theonlyD800inthehameau
Photography by theonlydeadheadinthehameau
Monochrome Madness: Backlighting
Posted on August 6, 2025
This is ‘Fred’, a sculpture who sits gloomily on a bench, looking out to sea, in the town of Scarborough. In the county of Yorkshire, where he finds himself, he would probably be described as ‘a reet miserable bugger’.
Even with the warm afternoon sun on his back, as here, he doesn’t look happy, and no doubt if the sun was in front of him, he’d complain that it was getting in his eyes. Yorkshire, eh?
Monochrome Madness: Begins with ‘H’
Posted on July 9, 2025
An interesting challenge for the latest iteration of Monochrome Madness: can I spy something beginning with ‘H’?
Well yes, albeit after a little thought. This is the harbour of the city of La Rochelle, as the sun begins to set.
Monochrome Madness: Transport
Posted on June 25, 2025
I have no end of pictures of various forms of transport suitable for this week’s Monochrome Madness theme of ‘Transport’. I think I’m especially well-equipped for tractors – unsurprisingly, given our location in the depths of rural France.
However, I thought I’d go with this. No, it’s not a child’s drawing of a bicycle – this is Leonardo da Vinci’s design for a bicycle, on display in a museum in the city of Venice. Note the characteristic mirror writing.
It looks a bit of a bone-shaker, to be honest, but it can’t be denied that he was well ahead of his time.
Monochrome Madness: Into The woods
Posted on May 28, 2025
This photo was taken at the Beecraigs Country Park, near Linlithgow in central Scotland, which is replete with woodlands.
I must have been originally attracted by the strong leading line of what just about passes for a path that leads to a clearing. However, to make it more interesting for the purposes of this theme, I applied an infrared filter and pushed the three ‘Presence’ sliders in Lightroom to the left by varying degrees, which gives the image a much more mystical – eerie, indeed – feel.
Monochrome Madness: Street Lighting
Posted on May 18, 2025
I confess that I had to do quite a bit of digging to come up with an interesting image of some street lighting. Typically, these are rather mundane artefacts that you wouldn’t often be bothered to get your camera out for.*
[Note to self: a conjunction is the wrong type of word to end a sentence with.]
However, I came across this image, which I had entirely forgotten about. High up on a wall in an old narrow street in the nearby town of Saint-Junien is this rather ornate but ancient lantern. Obviously designed for illumination, it certainly predates electric lights, and maybe even gas ones too.
Monochrome Madness: Everything Spring
Posted on April 18, 2025
This week the theme is the timely one of ‘Everything Spring’. Up here in the northern hemisphere it’s the time for planting and growing.
This little fella, just planted out in of our raised beds, will – if al goes according to plan – eventually provide us with some Brussels sprouts: chou de Bruxelles.
Monochrome Madness: Night-time
Posted on April 5, 2025
I took this photograph of a boat that was sailing along the Corniche in Abu Dhabi at night. The original image was pretty much monochrome itself, with just a few flashes of colour from the lights on board.
Monochrome Madness – Hands
Posted on February 22, 2025
First contact: our twin grandsons were born very prematurely and spent some time in the ICU. This is Grandma getting her first touch.
(It all turned out fine – the twins will be eighteen this summer and they’re both well over six feet tall now: and fine young men to boot.)
Lens-Artists Challenge: Colour or B&W?
Posted on February 11, 2025
This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge proved, I have to say, a lot less easy that I thought (or hoped) it was going to be. We were challenged to consider the differences in an image that arise when it is converted from colour to monochrome.
This is something that I often play around with in the editing process and I understand that subjects heavy on texture and contrast may be more inherently interesting in black and white. Also, of course, monochrome can give a better feeling for the age of a subject than a normal colour shot, which makes it quite suitable for photographs of old buildings, for example.
Nonetheless, I struggled to come up with something for the challenge, at least until I came across this close-up of a romanesco (a cross between broccoli and cauliflower and tastier than either of them). There’s never a shortage of texture to work with and although there’s plenty going on in the original colour version, I think that it’s easier to appreciate it in monochrome, which somehow gives the picture more depth.
Monochrome Madness: The Sea
Posted on February 7, 2025
This is a monochrome rendering of a photograph I took in St. Andrews in Scotland, looking out over the North Sea. Who could resist those leading lines – or those clouds?
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