PHOTOQUOTO

I'm back!

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:48:00 +0000

My predicted few weeks absence turned into several months, largely because I moved to a different part of England! But, now that I'm settled, and all those time-consuming, but necessary jobs connected with moving house have been done, I'm ready to hit the blogging road again.

However, I'm resurrecting PhotoReflect, so there'll be no more posts at PhotoQuoto. My first post of 2008 is imminent at http://photoreflect.blogspot.com/ . I hope to see you there!

Regards, Tony

No new posts for a while

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:40:00 +0000

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I will be "otherwise engaged" for a while, so there will be no posts on PhotoQuoto for a few weeks. My last post is an image from my garden featuring flowers. In the background is sage and forget-me-nots. However, the white petalled shrub in the foreground is a species I an unable to name. If anyone can enlighten me I would be delighted!

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" Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding."
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Russian-born French painter

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

Two of a kind

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:00:00 +0000

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A pair of venerable rowing boats on the River Nidd at Knares borough, North Yorkshire, their glowing, varnished wood starting to show the effects of use and weather.

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"A lot of people go through life like they are rowing a boat. They look at where they have been rather than where they are going."
Anonymous

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

61, 65, and more

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:20:00 +0000

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Green and red rowing boats lined up on the River Nidd at Knaresborough, North Yorkshire, wait patiently for the first customers of the day.

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"Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat."
Jean-Paul Satre (1905-1980), French existentialist philosopher and writer

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

Cruising

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:15:00 +0000

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Cruising along the sun-dappled Lancaster Canal near Ellel Grange looks idyllic. But is this kind of linear boating a past-time that soon loses its charms?

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"There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."
Kenneth Graham (1859-1932), Scottish-born writer (from "The Wind in the Willows")

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Homeward bound

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Tue, 29 May 2007 16:50:00 +0000

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The wood-built fishing boat, "Helen Mona", constructed in Denmark in 1973, showing a Ballantrae (Scotland) identification code, but fishing out of Fleetwood, Lancashire, rides the tide up the Wyre Channel in the evening sunlight, heading for its berth, followed by some optimistic gulls.

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"In the morning be first up, and in the evening the last to go to bed, for they that sleep catch no fish."
English proverb

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

After the rain

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:20:00 +0000

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A holiday-maker on Blackpool's central promenade looks at the clearing sky, from beneath an ornate shelter, after the rain has passed.

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"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain"
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist (from "Venus and Adonis")

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

The Wyre Channel

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sun, 27 May 2007 19:10:00 +0000

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The Wyre Channel snakes out to sea, marking the course of the River Wyre as it flows into Morecambe Bay. It is the deep water route taken by the ferries as they enter the port of Fleetwood, Lancashire. Here, a few holiday-makers walk along its banks, overshadowed by a dramatic sky recently cleared of rain, and the distant Cumbrian Mountains.

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"The sea washes all man's ills away."
Euripides (484?-406B.C.), Greek dramatist

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Tame calves, wild processing

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sat, 26 May 2007 16:15:00 +0000

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Taking photographs when the sun is at its highest isn't recommended: nor, usually, is placing your subject in the centre of the composition. And as for wild processing - well, make up your own mind!

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"The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk"
Ogden Nash (1902-1971), US poet

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photograph (c) T. Boughen

Beach tractors

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:15:00 +0000

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Old tractors are used in the Ribble estuary at Lytham, Lancashire for catching shrimps and for launching small boats. I caught this vehicle and its distant companion against a threatening sky.

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"The winkle ship sank and the shrimp ship swam."
Anonymous, a Tongue Twister

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Holes

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Thu, 24 May 2007 16:30:00 +0000

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I was in Blackpool looking at an exhibition today. The subject was worthy, but the presentation was dull. However, the pierced metal supports of the exhibition stands were very interesting!

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"Black holes are where God divided by zero"
Steven Wright (1955- ), US comedian, actor and writer

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Big shell, little shell

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:25:00 +0000

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Two shells - both, I am told, varieties of the species Murex - laid on a mirror in front of a black background, with natural lighting.

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"I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world...perhaps you've seen it."
Steven Wright (1955 - ), US comedian, actor and writer

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Beached hulks

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Tue, 22 May 2007 16:35:00 +0000

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I don't know how many years these wrecks have been stranded on the banks of the Wyre estuary at Fleetwood, Lancashire. But time and tide are certainly taking their toll.

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"A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy."
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish novelist and poet

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I DO photograph birds!

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Mon, 21 May 2007 19:15:00 +0000

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But only herons! It seems that herons are like buses - you wait for ages for one to come along, and then a few turn up all together! This one was stalking in the estuary at Arnside, Cumbria.

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"The cloud never comes from the quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it."
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), English novelist

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I don't photograph birds

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sun, 20 May 2007 19:00:00 +0000

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I don't photograph birds. I haven't got the lenses or the inclination. But when I come across one that is big, and lets you get quite close without flying off, like this grey heron by the Lancaster Canal, I sometimes point and shoot.

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"Craiget heron near the hill
Plenty water for the mill;
Craiget heron to the sea,
Fine weather it will be."
from "Spectator" (1st June 1895), herons as weather forecasters

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Constable's clouds

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sat, 19 May 2007 17:10:00 +0000

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As I walked along this country lane near Churchtown, Lancashire, cow parsley and may blossom lining my way, I looked up at the clouds and understood why the English painter, John Constable, spent much of his life trying to capture their transient beauty.

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"Spring goeth all in white,
Crowned with milk-white may:
In fleecy flocks of light
O'er heaven the white clouds stray."
Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930), English poet

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Alarming?

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:20:00 +0000

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If you own a lovely five-bay, three-storey house of 1720, that has an elegant doorway with a segmental pediment, fluted Ionic columns, a step that shows the wear of the passing feet of almost three centuries, and whose street-front is enlivened by a contemporary and delightful chequerboard of pebbles: a building that mercifully hasn't been scraped clean, but wears a patina of age, and is a pleasure for everyone who walks up the hill and passes it by, why do you stick a bright red alarm box on the front of it?

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"When we build, let us think that we build forever"
John Ruskin (1819-1900), English art and social critic

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Cafe chairs

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Thu, 17 May 2007 16:30:00 +0000

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The ubiquitous, gleaming, metal cafe chair now comes in many incarnations - with metal slats, metal mesh, real wicker, plastic wicker, wood, etc. But all stack, and so all offer that indispensable photographic quality - repetition.

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"You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it."
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norwegian painter and engraver

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You can't fence clouds

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:50:00 +0000

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Walking on the beach at Sunderland Point, Lancashire, I looked up and saw this cloud, apparently lower than its companions, drifting over the barbed wire fence that marked the edge of the cultivated land. It made me reflect that, just as you can't hold back the sea, you can't fence in the clouds!

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"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."
John Lubbock (1834-1913), English banker, politician, scientist and writer

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Long Row

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:30:00 +0000

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Long Row is the befitting name of this stretch of cottages in the rural industrial hamlet of Calder Vale, Lancashire. This housing was erected for the workers of the cotton mill that was built here in 1835. The mill is still working today, though powered by electricity rather than the river and mill pond of this deep little valley.

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"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do,
Chapels had been churches,
And poor men's cottages princes' palaces"
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist, (from "The Merchant of Venice")

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Dandelion field

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:50:00 +0000

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This field by the sea at Sunderland Point, Lancashire, seems to be growing dandelions as well as grass.

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" What would the world be,
Once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet,
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet!"
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English priest and poet

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In the gallery

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sun, 13 May 2007 16:20:00 +0000

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The solar cell array set into the glass roof of this alternative technology centre in Blackpool made some interesting "Tron"-like patterns on the visitors to its gallery.

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"I use the gallery as if it were a doctor. I come for ideas and help - to look at situations within painting, rather than paintings."
Lucien Freud (1922- ), German-born British painter

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Sails on the sea

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Sat, 12 May 2007 17:50:00 +0000

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At sunset a ferry sailing out of the port of Heysham, Lancashire, passes the Cirrus Array wind farm on the Shell Flat, 4.25 miles (7 km) off the Fylde coast.

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"To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet

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Rusted heart

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:50:00 +0000

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This rusty heart, with its surround of spikes is a detail of a sculpture on Blackpool's south promenade. It is by Chris Knight, and is called "Desire".

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"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish dramatist

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The heart of the flower

tbphotoreflect@googlemail.com (Tony Boughen) — Thu, 10 May 2007 18:00:00 +0000

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It seemed like I was looking at the heart of the flower when I focussed my macro lens on the centre of this tulip.

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"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears".
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet

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