Memories of Lammermuir

Footbridge across to Fast Castle, Berwickshire

A month has now passed since we parted company in Saint Abbs and life resumed its daily cycle. However, like a wheel turning, each revolution takes us onto new ground. Two thousand and ten remains a prospect still full of optimism. The brighter, milder weather that's followed the bitter snows of January carries with it the promise of spring and opportunities for positive action.

It's certainly been a busy month, work-wise, having to turn out every day and putting in more hours than some of my full-time colleagues. The benefit of long hours is seen in my monthly payslip, but the corresponding downside is evening exhaustion. The weekends become so much more precious as a resource. Projects beckon and time has to be so much more carefully managed.

In quieter moments, my imagination has been captivated by the story of the Bride of Lammermoor, Walter Scott's tragic tale of madness, oppression and thwarted love. Not an author I ever thought I would be likely to read, I came to his gothic tale via Donizetti's operatic adaptation Lucia di Lammermoor, which in turn I originally discovered many years ago via the soundtrack of Paul Cox's 1973 comedy-drama, Man of Flowers. (One of my all-time favourite films, not least for the way it visualises the nature of memory in the flashback sequences.) The Christmas holiday provided the opportunity for my third visit to Fast Castle, the first visit in which I began to understand its relevance to Scott's tale.

Every time I've visited the place, lonely and remote though it is, I've always been surprised to find other people there. One curious thing is that they never look like the kind of people you would ever expect to find in such a God-forsaken spot, the sort that Florence (who was with me again this time) calls rough-ty tough-ty. On the bitterest, bleakest day you could ever have wished to stay indoors, we found a minibus-full of dapper twenty-somethings there, dressed alike in smart urban clothes. They were leaving as we approached, so we never got to talk, but never did a group look so out of place as they set off back to their minibus, parked two or three miles away down a snowbound lane. My theory is that they were there because of the Scott/Donizetti connection, and were musicians or singers absorbing the atmosphere. Whatever it was, it was a slighty surreal experience.





There are so many brilliant performances from Lucia that it's impossible to choose the definitive one. Joan Sutherland for the voice - or the acting of Natalie Dessay? Netrebko? Caballé? YouTube has Dessay's entire mad scene split into parts 1 to 3. (The above is an excerpt.) Mesmerising and so worth watching!

Chilling (Out of Signal)

It seemed like such a good idea at the time – to meet up for a family Christmas at a midway point. No-one could remember the last time we all spent Christmas together as a family. Someone was always needed elsewhere.

Saint Abbs, ten miles North of the Scottish border, seemed to be the perfect location. More or less three hundred miles equidistant for those who lived furthest apart, North and South.

It suddenly seemed far less attractive a proposition a few days before we were due to arrive as the weather closed in. Everyone would need to make their journey in some of the most difficult driving conditions that the British weather can throw at you.

For me, a mere two hundred and fifty mile drive straight up the Great North Road (A1) is always something special. It has its own particular, slightly epic, quality with so much history and a magical landscape lining the road on either side.

New Experiments

It's been a very busy second half to the Autumn Term. First Year National Diploma students keen to experiment with lots of unfamiliar techniques. They used an old Jessops Powerflash motordrive head (MD400) to strobe with their camera shutters open on B. There were the inevitable problems of overexposure sometimes when the subject didn't move far enough between flashes. I showed them how to produce a similar effect by using a motordrive to take a rapid sequence of single frames which could be layered in Photoshop and selectively blended to create a strobe-like composite image. The shot above was the first attempt. With care, I'm sure some really nice sequences could be made.



A few of the students were curious to know about HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, though none knew what it was. I decided to demonstrate in class, using as an example two of the students who were taking a break near the window. It was fairly late on a very dull November day and the room lights were on. With the digital camera steady on a tripod, I asked the girls to remain very still while I took two shots, one metered for them, the other metered for the scene outside. The two images are shown at the top, with burnt-out highlights coloured red and textureless shadows coloured blue.

Again, I layered them in Photoshop with the indoor shot uppermost. I then carefully erased the window in this layer to expose the background scene of the lower layer. The hair was the trickiest part and there was a slight mis-registering between the layers to cope with. So, it's not perfect but I'm quite pleased with it as my own first attempt to have a go at this technique.



Another technique I've been trying to get students interested in, is pushing photograms beyond the familiar arrangements of keys and coins and other everyday items. Charity shops always have shelves of ornamental items such as the glass bowls I used for these images. Scanning the photogram and manipulating it in Photoshop, I was able create some psychedelically coloured animated .gifs.


The enlarger I used to make these photograms was in a pretty filthy condition, as I found out when I took the prints out into the daylight. The black background was covered in thousands of tiny dust specks. In this photogram, though, they looked like a myriad tiny stars, blinking away behind a baleful planet hanging there in a vast space. It seemed a logical step to colourise the scan to enhance this illusion and to add some random coloured shaped to create an imaginary perspective.


Lots of other creative ideas are developing. Having just repaired our UV exposure unit, I'm ready to roll again on cyanotypes and salt prints (always a favourite with students). Parts for an infra-red and a sound flash trigger are sitting on my workbench. And then there's stop motion animation and stereoscopic photography . . .

Built to Boogie

I couldn't resist her. She's a beauty in stainless steel, a simple and elegant combination of form and function. She's a Peter Lynn ST kite buggy that I bought secondhand from a lad in Stamford who's upgrading to something more seriously acrobatic. I hadn't realised there was such a huge but largely invisible kite buggy-ing fraternity in this part of the world. (Perhaps that's the way they like it.) I thought I would struggle to find a buggy, but via the online power-kiting forum, Kitecrowd, I found a found a community of buggiers only too happy to help each other out. I should have realised that Lincolnshire, with its old airfields and endless East Coast beaches, was built for buggies.

Days and Moments to Remember

Florence and Mum, February 2007

Today has a particular significance as it would have been Mum's 93rd birthday. The poignancy of the date was brought home an hour or so ago, when I had a telephone call from an 83-year old acquaintance of hers, calling to wish her a happy birthday. How much I wished I could have brought her to the phone, but she now only speaks to me in the dead hours of night.

View from my Window, Lincoln College

Time seems in very short supply now that I have returned to work. I'm grateful that my three fairly arduous days a week in Stamford are ameliorated a little by a fourth day day in the congenial surroundings of Lincoln's Cathedral Quarter, working in the top floor studio and darkroom of the old School of Art. In my own student days, the studio was the base room for an architectural technicians' course, run by Edward Albarn, a grand old architect who taught us unruly painters the more refined skills of perspective. He once lost a bet to me when, while drawing a two-point perspective drawing of a church with tower as a class exercise, I thought I could see how you would plot and project the conical spire and its details. He bet me a substantial sum of money that I couldn't do it without being shown, but I could see that the solution was fairly logical and was very embarrassed to prove him wrong. I hate to be made to look like a smart-arse, then as well as now, and refused to claim my winnings though they were offered. They were funny old times and the building still remains chock-full of so many happy memories.

Kite Aerial Photography: An Experiment

Looking back (as you do) I'm struck by how many of my ideas started out as thumbnail sketches on the backs of envelopes. This Summer's main project was no exception ...
It represented a convergence of need and interest in a very satisfying way. The background is my wish to have a better understanding of the topographical contexts of abandoned structures and archaeological sites in the Hebridean Islands. Simple rectilinear aerial photographs could provide a useful addition to measured surveys, such as those I made on Scarp, off the West coast of Harris. Anyway, doing kite stuff is fun! I've still got fond memories of the home-made kites the kids and I used to fly off the side of Pendle Hill in our Lancashire days.

The catalyst that set the project in motion was an unplanned encounter with a kite festival at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire back in April. Beneath a rainbow-decorated sky the irresistable lure of The Highwaymen stand drew me in and resulted in me going home with spools of kite line and a very temptacious price list.

There is a seemingly infinite amount of information on kite-based photography (generally called KAP by its practitioners) on the Web, much of which is anecdotal, like this blog post.

The best-known and probably most comprehensive website on the subject is Cris Benton's KAP site. As well as this, there's an inspirational video of him on Vimeo or Make:Magazine's mind-boggling Make:television channel (Episode 2). It's a good showcase for the creative potential of KAP.

Other names crop up repeatedly when researching KAP online, such as Brooks Leffler (maker of Brooxes rigs) and James Gentles (maker of gentLED electronic triggers, etc.). The KAP Shop, in the Netherlands, seems to be the main European supplier of KAP-related bits and pieces.

Typical of other useful sites are KAP, How to do it, and KAP. There are also academic sites and papers related to the subject, such as the University of Vienna's Aerial Archive and a pdf'd conference paper on unmanned small-format aerial photography.

My own ambitions at this stage are fairly modest. To hang a camera from the sky and take pictures of any sort would count for me as an achievement.

The simplest way to take vertical shots seemed to be to pack the kit in a small box that I could hang from a kite line. I had worked out that a box about 3" deep (75mm) and 6" square (150mm) internally would hold most cameras and other components.

I considered doing away with the Picavet cross suspension system and screwing the suspension rings directly into the box itself. However, I realised that a cross would allow me to rotate the box relative to both the direction of the kite line and the main axes of objects on the ground below. To construct the box, I used basswood comb-jointed at the corners for its combination of lightness and strength. Full-size pattern drawings were made to ensure that the pieces would all fit together.

There are more pictures showing
the building of the rig on Flickr.

For the radio-control components, Phils Models in Sleaford provided everything I needed along with plenty of free advice.

At this stage in this project, to have gone out and bought a new digital camera would have been a reckless extravagance. Cousin Rex's expeditions to car-boot sales provided me with three obsolete but serviceable digital cameras (of about two-megapixel resolution) that could, if necessary, be tested to destruction.


The rig, finally finished, painted and varnished went with me on my second visit of the Summer to North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. I'm pleased to say that in spite of the battering it took, it came back in good condition. A selection of images from my trip are in my Flickr photostream. Needless to say, there were lots of steeply-learned lessons for me to work on in time for a much more productive visit in 2010.

Hitching a Ride

Hitching a Ride
Originally uploaded by Joneau

Our week of testing kites and KAP rig over, Sol and I had fun on the ferry back to Skye by humming sea tunes (Rico's Ska version of SeaCruise being the most tuneful) and doing comparative testing of the ship's food and facilities. The observation lounge scored best all round - the Navmaster GPS screen being the clincher.