Like an inappropriate remark made to revive a conversation that has gone embarrassingly quiet, I feel forced to make this 'dodgy' contribution to the thread: you see the X10 being best toy I've had in years, I spend more time just playing with it than 'seriously' taking photos. Frankly,
most of the time I haven't a clue what to photograph, no particular urge to do so anyway, and end up only mucking about with nothing interesting, if anything at all, to show. (
The most pleasing photos I've ever taken with any camera have usually happened by accident, and often only after remembering at the last moment that I had one with me.)
So it was in Wells the other day (yes again - nice supermarket, and I've got to eat), I casually indulged the nearest I can get to enthusiasm by snapping the cathedral's monumental structures at close range. With film, you couldn't do much about the perceived distortions, particularly to the verticals, which made buildings look as though they were about to topple over backwards. In the early fifties, my uncle had a plate camera with bellows allowing the plane of the lens to be tilted relative to that of the plate, but quite how correction was made with that back then, I was too young to fathom, and can only guess at now (but perhaps Terry will tell us).
Now that I have the brilliant "Lightroom" software recommended to me by Yvonne, I can easily adjust those verticals, but of course that induces different forms of distortion - noticeable at elevated horizontal planes in walls at right-angles, that, with the associated 'stretching', a heavy hand can render much more acute than is perceived in normal perspective. Further, generous framing of the shots is needed in the knowledge that "Lens Corrections" in LR will require a "Constrain Crop" which might lose important parts of the image: playing about in PP, at first I tended to chop off the top of the tower in cropping the experimental - and
apparently unmemorable - shot in unflattering light (below).
Of course, all this will be 'old hat' to the regulars here, but as a newcomer to this digital stuff, I find the 'trying out' and 'finding out' - general ''mucking about'' you see - can be terrific fun:
DSCF4985 by
wylyeangler, on Flickr
But why present this seemingly prosaic snap here in company that'll know much more than I about this technical stuff?...
Well, the real importance of the photograph lies scarcely discernable at the bottom of the south transept: the fleck of ginger is the cathedral cat, although that is rather like describing the Queen as, "the posh woman who lives at the end of The Mall". Being ignorantly common, I don't know how - with due deference - I should use his name: "Louis the Sun Cat", suggesting his colour and predilection for sunning himself, might be too royally French, although he does carry an air of Gallic indifference. Alliteration demands that "Lord Louis" ought to do it - of course cats in general tend to have aristocratic pretensions, but Louis is the genuine article, presuming ownership of the place with all the sure-footed confidence possessed of the very privileged.
I do seriously wish the X10 could zoom to the longer focal lengths I enjoy with my much cheaper, and very cheerful, 'point and shoot'; nevertheless, I feel honoured in my humble way to record Lord Louis's reaction to his inferiors in the massively cropped photo below:
DSCF4990 by
wylyeangler, on Flickr
Love him or loathe him, like Scrooge, "it's all the same to Louis": he meets each of those reactions with dignified distain. Superiorly mannered though he is, he cannot suppress registering disapproval, but only by the merest twitching of the tip of his tail (captured here - the result of being rudely interrupted whilst relaxing on the lovely sun-warmed foundations of a very early chapel) - anything more demonstrative would, of course, be unseemly. As befits his status, he will never deliberately look at you (sorry - pleb's language - that should be ''one''), although he
did once glance at me by accident.
If you've never been favoured by an 'audience' with Lord Louis, the next time you're in Wells, he'll almost certainly be in residence, but possibly difficult to find within his vast estate, performing his varied duties with the generous condescension of a 'thoroughly modern' working aristocrat. He might be in the cathedral itself; or its gift shop - lovely and warm in winter - where, like the elderly peer he must be, he takes the occasional nap. Sometimes he feels obliged languidly to abandon his basket when the cloying affection of all those ghastly visitors gets really too much to tolerate!
Pete
PS Subsequent to the above, I 'googled' Louis to discover that he is more famous than ever I had supposed. Of course, nobility will always attract such vulgar publicity.
This pictures been up a day or two now and I keep having a look at it, Its the kind of picture thats been done many times, but how difficult it is to get one to feel right, this feels right to me.
