At night

Last night, a bunch of us old, geezerly friends, went to a bar well-known for its geezerly musical fare. About a hundred metres from the bar is this view, down over George Street and Beck's Cove, to the harbour. It looks deserted but just to my right is the area where hundreds of young drinkers were drinking in the street.

It was just starting to get dark, dark enough for electric lights to come on but still light enough to hand-hold a camera, one evening when we walking across the beach at Bournemouth, back towards Poole where we were staying. (I'm still scanning all my old negatives, and I've reached mid-1996. now.) This was fastish film, Ilford Delta 400. It is actually two negatives, right and left, stitched together by layering and erasing bits. I was carrying my new-to-me but ten-year-old Nikon FE at the time, and the exposure needle had stopped working a few days before. So I was getting pretty good at estimating exposures. One reason these two went together fairly easily was that they (seem to have) had the same manual exposure.

We were visiting our friends and three of us had stept outside to drink wine in the garden when I lookt up and saw our host preparing our meal. She saw me and I took her picture. This was on a 1996 roll of film I finally scanned yesterday. Kodak Gold 200 colour film in Nikon FE.

Last night, the last night of 2019, a half-dozen of us got together at the home of friends in downtown. And from their gallery/deck we watched little blasts of New Year's fireworks in people's front gardens all over that part of the city. Among them were these a few doors up from our friends' house, on the other side of the house, away from the gallery. I pushed my camera out the window as far as I could while still balancing it on the ledge, but the view was limited. :) Happy 2020 to all.

One evening a week or two ago, I was walking down the street and stopped to chat with two friends shovelling their driveway. Sadly, I forgot my camera was on manual focus, and thus I forgot to focus when I took their picture. What a shame; it wouldn't have been a bad picture. Of course, it's another reason why I am lucky I never tried to make a living taking pictures. :)

With some friends, we had walked out to the Narrows, at the end of the St John's Harbour, to watch the arrival of the sailing ship Matthew, a replica of the late-15th-century craft John Cabot had used 500 years before. We did see it arrive and then walked back. This was one of the views of the harbour while we walked home. I've always been a pictorialist at heart. :) Canonet, Tri-X film. Dev in Rodinol in 1997 but only scanned this morning.

A few minutes ago, I walked to the bottom of my street and back and this was the view coming back up. We had another 30cm or so of snow last night and this morning. Because it *nearly* went above freezing later today and the roads got wet, and then the temperature suddenly dropt again to about minus 5 (C), this little hill is dangerous to walk on. We're all coping -- partly by complaining non-stop.

It rained part of today but cleared up just before sunset. The temperature started dropping, making lots of icy patches underfoot. But the snow had indeed receded a little. The people in this house, not far from ours, turned on the string of electric lights on their hedge. It had been hidden by snow since before Christmas. A little brightness in a quiet city, getting quieter.

A friend reminded me tonight that the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, are visiting with Venus in the SW sky this week. So, it being uncommonly clear this evening, I went outside my back door, looked up, and saw them all together there.

If I had an unobstructed view of that hilltop from my door, I could use the autofocus function on my camera. But instead there are all those trees, and I have to focus as best I can manually. I find that hard to do when it is the moon I'm trying to focus on. But then, being in manual focus mode, I can more quickly take pictures. So it's all sixes, as the old fellows used to say. The hilltop is between me and the official horizon, from which the moon had risen a good forty minutes earlier. The hill used to be known as The Brow, a name I like, but officially it is Shea Heights, named for a priest who -- fifty years ago -- operated the Catholic church in that neigbourhood. (The competing Anglican church's spire is just barely visible to the left of the moon.) The media are calling this full moon (officially full in a couple more hours) a Supermoon because it is close to us, and a Pink Moon because in some climes the little flower known as pinks blooms in April month. Not in this clime. There is still a metre and a half of snow in my backyard. The garlic under that snow will have to wait to show its greenery, and if there were any pinks down there, they would have to wait, too.

Last night, just before I took to bed, I saw the moon was starting to rise over the hill a half kilometer from our back door. So I took a half dozen shots as it came up. And soon went to bed. This is a tiny fragment of the frame of one of the shots.

There's the moon, still thin and newish, getting ready to fall below my neighbours' roofline.

I was hoping that the tiny angle of view I had of the sky, looking northwest was the right one to see the Comet Neowise this evening. So I stood by the window for a half hour waiting. I was lucky: it was the right angle. And I got a picture of the comet.

Sometimes we forget to scowl. It was a birthday and we were celebrating.

If I were a more careful photographer, I would use more sturdy supports, ones that would prevent camera shake. Instead I use what's available. Here, I angled my camera against a post on the railing of our deck just outside the back door. It was Saturday around ten pm, and the night was already fairly dark. I was aiming to get a picture of the bottom of the Milky Way in the SE sky. I think I did so, but some of that coloured haze may have been low light clouds lit by a car on a road a kilometre away. Maybe. And of course every star in my sky is a short line rather than a point of light. Thus you don't want to look too closely. :) I did get a sharp image of four moving objects, probably satellites, but maybe meteorites. You do have to look closely to see them.

It took a while for me to find her, up there hiding behind trees and overhead wires. But there she was.

I have become lazy with this camera, my Fuji X100T. I know *when* I should turn on the raw files, but I almost never think to do it, even when (in retrospect) it is obvious that I should have. So I took a series of about two dozen pictures of the sun coming out of the cloud bank, and setting behind Kelly's Island. And they were all saved in my camera as jpegs. Duhhh. This is the best of them, and this not very good. It was just a moment after the sun's edge disappeared behind the island. I certainly could have exposed a little more, and I would have got better detail in the shadows but, it being a jpeg, I'd have lost some detail around the sun. It's all sixes. Except for that I might have got better had I turned on the raw. Oh well.

They're all the same, moon pictures. But the fact that we all look up and see the same sight, if we see it at all, is pretty amazing. Above us, only sky. And this is the sky right now outside our back door.