Boston, Not Massachusets

Haven’t had much time to do this blog recently. Although I’d much rather be a film star, a rock star, or a pro footballer, or still better a golfer earning millions on Tour (with a great big Winnebago, with a 42″ pop-up flatscreen, home-schooling my family and teaching the kids how to hit a spinning 30yd chip onto an immaculate sloping practice green as the sun sets over Arizona, crickets chirruping and a giant freght train mournfully whooping its way through the distant canyons), I’m slowly waking up to the fact that I am, in fact, one of those English slightly desk-bound guys who makes lots of phone calls, has lots of meetings, and gradually pulls together deals which – in theory – make business people money, and hopefully entertain / assist the general public.

Having never got lower than 3 handicap (5.4 as a proper grown up), I’ll even need to take a serious sabbatical from the business world before I’m fifty (still five years), if I’m to step out onto the seniors circuit. I’d still fancy myself to get there, if I took two years off – golf and me go way back, and I have the smarts and the good hands, and I love to practice. But that would be bye-bye to a business career which, to date, has looked after me and my family pretty well. And so, in the spirit of backing myself to the hilt and gambling on the future, which I have always done, I’ll probably continue to wheel and deal for the clients, and for my family, for a few years yet before I set off to chase the big sunsets, with clubs in the boot.

Which is why I am far more likely to be found taking photographs of Boston, Lincolnshire, than Boston, Massachusets: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 22mm, 1/80 sec at f 18, ISO 200, tripod no flash. I took a week off before our wedding, in spring 2008, and on the fourth day I’d headed off to find some boats to point my camera at. Above, a few Boston fishing boats are moored on the muddy banks. In the Middle Ages (bear with me) Boston was England’s second most important port. Nowadays, it’s been nicely described as ‘an unfortunate backwater’, stranded by being ignored by the motorway system, occasionally visited by trains en route to exotic places like Skegness or Nottingham. But, it has some photogenic boats, and I’ve tried to do the scene justice in this picture, by giving it a painterly look in Lightroom, and a ‘happy finish’ in Paint Shop Pro. This was actually a lovely, warm, breezy day, and I returned home that evening a very relaxed, chilled out fella.

It’s Our Sunset

Sometimes you look outside, and the world’s gone pink. At 9pm last night we noticed this, climbed off the sofa and went outside to see the latest special effects display in our back yard:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/25 at f 4.0, ISO 640, hand held no flash. That’s Marie looking west across Rutland. We built the decking just for moments like this. Marie is eight months pregnant in this picture, our baby girl is still in there somewhere, and note Jesse the cat on the table - looking for yet more moths to catch. He’s on about three a day at the moment.

This picture is more or less untouched out of the lens – I just brightened up the decking a touch in Levels, but the colours are unchanged, and outrageous. “It feels like our own private sunset,” said Marie.

Big Sky

Sometimes nature paints itself a picture, and all you have to do is take a snapshot:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/320 at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I took this five minutes after getting home after a long week at work. I went to sit out back, with a cuppa, to relax and blow the cobwebs away. This was a just snapshot, one of three I took. I plan to make the three into a tryptich soon, onto a canvas to hang on a wall somewhere in our house. A single shot, taken in RAW, processed twice in Photoshop (-0.5, +0.5) and after a tiny little bit of HDR trickery in Photomatix…

Without getting too philosophical, it’s easy to miss the beauty that you can find in your own back yard.

Andy’s Little Project

We’ve been in our house for nearly three years, and my little dream project – the one that struck me as soon as we saw this place – has finally been realised…

(No image details in this blog – it’s all about the building, not the photography)… This is the top end of our back garden – ‘Andy’s little project’ for the last three years. When we first viewed the house, this top area – we called it our secret garden – was neglected, overgrown with nettles and rubble. You had to fight your way up some rickety wooden steps at the bottom of the lawn, and through a tight gap in two huge laurel bushes to get there. But the reward for fighting your way through was literally breathtaking. We discovered a stunning western-facing level area sitting high above rolling fields which – we later found out – change colour spectacularly throughout the seasons. Breezy, refreshing, and a thoroughly uplifting place to be. To seal the deal, the sun sets directly in the middle of the picture above…we enjoy some of the best sunsets you can imagine while still being land-locked. In fact, as I’ve lived near to the coast through a fair portion of my life, I tend to get a little claustrophobic if I don’t have a decent horizon. This secret garden of ours provides a level of shoulder-room and grand scale of view that I never expected to find living in our little old English town (we live right on the north western edge of Stamford, which itself is right on the borders of five counties – Lincolnshire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire).  

At the end of this blog, I’ll show you what it looked like soon after we started. But below, the workers (in red, Marie’s brother Craig,  and in blue, her father John) have already arrived. The following images show the gradual progress of a family project which took over two years.

First job was to tame the terraced slope at the foot of the garden, give it a bit of structure. Note roped-off area, which is Andy’s anally-retentive attempt to preserve his grass (another little project, it was fairly cabbage-strewn when we moved in).

Once finished, we’d successfully turned three crumbling earth terraces into two firmer shelves – but we had a long way to go:

Above, we haven’t filled in the ends yet, nor have we gravelled the shelves. And spot the obvious (deliberate) flaw – no easy way to get up there.

A year later, and a couple of outstanding friends called Paul (aka Lorryload Paul, a red haired Harrison Ford lookalike) and Michael (about whom more below) had built us some fantastic decking steps, and a back fence, and side fences too. Note our ex-stray cat Lucy to the left. Grass is coming on nicely too:

But we were still only half way there. That sorted the back end of the main garden, but what about the secret garden, and the big view? It remained untouched, and for almost a year we waited until the time felt right to get Paul and Michael back again, to do the second half of the job. Below, the boys are just a couple of days in to what became a superb, fast, and brilliantly-delivered piece of work:

Up on the top, the lovely bit of decking from picture at the start of this blog was taking shape. I’d always envisioned a platform jutting out like a ship’s prow above the overhang, and it was exciting to see it coming to life:

Finally, on June 27 2009, on the first anniversary of our wedding, we invited our families to come and see us at home, to celebrate our anniversary, to christen our new ’secret garden’, to look at the view, and to share a few drinks and a barbeque with us. Below are (from left) Michael, his partner Graham, Tracey (Mark’s wife), Mairi (my stepmum) and my big brother Mark. Michael – whom we now count as a trusted family friend – was the mastermind behind the decking and, along with our other good friend ‘Lorryload Paul’, built something which will provide lasting enjoyment for our family. Michael even built a small scale model to show us what it would look like, before we made the final creative decisions. That bannister, for example, is wider than usual – wide enough to balance a beer can on, for example (or for me, more likely, a mug of tea…). It was a peaceful evening, once the kids had calmed down, and I found that sitting up on the decking as the sun set, chatting to friends, was every bit as peaceful and rewarding as I imagined it would be:

So to finish, here’s the awful reality of our back garden before we began the two-year process of realising the dream:

And here it is this morning:

There’s plenty still to do – those laurel bushes need taming properly, we haven’t yet started to put any real colour into the garden or onto those gravelled shelves, and the rest of the fencing needs doing.  But it’s a relief to have the big stuff done, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I go up there, to my secret garden, often now, to blow away the cobwebs of the day, to watch the clouds skim along, and to reflect on things a little bit. It’s my haven.

Boston Waterway (HDR)

Back in Spring 08 I took a week off, and took myself off for one fine day up to Boston, in Lincolnshire, to take advantage of the sunny blue skies. It was – as is normal for me – a day of experimentation, and this picture is fairly nondescript (I think)  in terms of both composition and subject. But it was a great sky and I thought it would make a useful tester for when I got around to doing some HDR techniques. And so it proved:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 12mm, 1/400 sec at f 16, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Great shooting conditions. Triple processed in Photoshop CS3’s Raw converter (exposed at zero, -1, +1.5), then HDR processed in Photomatix Pro, then resized and sharpened in Pain Shop Pro. Yes, a clunky procedure but you should see my fingers flying over the keys, it’s like watching Rick Wakeman. Anyway, the result’s pretty pleasing to the eye, and more or less a technical success. By the way, I absolutely don’t mind about the VW Golf parked across the water, this wasn’t meant to be art, and it’ll certainly never go up before a panel of judges…