Shots in the dark

It was Rachel's 45th birthday today. Clare and I recorded ourselves singing her a 'Happy Birthday' on WhatsApp after breakfast, and sent it to her so she'd receive it when she woke up some eight hours later in Arizona. We were spoke to her in the late evening just before we went to bed, and she was setting out to collect Jasmine from school. A small consolation for being so far away. It's at times like this you really regret such a distance between you and your nearest and dearest. 

I walked into town mid afternoon and met Ashley for a cuppa and a chat in John Lewis' top floor restaurant. It was dusk when we parted company and the traffic was moving slowly, so I walked back along the largely unlit riverside path, busy with pedestrians and bike commuters armed with dazzlingly bright LED lights. It made me wonder how many collisions occur at winter evening rush hour.

I took with me my trusty seven year old Lumix LX5, handy for photographing townscapes. Nearly all my Central Square photos over the past three and a half years have been taken with it, but on this occasion, the natural light was waning by the time I arrived.  I took a few on the path along the Taff walking home, by way of an experiment, so see what Google Photos web editing tools could make of them. Maybe if I'd used the camera's ability to take uncompressed RAW format images to edit, I would have had more better results, but I've only ever worked with JPEG images, whose quality in low light on a camera of this age isn't good anyway. Three of the five I took were keepers, for interest's sake. Next time I'm out with it in the dark, I'll experiment.

 

Photo catchup

Clare heard that the Council's Bute Park plant nursery was having a sale, so we walked over there at the end of the morning and purchased a few more additions to her delightfully colourful flower beds and then had lunch in the small courtyard cafe which is at the public entrance to the interpretation centre and greenhouses. I was glad to have taken along my Sony Alpha 68, as the wealth of colour displayed in the array of bedding plant trays was spectacular. My photos can be seen here.

Later in the afternoon I took the bus to town, to buy a lens filter, with some birthday present money, having discovered that I have three 55mm lenses but only two filters. I also took with me my Lumix LX5, little used these days, except that for the past three years I have kept it in service to record the Central Square building redevelopment, taking advantage of its fairly wide angle lens. Last used back in February, and probably charged in January before that, I was surprised to discover that the battery still had enough power to shoot twenty odd pictures, and still only display as half full. Perhaps this is because it doesn't have GPS, NFC, Bluetooth or Wi-fi built in for sending photos to another device. It's a plain digital compact camera, robust with a touch of sophistication about it. 

The only tower crane now in the Central Square construction sites serves the HMRC building, whose steel structure has grown very rapidly during the three months I've been away. When I left, only the cores of the two lift shafts were nearing completion. The exterior structure of the new buildings on the south side of Wood Street is now finished, but the entire site is still cordoned off, as paving has to be laid and entrances completed. All that remains now if for a start to be made on the bus station, intended to occupy the remaining empty site in front of the station. These photos can be seen here

Gaudete Sunday

We woke up at six thirty this morning to the sound of Rhiannon and Jasmine playing in the adjacent bedroom making the most of their cousins' special time together. We got up an hour later and went to the eight o'clock Communion at St Nicholas Parish Church, a rare opportunity for us when staying in Kenilworth was so often we are looking after Rhiannon when her parents are on tour.

After breakfast Anto drove us home to Cardiff, where he was headed for a 'Third Uncles' band rehearsal in preparation for next Friday's gig at Chapter Arts Centre. We were home in time for lunch and a quiet day to ourselves, as Rachel and Jasmine stayed on and will be using our car to get themselves back to Cardiff on Tuesday. The rest of the day I spent relaxing, editing and uploading photos of yesterday's Wriggledance performance and a few dozen of Stamford town. I was impressed with what my Lumix DMC-LX5 was able to make of high contrast low light conditions, even though there are not that many photos that really capture the occasion as well as it merited. I need more experience of shooting indoor performances without flash to do justice to the subject in view.

 

Sunny pleasures

Yesterday I started thinking at last about my trip to Spain. I renewed my EHIC+ travel insurance policy for the year and printed off my EasyJet boarding pass I was I little annoyed some fifteen hours later to receive a nagging email from EasyJet urging me to check in on-line. Confusing to say the least, but as EasyJet in the drive for better efficiency move exclusively to on-line check-in, so that all you need to do is drop off your bags when you arrive at the airport, there are bound to be teething troubles. This time I've opted to take only hand luggage with me, as last summer in Spain I found that I didn't need nearly as much as I took with me, as it was so easy to wash and dry clothes. So, I've had a practice run at packing what I need already. Now that the weather is more consistently warm and sunny, the trip to far hotter Spain looks more like the work it is and not just an excuse to escape from the British climate.

Before dining out at Stefanos with Clare and Owain, I spent the afternoon in the CBS office, making sure that communication from afar will be hassle free. Since Ashley's hard disk crisis last year, Skype hadn't been  re-installed on his computer, so that needed to be fixed. We'd used it when I was working in Costa Azahar, but not when I was in Sicily and it had just been forgotten. It's silly really not to use it when we're calling each other from offices, not least because of the ease with which exchange of documents can be effected while a conversation is going on, and then discussed. Must try harder to use more common sense. There was also the list of chronic debtors to be revised prior to taking recovery action - thankfully dad debt is small now compared toa couple of years ago, but we'd be better off with little or none.

This morning we enjoyed our sunny garden, uploaded Clare's Arizona photos to the web, and after lunch outdoors, went to Dyffryn Gardens to have tea, walk around the arboretum and sample the virtues of the Leica's wide angle lens in my new Lumix DMC-LX5 in shooting close-ups of leaves and flowers in the bright afternoon light. Here's three examples:

I love the way the sunlight shines through the leaves in the one above, and how it makes the flowers glow in the one below.

And the one below makes me think of something extra-terrestrial, from the world of sci-fi.

I was struck by the volume and birdsong out there in the Vale, in comparison with our neighbourhood, which is definitely down on numbers of garden birds this year. And while other parts of the country are complaining at the dearth of buttercups, there are vast fields of grass, gold and green.