Therfield, Hertfordshire

Roy likes this.

Unusual for him. The sky isn't Shepperton.

I arrived in Therfield behind schedule and late for lunch, but nevertheless took this first. Wisely, because when I emerged from the pub (which, luckily, was still doing food) it had miserabled over and was spitting rain.

[There'll be no more from me for the next fortnight].

He likes it because it's well composed and doesn't have the "dingy effect" which you've applied to some of the others (umbrellas, for example). Hope you enjoy your Indian summer.

To humour Roy, here's the non-dingy, ex-camera .jpg:



If he thinks that's better, he's entitled to his opinion, but I cannot agree with him.

Thanks. It begins early on Monday.

He doesn't like EITHER of them, but has a nasty feeling he's seen them before.

Highly unlikely, as they were only taken yesterday.

Was there something similar in London or Kent a while back?
Or is he having deja vue?

Not that I myself have come across. But it's certainly been done elsewhere - www.pps.org/places/umbrella-sky-project

According to www.royston-crow.co.uk/news/24379438.umbrella-sky-display-fills-royston-town-centre-colour, the umbrellas are part of a scheme with "the aim of raising the profile of Royston as a great retail, tourist, and business destination, and improving the experience for those who live, visit and work in the town".

Oh dear. Improving places usually means spoiling them.
But Roy is very chuffed to have a town named after him.

Arrived back from India two hours ago, safe and sound and (more importantly) so have my memory cards and the pictures on them. No great masterpieces but (it was a photographic group tour and it mostly lived up to expectations) I'm expecting over 80 usable shots which for me will be an all-time record for a single trip.

I quite enjoyed the trip (just like the photographic tour in China in 2017, I was the only male member of the small group, all the ladies being serious and well-equipped photographers, one of them an ARPS) and the side effects of the RT, which are starting to diminish, weren't a problem.

I've been up for over 20 hours and after two long, back-to-back flights ought to be exhausted, but strangely I'm experiencing a second wind.

If your pictures are more important to you than your physical wellbeng, then you must be a very serious photographer, but I'm glad you both made it back safe and sound.

I look forward to seeing them, but won't look at your first upload, if it's what the title suggests. Please don't ever show me anything with eight legs, even as a joke, as I have narcolepsy and images like that tend to repeat in my brain as I'm nodding off.

I know that feeling of being really exhausted after a long journey, and then feeling bizarrely hyped up once it is over, as though one has reached a point of being too tired to sleep.

That's the only arachnid picture I took, but it's only a small part of the composition, and the creature was actually tiny, as can be seen from its size relative to the surrounding water droplets. The image is unlikely to induce narcolepsy in anyone, but there's no compulsion to look at it.

That's yer lot. Although I took over 80 pictures this trip, on Ipernity and Flickr, I've drawn a line at 50 pictures. Not a record number - the last India trip (not a photographic tour) produced 62 - and no great masterpieces among them, but some quite good ones, more than sufficient to have made the trip worthwhile. I didn't need or use the tripod which I'd bought specially and lugged all the way there and back, but did use and need all three lenses, and there's satisfaction in that.

I look forward to seeing the others' pictures, taken in the same places at the same times, to see how they compare with my own, and how, in the opinion of the tour leader, a known and published professional landscape photographer, they stack up.

I'm afraid I accidentally clicked on it as I was going through your series just now.

I instantly screwed up my eyes and clicked away, but even that split-second sighting showed me that the image was not tiny, whatever size it may or may not have been in relation to the water droplets.

Such images do not induce narcolepsy, but can later repeat themselves quite vividly on the inner visual screens of those who are prone to hypnagogic hallucination.

I hope that this did not happen, or if it did, the effect is not long-lasting.

The image is momentary, as I have an inbuilt startle response which jolts me awake if such an event occurs. However, it does impair my hypnagogic experience, when I like to watch the swirling patterns and onset of dreams, but am constantly in fear of arachnid intrusion.
The more you tell yourself not to think about something, the more you think about it.

www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/hypnagogic-hallucinations#:~:text=Hypnagogic%20hallucinations%20are%20vivid

With obsessional, negative thoughts (when I have the discipline to) I say to myself, in the abrupt, authoritative tone of a bossy film director, "CUT!". It usually works.