PG went out looking for some autumn colors a couple of weeks ago. He didn’t find them in the usual places, but did find this spring that is the beginning of a small creek.

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UPDATE – Sharp-eyed visitor Donna discovered a ghost in this photo. See the discussion in the comments.

Here’s an enlargement of a portion of the original image that shows the ghost.
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From The Guardian:

It is high summer, and the barley is being harvested. Instead of breezes and birdsong the fields are loud with the rumble of machinery, clouds of dust marking the place where distant combines clank and toil. For months I’ve watched the barley’s awns form, watched the beards tip over as the rippling acres turned from green to richest gold. Because of the long drought, though, this year’s yield has been low – something I wouldn’t have realised until recently. While the barley fields looked beautiful, the ears were far too small.

Nine months ago I was a nature writer and novelist who lived in south London; now home is a Suffolk village with nightingales in springtime, stoats, corn poppies, hares and water voles. Being able to walk out of my front door on to farmland and connect to the cycle of the agricultural year feels right at a bone-deep level; the longing for a more rural life that I’ve carried around for so long has eased.

Yet that longing was one of the things that’s always driven my writing. My first novel, Clay, was about the nature I discovered in the heart of the city; my second, At Hawthorn Time, was (among other things) an exploration of what it might be like to leave. “Will you still want to write about wildlife now it’s everywhere around you?” a friend asked me recently; “Or will you just start taking it all for granted?” It could happen, but as I’ve found out more and more about my village and the living things I share it with, my feelings for it have deepened, and the possibility of not wanting to capture it in words seems increasingly remote.

. . . .

As a child Dartmoor was my first love, and later Cumbria: upland landscapes built from granite and peat and heather, criss-crossed by drystone walls. Suffolk’s flat, wide, fertile acres could hardly be more different, but in 2016 I visited the county several times and found that it somehow crept into my soul. Farming with its often generations-deep connection to place has featured in all my books, probably because growing up rootless in suburbia I lacked that sense of connection. Having already written about pigs and dairy, I wanted to explore arable farming, and flat, fertile East Anglia is our cereal heartland. It’s also somewhere where, in the years between the wars, horsepower gave way to mechanisation just as the last vestiges of rural folklore were being swept away by science.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

PG found a few lovely photos taken in Suffolk (not by himself, alas).

And Suffolk hosts the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival. PD James and Daniel Defoe lived in Suffolk. Ruth Rendell lived in Suffolk and was created Baroness Rendell of Babergh (of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk) in 1977. Thomas Grey, who composed “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in 1750, died at his home in Blundeston in 1809.

 

From The National Review:

[The new show at The Yale Center for British Art] Salt and Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860, takes some of the best holdings of a private London collection so exquisite and so focused that it can generate, with the BAC’s scholars, the definitive take on the technique that drove photography’s young years.

. . . .

Salt and Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860, takes some of the best holdings of a private London collection so exquisite and so focused that it can generate, with the BAC’s scholars, the definitive take on the technique that drove photography’s young years.

. . . .

The salted-paper process, using compounds of salt and silver, was invented by the British scientist and scholar William Fox Talbot (1800–1877) in 1839. On one level, the show is about science and invention, but labels are kind to those who never belonged to a high-school camera club. Bathing a piece of paper in a salt solution, then a silver solution, and then exposing it to light created a negative of the image on which the lens focused. Another round of simple processing on a separate sheet produced a positive image. A daguerreotype, a process also pioneered in the late 1830s, was more complicated, took longer, made outdoor shooting more difficult, and created a glassy, toneless, deeply, almost unnaturally, focused, pickled image.

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(click for larger image)

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Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844 William Henry Fox Talbot salted paper print from paper negative

 

. . . .

 

Newhaven Fishermen (Alexander Rutherford, William Ramsay & John Liston), ca. 1845
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson
salted paper print from paper negative

. . . .

There’s plenty of color in these photographs, too. The early artists were competing with drawings and engravings, usually monochromatic, as the good catalogue tells us, but the photographs still stunned early audiences with their subtle tones of rose or sepia or lavender.

. . . .

Roger Fenton’s gorgeous portrait of Captain Lord Balgonie from 1855 has an entrancing aubergine color derived from gold-toning, a substitution of silver chloride with gold chloride during the finishing process. This deepens the density and intensity of shadows, which create a mood of extremes as his white face grows whiter, the darkness under his eyes more pronounced. Balgonie fought in the Crimean War and suffered from shell shock, the 19th century’s term for post-traumatic-stress disorder. He looks exhausted, has seen too much, and now seems to see strange things in the distance. It’s psychological portraiture at its best.

. . . .

Where are the Americans? Using Talbot’s technology required a costly license, a disincentive for early American photographers. Gradually, by the 1850s, newer technologies displaced salt-and-silver prints. Collodion glass-plate negatives produced sharper, more detailed images. The goals of American photographic surveys of the West, for instance, didn’t depict the colored atmosphere or mist so effectively evoked by the tonalists. Mathew Brady and other war photographers looked less for the mysterious, the equivocal, and the speculative and more for plain, matter-of-fact, in-your-face truth.

Link to the rest at The National Review

PG was in a Venetian mood this morning.

The following is a photo PG took a few years ago while he was on an early-morning walk in Venice. As those who have visited this marvelous city know, walking along the canals is a great pleasure and one canal connects with another like the major city thoroughfares they are.

Another way of exploring Venice is to follow a sidewalk away from the canal. There may be something akin to a square western-style block somewhere in Venice, but PG has not discovered it.

Once you get away from the larger canals, the sidewalks become narrower and narrower, winding in between old buildings like an afterthought. On this particular morning, PG followed a very narrow sidewalk (turn sideways if you meet someone in order to squeeze past) which ended in a small courtyard pictured below. PG was standing at one corner of the courtyard with his camera pointed at the opposite corner. You’ll see a small portion of a wall on the right side of the photo.

No one seemed to be up and about. You’ll notice some closed shutters on the house at the left. PG suspects the laundry might have been hung out on the previous night. With water everywhere, it would take a bit of time for clothes to dry.

You can click on the photo to see a larger version if you like.

PG located a couple of old (out of copyright) photos of soldiers and did some post-processing of them to enhance their emotional impact (at least for him).

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I just rediscovered a photo I took a few years ago in Huntington Beach, California.

 

PG will exercise a grandparent’s privilege and include a couple of photos of his offspring.

 

For the first photo, he asked Natey to look really scary. Natey has a hard time transmuting himself from cute to scary.

 

Astrid is usually a fast-moving extrovert. PG had to be quick to catch her in a pensive moment before she noticed what he was doing put on a big smile for the camera.

PG has not been a paradigm of posting lately.

His reason (and he thinks it’s a good one) is that he’s been visiting some of his  offspring.

Following is Offspring Exhibit A: