Progress, progress…

It’s been a while since I posted anything on how the gallery build is progressing [although if you follow us on FaceBook you will have seen more recent pictures: if you don't, sign up immediately!]  Things are progressing apace.  The outside isn’t that far off being finished.  The extensions have their larch cladding and roof flashings.  The new door has been cut out and the old garage doors have been blocked up [quite literally] and await the final coat of plaster.  It’s all looking rather smart.  Inside is still largely just a shell, although the extensions have already been insulated. Next major step is the floor in the ‘old’ building, which has to be built up so that it can be insulated – the ‘new build’ has insulation under the concrete base so just has to be raised up to meet the new section.  The old concrete floor is somewhat less than even and there has been much muttering and drilling out and smoothing over, but it’s looking good, even if I did go skidding over the floor last Saturday as I didn’t know there was a patch of wet concrete!

All looking good: but what is the piece of wood doing on the extension roof?

At the top of the drive the dreaded SDB2 is taking shape.  Taking shape rather quickly, as in one day it has gone from being something on a plan to being ready for tarmacing, following the addition of 100 tonnes of crushed rock of various grades and some nifty work with an excavator. Whereas before it was a concave slope with an awkward lip at the top it now has a wide flat junction with the road.  Our builders got their van up it second go before it had been rolled – I tried it in the Jimny [in four-wheel drive] and glided serenely to the top.  Since it has been rolled it’s been fine – they’ve been driving in and out all day today.  It gets tarmaced on Thursday. I then need to quickly put some marker stakes up as it’s a steep drop if you come off the edge!  The fence will go up in a couple of weeks when the soil has settled.

Now, if I just reverse a little bit more, there’ll be a large pile of stones and no digger…

We’ve started some planting around the finished end of  the car-park although the final layer of gravel has still to be added.  Time to start ordering the fixtures and fittings: after all, it’s only money…

Currently listening to: The Vice of the People – The Albion Band

On the road again…

So, we’re at the annual Clan Donald Craft Fair down at Armadale in Sleat on Saturday and Sunday, the largest event of its type on Skye.  Sleat is the south-western ‘arm’ of Skye, so that’s a 100 mile round trip each day…  We’re in marquee B if you’re around.  Then on Monday, just for relaxation, we’re at the Craft Fayre [sic] in Waternish.  Don’t forget to visit our Zenfolio gallery to see the full range of images available to order.

Handsome beast am I not? If you visit the OldByreSkye stall you can buy my portrait. McMoo.

Currently listening to: Nothing Can Stop Us – Robert Wyatt [augmented version with Shipbuilding, which isn't on the original album]

Leica rangefinder, but different…

If you’re not interested in camera talk [or bad puns], look away now – you have been warned [although it's too late for the pun...].

As it’s nearly my birthday I decided to buy a new camera, to join the other 14 that I own.  It’s not a replacement for my Pentax K5, which is the current workhorse, but rather something to bring one of my old systems back to life.  By the end of the days when I shot on film I had three systems that I had built up over the years: a Bronica 645RF [medium format rangefinder; three lenses]; Pentax MZ-5n and MX [35mm SLRs and xx lenses] and a Voigtlander Bessa R2 and T [35mm rangefinders and five lenses].  The Bronica, which was a flawed masterpiece sits sadly in its bag, where at least it doesn’t gather dust.  The Pentax system converted to digital although nothing of the original system remains in use.  And then there was the 35mm rangefinder system with five Leica M mount lenses – 4 Voigtlanders from 15 to 75mm and a Leica 135mm f4 Tele-Elmar bought off eBay for about half its market value. So it is the latter system I’ve brought back to life.

Panasonic LX3 – fixed 24mm f2 – 60mm f2.8 [35mm equivalent field of view] vs Ricoh GSR with 25mm f4 Voightlander Snapshot-Skopar – over 6 times the sensor area of the LX3…

Sadly, digital rangefinders are out of my league as there are basically Leica or nothing.  If I still had my old job in London I could probably stretch to a reasonable second-hand M8, but not now.  So I’ve bought a Ricoh GXR with an A12 -M module as they are going cheap at the moment [which probably means they've been discontinued].  The original GXR was an interesting, if flawed concept, in that the ‘camera’ body isn’t really a camera at all: it just houses the controls, LCD screen and most of the electronics.  The lenses came in sealed modules with the sensors onboard. The idea was that you could keep the small camera form by putting small sensors behind long zooms, and lager sensors on short zooms or standard lenses, and the sealed units would be impervious to dust.  In practice you ended up paying over the odds for the lenses – what really needs to be changeable  in digital cameras is the sensors and the electronics to run them as the turnover on camera models in any given market position other than very high-end is around 18 months, if that, driven largely by an increasingly meaningless pixel count.

But the M Module is different – it mounts M bayonet [the Leica rangefinder mount] lenses. The M module is interesting in that unlike using adaptors on [mainly] micro 4/3 cameras, the sensor is optimised for M mount lenses, which having been designed with a short registration distance can cause problems on digital sensors.  The sensor isn’t ‘full frame’* so the angle of view is reduced to what it would have been on 35mm – it crops the useable image circle.  This does mean, however, that the edges of the lenses which have less resolution aren’t used, and there is no light loss at the corners (vignetting) which is common on very wide-angle lenses, especially for rangefinders.  If you want vignetting it’s very easy to add when processing an image.  There is also no AA** [anti-aliasing] filter on the sensor, which increases sharpness.

So what’s it like?  Well, it’s not a rangefinder, but….  The lens module glides smoothly and solidly onto the magnesium alloy body, and the whole thing has a reassuring solidity about it – it’s not a budget product.  It fits nicely in the hand with all the controls easily reached.  Many of the controls can have specific functions assigned to them which is especially useful as the zoom switch is otherwise redundant on a manual focus,  prime  lens mount.  The control menus are logically laid out and easy to scroll through.  In fact the whole control interface is  quite exemplary and was very easy to get started and to explore the deeper depths of the possibilities offered.

Same size sensor: Pentax K5 with battery grip and 50-135mm f2.8 vs Ricoh GXR with VF-2 digital viewfinder, Leica 135mm f4 Tele-Elmar and IUFOO lens hood. I have no idea why Leica used to give its accessories such strange names…

The accessory viewfinder is expensive, but very necessary as the rear screen is all but impossible to see in bright sunlight.  It can be tilted through 90 degrees as well, so is good for low angle shooting.  As focusing is manual there are various software focusing aids.  The one I’ve been using increases contrast, particularly at the edges of objects – with a shallow depth of field you can ‘walk’ the line of focus across the image, and with the wide-angles I usually zone-focus anyway as per rangefinder days.

As you may have worked out, I like this camera a lot.  Whether this continues will, of course, depends on how it performs optically when I start trying to make commercial quality prints from its output.  It’s not meant to replace my K5, rather offer a more portable system for when I don’t want, or need, to carry a heavy camera bag [much as my old Bessa] but it still needs to be able to sing for its supper, as it were.  I’ll post a second report when I’ve done some serious shooting.

*’Full frame’ in digital terms is a sensor the same size as a single frame of 35mm film [24 x 36mm].  It’s an irritating term as all sensors and film are ‘full frame’ – the sensor covers the frame.  Most digital SLRs are APS -C [23x15mm], which is Advanced Photo System (Classic), another film format.  ’Full frame’ is much smaller than my Bronica rangefinder [60x45mm] and my old 617 panoramic camera [60x170mm], so what’s ‘full’ about it?

Currently listening to: Shining Brother Shining Sister – Jackie Leven

Time o’ the signs…

Things have been quite busy here although we’re a bit behind on the online stuff as we both succumbed to the bug that is doing the rounds on Skye at the moment.  [No, not the dread highland midge – that comes later!]  So what signs of progress are there to report?

A sign of things to come…

Sign the first: a smart new brushed aluminium sign at the end of the drive with the logo which, for the moment, serves to help our guests in the holiday let find the property.  It will probably end up on the gallery itself as the roadside sign needs to announce the cafe and gallery much more prominently to catch drive-bys, but it makes a statement for the moment.  I’m now in the process of painting a stenciled sign to go beneath it saying ‘Opening Summer 2013′ before we get people driving down looking far a cafe!

4 star for you…

Sign the second:  the Scottish Tourist Board 4-star logo in the front window of the let.  We  have been sitting on is news for a little while – we had the final inspection and grading a few weeks ago, but have been waiting for the official letter before ‘going public’.  We’re obviously very pleased with the grading – it took a little extra push following the initial advisory visit but the results have been well worth it.  You learn about all sorts of things, like the merits of Egyptian cotton linen [and its demerits, such as cost!], the perceived [rather than actual] benefits of different makes of crockery and saucepans, what makes a carpet ‘excellent’ rather than ‘very good’, and how close to an upstairs window an inspector should stand when suggesting re-skimming a ceiling. [We didn't – re-skim or defenestrate...]

Currently listening to: Electric – Richard Thompson [If you buy this, be sure to get the deluxe version with the added bonus disc – three of the four tracks that are off the same sessions as the main album could easily replace some of the songs chosen for the final album.   And it includes the wondrous Auldie Riggs from Cabaret of Souls  – a classic piece of  dark, broad Thompson music-hall sung by an unrepentant, mass-murdering sailor…

Follow your leader…

I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for some time now [other social networking tools are available...].  It’s useful for keeping up with old colleagues without the intrusive, domineering style of FaceBook.  Recently, however, they have started sending regular emails suggesting that I might like to ‘follow’ some LinkedIn Influencers, or ‘thought leaders’ as it subsequently calls them.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I get quite tetchy when someone seems to be telling me what to think.

Sheep…

Especially as the cast of these leaders is somewhat depressing and all to predictable.  Obviously, we have LinkedIn’s own CEO, whose name I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to look up.  Among the others we have the new age guru and shameless charlatan Deepak Chopra.  Another recent email informed me of the The Things He Always Carries.  Items listed are a biosensor manufactured by a company he works for as an adviser, a gizmo that ‘automatically puts the user into a meditative, relaxed, dream, sleep, creative or altered state of consciousness’ (whatever) that, yes you’ve guessed it, he helped to develop, and an iPad, which becomes a shameless plug for his app and website.  Basically, the things he says he carries are things he can sell you.  Just as well, as he doesn’t always seem to carry money….

Clicking the link for further shameless self-publicists Thought Leaders gives a screen including our own David Cameron, who may be Prime Minister, but who hasn’t obviously had an original thought in all the time he has been in the public eye, beyond that he should lead the Conservative Party.  And so it goes on.

It appears that to be a ‘Thought Leader’  your ideas don’t need to be proven, your thoughts don’t need to be original or even well-formed.  You just need to be a brazen self-publicist and to have made it into the new self-appointed power-elite, whereupon riches of all sorts will flow to you because you obviously deserve it: much the same as the power-elites of every other generation.  Such people can’t tell you how to succeed as they don’t really know how they did it – luck, connections, whatever: you can’t replicate it to a formula.

It’s a nice gig if you can get it, but it doesn’t mean that I want to listen to you, or that I should hold you in high regard.  At the moment the web is awash with massively valued companies that don’t actually produce anything of real value and whose only real commodity is access to their members, and often what their members might reasonably regard as their own property, such as images they have produced, or copy they have written.  If anything is less likely to make me want to engage as part of a community, it’s their suggesting that I should pay attention to modern-day snake-oil salesmen.

Postscript

Since I started this post [and agonised over whether to post it] another leader from another time has passed on.  I will not comment directly on the late Baroness’s politics, suffice it to say that we did not often see eye to eye, and that as time has moved on I have moved progressively further from such a line of sight.

Much has been made in some circles of the public  ’celebrations’ at her death, although detailed reading seems to result in reports of  numbers similar to those found at a Scottish Second Division match – as long as somebody remembered to take a dog along.  I don’t celebrate anyone’s death – perhaps if I had been raised under a totalitarian regime I would feel differently, but I didn’t, and neither did anyone else born and raised in this country for many generations.  And in any case, there is too much to celebrate in simply being alive.

In some ways though, this response had become a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Margret Thatcher had become a symbol of many things to many people, and symbols can be very powerful things.  Over the years I have probably met more people who said they would celebrate this passing than were anywhere near the streets on Monday night.  A generation has grown up hearing these things: some of them, although having no direct experience living through the eighties, believed that this was an appropriate response.   If you repeat something often enough people may start believing it, especially if their opinions are still being formed: and the self-righteous indignation of the self-appointed keepers of the flame playing to their own demographic simply makes matters worse.

Those on all sides of the political fence, including those who sit on it, should take a long, hard look at themselves and think of the ramifications of their sloganeering and the law of unintended consequences.  There is a society out there that deserves, and increasingly expects, better.  What you say three times isn’t necessarily true – and history is full of boojums…

Currently listening to: Deserters – Oysterband [All That Way for This...]

A new benchmark

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then, to coin a phrase, I’ll begin…

There’s a lot of waste wood around the property at the moment, some left over from the work on the annex, some from the ongoing work on the garage, and some from old fencing that was dumped behind the garage.  It’s a good supply of kindling for the woodburner but I have designs on some of it – I need a larger workbench for the studio for which I’ve started to cut wood.  But today’s project was a different bench – a bench seat for outside the house.

Kit of parts – either that or a bench dropped from a great height…

I’ve been designing a simple bench in my mind for years, for the leftover wood from the deck I built years ago back in Greenford but never got around to building it.  It’s a more practical life up here on Skye, so I set to work yesterday sorting out timber to experiment with.  I did, however, have one disappointment.   Out of interest I did an online search for bench plans and found that my fledgling design already existed.  Not only did it exist but it even had a name: it’s an Aldo Leopold bench.  No, me neither.  But perhaps I should have.

Leopold, it turns out, was an early player in the American environmental and wilderness conservation movement, becoming professor at the University of Wisconsin. Here’s a quote from A Sand County Almanac, a collection of his writing published shortly after his death in 1948.  ”… a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”  And amen to that.

By a  happy co-incidence with my discovery of Aldo Leopold we also recently discovered that 2013 is The Year of Natural Scotland [don't know how I missed that!].  The more observant of returning readers may have noticed that I’ve added their logo to the blog’s banner.

Anyway, back to the bench.  It’s a very simple design that can be made from a few lengths of solid timber [the original spec seems to be 8" x 2" by enough to finish] a few screws and coach bolts: all things that have been found lying around rural properties for generations.  It’s true to the original conservation ethos that the timber has been reclaimed. Unfortunately I couldn’t reclaim quite enough 8 x 2 so the back is made from two pieces of  3 x 2, which gives it a lighter look, although weakens it a little.  There’s a very slight lateral wobble [although no worse than many commercial garden benches!], so I may make a few tweaks – maybe a stretcher on the rear legs.

The finished (for the moment) result

As there is an environmental flavor to this post I also can’t help but note that today the Scottish government has given consent to the building of a wind farm off Aberdeen.  This is in plain view of the controversial golf complex being developed by American egocentric and bewigged buffoon Donald Trump, and which he has been opposing as it “will spoil the sea view for the golfers” and “will definitely be the destruction of Aberdeen and Scotland itself”.  This is the same golf course that was built on, and destroyed, a Site of Special Scientific Interest.  Sorry Donald, your opinions on anything related to the environment are as valid as what ever it is that seems to have gone to sleep on your head.  And less intelligent.  Goodness knows what Aldo would have thought…

Currently listening to: Traces – Karin Polwart

Mind the Gap

We have had a gap in our lives this past week.  A big gap.  A big gap where the bridge across the Allt a’ Mhulaig (the burn that runs across the front of the property) used to be.  As part of the work to convert the garage into the cafe/gallery we have had to replace the bridge, as the builders didn’t think it could be trusted to bear the weight of the cement and aggregate delivery lorries given that we didn’t know exactly how it was constructed, other than that it appeared to be a cast concrete slab sitting on concrete piers.  So, in short order, it was demolished.

Mind the Gap

Demolition revealed that replacement was a good idea.  You would expect to find some reinforcing mesh in a concrete slab such as that which formed the bridge.  The only signs of any steel whatsoever was what appeared to be a car or trailer chassis that had been set such that it sat on the concrete piers on either side, but otherwise did little to hold the slab together and help resist the tensile forces that cause such structures to fail.  Truth be told it was an accident waiting to happen and is best buried under what will be the car park…

The Gap Filled

As you can see, the new bridge is formed from culvert piping with concrete on top.  What you can’t see are the two steel girders sitting on the piers a lorry axle’s width apart, and the steel reinforcing mesh that was missing in the old bridge.  In due course we will think about putting up some form of side rails, when the rest of the building work is done, and we are landscaping.

The concrete was poured last Thursday: on Friday morning there was a set of cat paw prints leading across the bridge away from the house.  Piano was in the house all the time: Puzzle was in the house all the time.  If anyone in Ose sees a cat with concrete boots on, let me know.  Piano says cats with concrete boots sleep with the fish (and not from a Whiskas tin…)

Currently listening to: Ashore – June Tabor