MorseBlog

Last week my old friend Frank Protiva died when a private plane he was piloting crashed in the forest in Northern Arizona. It is hard to come to terms with him being gone despite the fact I haven't seen him since his wedding to Barb Lambros. I met Frank at Coconino High school in an advanced algebra class. He was one year ahead of me. We would talk and write notes with John Willis. This became a long friendship that proceeded to embrace my whole family. With my brother Glenn accompanying him on river and mountain biking trips and later my dad and mom. When my dad called to tell me of his death he mentioned a very special fondness my mother had for Frank. For me Frank was a passionate and extremely kind person. He always understood you and though he believed strongly in many causes he was never fanatical; always able to express his profound sense of irony. When he left University I remember him getting a job with Peabody Coal. Working for a strip mine seemed an anathema to what he b...

These are ones I took in a couple of locations. The first 3 are from Solsbury Hill above Bath which is an old hillfort. The sun was setting and made for some good light. This is looking east into St Cathrine's valley. Looking north along the A46 the main road to the M4. And west across Bath proper. The next set were taken in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. Here are Vicki and Redington taking the mick as I take too long setting up Old School. A look down the hill with Vicki and Redington in the foreground. A tree...

I recently bought a second-hand Mamiya medium format film camera. They have become quite affordable with the advent of digital. This I now call Old School 2 (Grandpa's Nikon being Old School 1). It is actually quite fun and benefits from simplicity. Aperture, shutter speed, focus, click. The negatives are 2 1/4"x 1 3/4". When scanned (thanks Dad for the great gift) you can get between 70 and 100 megapixels. There is no instant gratification here and processing takes a week. Below are my first efforts. These were taken at night in Bath. They take advantage of the long exposures allowed by film. Most of these are classic buildings and sights in Bath. The picture above was taken at the Royal Crescent. So often photographed it is a bit cliched so I tried a view from the lawn looking up using the tree to obscure the harsh glare of the street lamp. I converted it o B&W as the yellow light seemed unnatural. This is Pultney Bridge and weir. Another classic piece of Bath archi...

Up above Bath is an area called the race course and Lansdown . Is is on top of a ridge as and as such gets moist air blown in from the Bristol Channel. Recently we have had a number of sub-freezing nights here in Bath, so Saturday morning I thought it would be good to see and photograph the resulting hoare frost up at Lansdown . Friday night I drove Redington down for his stay this weekend and the fog was thick and hoare frost already evident at about 9:30 that evening. Vicki was away so the next morning only the two of us got up at sunrise and drove up the hill. The fog was clearing on the hill but as we headed for Sir Bevil Grenville's Monument the fog was still gathered there. Vicki was good enough to let Redington use her camera with a new wide angle zoom lens. I had my little Casio compact camera. It was a good chance to compare the two lenses. Some of the photos here allow you to do that. We walked through the fog and the conditions were dismal in the fog for photograph...

This story has been told in book form available on Blurb. It has a much larger range of photos from the trip and may be purchased here ... Recently on my last trip to the US I stopped to stay with my dad and Joanne. My dad and I dug through the archives of Glenn's photos and I retrieved some old slides of his. The ones I was particularly interested in were from a vacation we took together in November of 1987, about 20 years ago. We traveled to Southern Utah in Canyonlands National Park. What Edward Abbey referred to in an essay Terra Incognita: Into the Maze (Desert Solitaire, 1968). Indeed, this was the inspiration for the trip we took. Ever since having read this essay I was captivated by the description and had to see it for myself. Being as such I will literate our journey's description with Abbey's words. Interestingly his book was published a further twenty years earlier than our visit. ( The photos are ones that Glenn and I took with his Olympus OM2 camera. He...