Lovely morning – just right for my morning constitutional. What is better than having some grand old trees for company.
Perhaps not quite as grand or old…
The iPhone is a peculiar piece of equipment – especially when you use the camera but not the photo app. RAW images, as I am discovering. Without the ever helpful(?) hand of aunty iPhone the image it produces can be a bit rubbish. However, when you see the data from the camera you realise it is doing things other cameras just don’t even contemplate:
1/10900th of a second – one of the joys I guess of having a fixed aperture of only f1.6 around f8/13 in old money, sorry, full frame. Anyway, this is what the camera captured.
There are times, every now and then, when I do just wonder at the awful way the world is turning out. I don’t mean the thankfully abstracts, such as the suffering in Gaza or whatever dreadful international situation that you are concerned about, but rather the everyday things back home. For me at the moment it is the slow collapse of the old Conservative Party and its replacement by a mutation that seems to view everybody and everything with suspicion. The other is to be rejected and feared. Whilst at the same time we must not, under any circumstance, question why over the last 20 years the rich have got so much richer whilst the rest of us haven’t. Or perhaps ask why in the last 13 years the country in which I live in and have given quite a bit of my life to is in many ways so much worse than it was 13 years ago. Are the two connected? Only you can answer that.
“As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one’s gonna fucking notice.”
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – Gust Avrakotos
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
So what exactly does appointing David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Greensill fame) bring to the table? I have seen it argued that one of the reasons why Baron Cameron has been appointed is to reassure the more liberal Conservative voters in the Home Counties of England that things are OK under a Conservative Prime Minister who is a hard Brexiteer. If I were one of those voters I would take one look at Cameron and think he was the one who allowed the referendum to take place and thus split the country down the middle and then immediately quit. Not sure how much of a reassurance that would be.
Perhaps it was all a distraction – a Gust moment if you will. All of the Westminster media will be fixating on Cameron and not on Suella Braverman. How long will that last? A day or two at best and given the political skills shown by Sunak and his team he will probably squander the political restbite, afterall the Rwanda policy is about to reenter the political domain on Wednesday. If things go against the government then that is going to be clammer to revoke membership of the European Conventionon Human Rights (ECHR) from some of the loader members Sunak’s back benches. What does the new Foreign Secretary think about coming out of the ECHR?
Even if the Government wins the case at the Supreme Court the opposition will no doubt appeal to the European Court of Human Rights…more noise in the Mail and Telegraph…again Foreign Secretary what do you think? Perfect time for a Braverman opinion piece me thinks. And it is only Friday. Monday will seem such a long time ago.
That is before thinking about cabinet meetings where the former Prime Minister of over 5 years experience will sit opposite the current Prime Minister. Wonder what Cameron’s first intervention will be on? No one has as much experience as he has. He is the big beast amongst a crop of mostly Neophytes, and that includes the current Prime Minister.
So what is the question that Cameron is supposed to answer?
Along with wisdom old age also brings with it a raft of chronic conditions which are bundled together under the title ‘Aging Process‘. Some are there all the time some come and go. Today I have been visited with one of my come and go conditions. There is nothing I can do other than wait for it to pass but it does give me chance to work on some of my old iPhone images – c 2019 and 2022. The more I work on these images the more I realise that the best thing to do with a iPhone image is don’t try to work on the image on the phone. Save as a DNG or Apple RAW and then work on them on the computer.
On top of this I’ve been starting to experiment with the Adobe presets. Interesting experience. Anyway, back to resting and watching trash TV. Horrible, just horrible.
As the current government collapses in front of our eyes more attention will be focused on the probable replacement Labour government. Just what will they look like and how many ‘big beasts‘ will emerge over the next few weeks and months to fill out the Labour Cinemascope?
When is a volcano not a volcano? I’m sure there is a perfectly sound geological answer to that but I can’t be arsed to find out. Instead, I like to think I was standing on a volcano yesterday even though it hasn’t been active for over 400 million years ago in the Ordovician period. Croft Hill is certainly a feature that can be seen from kilometres away even though it is only 128 metres high.
Whenever I have made the trek to the top it also reminds my of the Arthur C. Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. This is credited as the inspiration for the Obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. On a day like yesterday you can imagine all manor of things with the dramatic sky and low lying sun.
Over the past few days a small but interesting corner of the Internet has slowly been consuming its own babies over whether recent Apple event which was ‘shot on iPhone‘ was actually ‘shot on iPhone‘. This is so ridiculous but the argument boils down to whether using top end professional camera tools with a iPhone 15 Pro Max constitutes the title…Sometime you just have to smile at the time people will waste going down a deeper and deeper rabbit hole. The good thing is that as far as Internet rabbit holes are concerned this is one of the more harmless.
So what has this is to do with me? Nothing other than the following images were ‘shot on iPhone‘. Equally, no industrial level equipment was used to capture the image, that is if I don’t count as ‘industrial‘…some days I’m not sure what I count as.
So what is the point of all this you may well ask? Well I have been testing the photographs I can make from the images I have captured using an iPhone 13. These are some of the results. What have I learnt? Firstly, use the Adobe Lightroom camera app – the only way I have found to extract ‘RAW’ images from the 13. Secondly just stick to the prime lenses and don’t touch the zoom. The phone only captures 12 MP images so anything that destroys image quality is to be avoided. The third is do not, I repeat, do not try to create the image on the phone using the Lightroom App. Perhaps if you have young eyes it might be different but for me I need as much real estate as possible to get things the way I want them and even then not always.
One of the joys (?) of the clocks being turned back is that you don’t have to get up at a silly hour to capture a cold sunny dawn. There was a time I would be found driving miles across country to capture the sunrise over the sea. Nowadays I’m not so keen.
One of the joys of being up and moving at dawn is that you get to see and hear things that later on in the day just don’t happen. This morning I discovered that we have at least one pair of Ravens here in Leicestershire. Now, as the Raven flies, it is only Leicestershire by a beaks length but it is Leicestershire nonetheless. There they were circling about my head and calling out with a call that once heard is never forgotten. They are a magnificent bird but as I didn’t have my long lens with me I didn’t capture any images. Still can’t complain.
If I find the whole ‘..when Rishi met Elon…’ nonsense just that then what must the archetypical Conservative party member, let alone his fellow Conservative MPs, think? I think it is time that some one reminded our Head Boy that he is actually the leader of a country that could comfortably bring about the end of life as we know it. Perhaps he should start to act like that – he is not at Winchester school anymore. I know Elon is all shiny and rich but Rishi would do well to listen to the wise words of Frank Underwood…
The more this nonsense carries on the more I think Rishi, whom I’m sure is a very decent man, is going to be the final jenga block in the collapse of the Conservative party as a credible political force. Yes I know argument: even if they lose the next election they will lick their wounds and come back stronger. Unfortunately, I suspect there are much stronger forces at work this time that will pull what is left of the once mighty ‘…party of government…’ apart.
I’ll leave you with this chilling thought. Should the Conservative party get a real good kicking at the next election then they’ll be looking for a new leader, Rishi Sunak is more than likely going to lose his seat in these circumstances. Probably the last ‘ Big Beast‘ of the Conservative Party left in parliament would be Liz Truss…need I say more?
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