for an excellent historical novel, read Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford), passing through Beer Cart Ln by the Marlowe Kit to Greyfriars Gardens. Passing through the gardens we came out into St Peter’s Grove, a street that looks like all those English ’60s movies. Click any of the pictures to enlarge them all.
I’m not sure what this flotsam (or is it jetsam?) was, but found it along the Viking Coastal Trail
Upon leaving the train station in Margate we came upon this circle of stones with poems created from the contributions of school children.
Last month we took a bus and a walk to see the outdoor Museum of Rural Life. Click any image to see them all enlarged.
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