theonlyD800inthehameau
Photography by theonlydeadheadinthehameau
Lens-Artists Challenge: Looking Back
Posted on October 15, 2024
A particularly interesting theme for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge: ‘Looking back’.
If you think about it, every photo you’ve ever taken – even the one you might have captured less than a minute ago – is looking back: a split second of a memory preserved for ever (or at least until you press the ‘Delete’ button). Indeed, why do we take photos in the first place, if not to create a memento?
I’m fortunate to have many happy memories – and perhaps even luckier to be able to remember them, but I’d be lying if I said that having a photographic record hasn’t helped in that.. So, the choice wasn’t easy, but I finally settled on something.
Madame and I have been lucky enough to visit Venice four times, all for wedding anniversaries, of which three were significant milestones. This is the hotel , on the Grand Canal, that we stayed in on two of those occasions. Happy days…
Lens-Artists Challenge: Music To My Eyes
Posted on May 1, 2024
I know I wasn’t the only one whose first reaction, on seeing what this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge was, thought something along the lines of ‘Nah, what’s that even about?’ In my case there may also have been an element of ‘WTF?’
And yet – also like others – when I thought about it a little, I understood what Egidio was getting at more fully and realised I could give it a go.
Okay, so it’s just a decent enough image of a rainbow, albeit an unusually close one, but it did trigger a musical memory.
Picture this: October 1970 and it’s the first day at university (in the south of England – more specifically, Canterbury) of a callow youth from northern England. After the welcome speech from the Master of the College, the new recruits mingled and formed small groups. I found myself, with about half a dozen others, none of whom had met before, in the college room of a fellow freshman..
Being English, they put the kettle on and made tea. It was my first experience of Earl Grey (callow and northern, remember). This album – ‘A Rainbow In Curved Air’, by Terry Riley – was playing gently in the background.
Heaven help us, that was over half a century ago, but I still listen to it often and the sight of a rainbow – any rainbow – takes me back to that quiet afternoon.
Try it for yourself, if you like…
Tuesday Photo Challenge: In My Life
Posted on February 13, 2018
Frank was inspired for this week’s prompt by the Beatles’ song ‘In My Life’ (I assume that’s the reference anyway). I know it well:
‘There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain’
I was born and grew up on Merseyside, and although I haven’t lived there for more than forty years and my home now is very much here in France, my roots will always be in Liverpool.
You can take the boy out of Liverpool, but you can never take Liverpool out of the boy.
Neil Young (in ‘Helpless‘) also has something to say about the importance of where you grew up:
‘And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there’
Last time I was back there I spotted this, covering some scaffolding in the city centre, so I grabbed a quick photograph with my mobile phone.
It seems like fair comment to me.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgia
Posted on October 1, 2016
Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be, is it?
The obvious temptation is to respond to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge by pulling something quaint or sentimental out of the archives. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but as a counterpoint to the rose-tinted glow of memory I thought I would post this less cosy image.
The ‘living museum’ that is the nearby village of Montrol-Sénard has many features that portray a romanticised version of local life a hundred and more years ago. However, it also has this perhaps rather more realistic illustration of the way things were.
It’s a bedroom for a farm worker: a small, rough-made bed, a lumpy, dirty straw mattress and a pair of clogs (note the straw lining: no expensive luxuries like socks). When you see an example of the verité like this it’s possible to understand why the locals seem remarkably unsentimental about their comparatively recent history.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Relic
Posted on July 14, 2014
Recently, I went to a display of old cars and farming machinery in the village of Lesterps, not far from here. I now have many, many pictures of ancient tractors and some quite cool vintage cars, but this image of a child’s tricycle from yesteryear is perhaps a bit more than just a record shot.
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