frozen canal at Isis Bridge

Unrealised potential.

I realised it was quite cold. What else was there to realise?

The full potential of this scene, under those conditions, as a picture.

How was that unrealised?

By not including more North, by not using a higher POV, and/or not including more of the shadow-streaked ice. That, however, might not have been possible with the camera and lens used.

I wanted to include some ironwork in this one.

I'm guessing you're in sunny St Ives at the moment.

Home now. Weather very mixed. Glorious on Sunday with stunning skies, but mostly grey and drizzle the rest of the time. A handful of pictures taken (to appear here in due course), but no masterpieces. Acting on your advice (others said the same) I didn't bother with Land's End or Lizard Point, but did (as well as St Ives) do Penzance, Mousehole, Zennor and St Just, and briefly saw a couple of interesting towns on the way home.

You're right. Nothing exciting so far. The Mousehole hydrangeas might have been good if you had included more righthand side. Others have been spoiled by the 'dingy' treatment.

We, I'm afraid, will never see eye-to-eye about "dingy". But having gone to western Cornwall with modest expectations (where there are only a very limited number of photo-opportunities, even in perfect weather) I challenge anyone to have done better where I was and when.

Devon is greener, better-wooded and has more of interest, and so to an extent does the East side of Cornwall, though the only seriously-picturesque place is tourist-infested Polperro and even that has only one really takeable view, out of which afterwards (like everywhere else) a spider's web of cables must laboriously be removed -

That is an excellent composition.

However, there must be something seriously amiss with your psyche if you think Western Cornwall has limited photo opportunities! The limitations seem to be self-imposed.

There probably are photo opportunities galore for rugged coastal scenery and ruined tin mine buildings, by which my psyche is not particularly moved, as it isn't with endless variations of any narrow themes. Please point me to examples of these unlimited photo opportunities, and I might find that I'm wrong.

Silly boy! How can I point you anywhere when I wasn't there?

Point me to such pictures online - on Ipernity, Flickr or anywhere else. I have seen photos aplenty of West Cornwall; the hotel in St Ives had them hanging on walls everywhere, plus guide books, postcards etc. etc. But the pictures are very samey, bits of rugged coastline, bleak landscapes with a ruined tin mine building somewhere with or without a patch of yellow flowers in the foreground. Occasionally they're of some grey-stone Cornish fishing village or harbour, invariably marred by parked cars and tourist tat and incongruous modern boats and buildings. If anything more photographable existed it would feature somewhere.

Have I not got better things to do than check out beauty for a gloomy old cynic? If you were presented with a nice scene, the chances are you would dingify or discompose it in some way.

I'll present you with one:

That doesn't look like Cornwall to me.

No. It's a Nice scene, which I thought you wanted.

The potential has obviously not been realised.

I realise that.

I hope you realise that your fan, Andy Rodker, has
some very nice Cornish scenes on his stream.

Yes he has, and they're the best examples I've seen (he's a seriously good photographer) of their kind and clearly it's his type of scenery and subject.

In an art gallery in St Ives I bought a large painting (acrylic on paper, with a 3D trompe d'oeil look) of a green fern, from the artist himself. It's now hanging on my wall.

1. I think he said that most of the early ones were taken on a 5mp mobile phone.

2. Not really my thing.

Like this one:.
"Dingy" as it may be, to my eye this is one of my OAT best.

Yes, it does have a rather oatmealy look.

Yes, and the grainy rendering suits the subject.

I'm surprised you haven't unrepaired the tarmac.

Why?

You remove the aerials, so why not the patches on the road?