Our Dog's Basket

 In May I had one of my two annual hospital appointments, this one with a doctor, as I'd not seen one since November 2019. So I figured as I was travelling into central London I could at least 'play tourist' for the time. I had a two year out of date roll of Ilford SFX film, and decided to take my Voigtlander Bessa-L camera for the day. The Bessa-L is a weird one, it's basically just the bare bones of a camera. Film goes here, lens screws on there, there's no viewfinder in the camera itself, you just clip a viewfinder into the accessory shoe, depending on the lens you're using, and there's no mechanism for focusing, you just use depth of field to get as much in focus as you can dependent on aperture. F8 and be there! Voiglander Bessa-L, here pictured with 15mm Aspherical Super-Wide Heliar. Rather than use the 15mm lens in the above picture, I'd discovered that the 25mm Snapshot Skopar had a filter thread which was the right size for some of the filters I...

Two years of Plague So in March 2020 as the first lockdown for COVID-19 began, I had an idea, a rather grandiose idea for a project at which I completely failed. I decided I'd carry a camera with me any time I went out, and chose an Olympus EE-2, which is a fixed-focus half-frame camera with automatic exposure govered by a selenium cell. No batteries, relatively compact for a camera of its time. In a half-frame camera, you get twice the number of shots to the roll of film. So I put in a roll of Ilford FP4+ black and white film. It took me until March 2022 to shoot the lot, and here's a selection of shots from the last two years.  A really organised person might have carried a notebook and taken a note of each frame shot, but that's a pain, so I didn't do it. Here goes.... Social Distancing - when people still did that. Queueing for the bank. Maintain Social Distance This is not a basin That's not how you spell 'Cosy'! Tax on Hope So that's what became of...

 Two whole years. Today is the 6th of March 2022, which makes it two whole years since the last time I went anywhere outside of walking distance except for the three times I went into London to St Thomas' Hospital. At one point it would have been technically possible to go somewhere for a day, but given that so many places were shut and any walk would have been very unlikely to wind up in a pub unless I booked a seat days before for a specific time, which all seemed like too much faff.  Then I got to the stage where I couldn't really afford to go anywhere and do things, so boo. Two years ago, however, the weather wasn't that great, and I wanted to do a camera check so on the spur of the moment went somewhere that was relatively picture-skew  but had indoorsy bits to shelter from any showers that might prevail. So off to the Amberley Museum  which seems to have survived recent events and is still going with its old buses, narrow-gauge railway and collections of olde-w...

 November walk So on the 17th November I figured while I didn't need to go out, well, it was a nice day so I'd go for a wander and try and find some autumnal colour. As I've no idea when I'm liable to be shooting colour film again let alone developing it that meant taking one of the digital cameras. As the spare battery for the Sigma DP1 I last used in the summer still had a charge, I swapped it with the long drained battery in the camera and headed out. The Sigma DP1 came out in 2008, as the first digital compact camera to use the same size of sensor (APS-C) as most DSLRs, although unique in Sigma's choice of the Foveon sensor as opposed to the Bayer sensor used in most digital cameras. Despite the age of the camera, it's still capable of decent results. That said, as a camera which could have been designed for the slow photography movement, it really wasn't a good camera for getting pictures of the squirrels, so these are heavily cropped.  

 It's exactly a year since the last time I went to the coast.  The 7th of February 2020 I took my Sigma SD Quattro with the recently acquired 17-70mm zoom lens, and headed off down to Worthing for the day. It was a nice day, albeit chilly and blustery, but a good day for a stroll along the sea front. Past the serried rows of plain beach huts. On an almost empty beach. Of course, there was a point during the summer at which it might have been possible to head off out for the day, but the spontaneity of just spotting a decent looking pub and heading in for a swift one was not really doable and most things were shut, so I just didn't. 

At Last! At last! The uneagerly unawaited return of Our Dog's Basket . And now it's a blog! This is something nobody wanted!