In Search of Claude Monet

Bide Brook, Lacock, Wiltshire. The focus is way off; the result is almost an impression of the bridge. Not a particularly successful photograph but something of a little tribute to Claude Monet. Canon EOS 40D + Nikkor-O.C Auto f/2 35mm lens.

The preceding nine photographs in this series aren't all as horribly blurred as this one. In fact, one of them is quite sharp. This is the result of using too slow a shutter speed. It's not entirely motion blur because there wasn't an earth tremor at that moment. I ought to have used a camera capable of higher ISO, or a fast lens, or both. But I didn't have those options so I used a Nikon D50 with a Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6 AF G lens whilst waiting to meet the 16.23 at Westbury station. Claude Monet noticed that slow shutter speed blurred moving figures and was inspired deliberately to smudge his painting to achieve this blurry effect. Bravo M. Monet! And Bravo The Limbo Connection!

Nikon D2Xs, Nikon AF Teleconverter TC-16A, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8. I disengaged the AF; thus the teleconverter was providing only extra focal length, in this case converting 50mm to 80mm, which is equivalent to a 120mm lens on a full frame Nikon digital or 35mm film camera.

Accidental result. Either there was an earth tremor or I had unsteady hands. It is a wide angle setting at 1/80th sec and ought not be blurred. Whatever would Claude Monet make of it? Nikon D300s + Tamron Di II SP AF 17-50mm f/2.8 XR LD Aspherical lens (not the image stabilisation version!)

It was a mystery tour in a cream and red Bedford OB coach. There were people there who wanted to be characters in my forthcoming novel. The coach driver said he'd received an e-mail saying that I had not paid my fare. He drove off and left me here. I thought, 'It's 1956, how could he have received an e-mail?' When my gaze returned to this avenue of trees there was an elderly man with a beard sitting at an easel with a child's paint box, a tin one, like you got at Christmas in 1956. I told him about the e-mail thing while he used up the last of the raw sienna. He shrugged and replied that he had no experience of industrial processes. 'Do you know,' he said, 'I have asked for another paint box like this for my Christmas present this year. But most unfortunately I shall die before the feast.' That man was Claude Monet. His calendar was 30 years out. But he couldn't care less. Note to people of the USA: It is quite illogical to say, 'I could care less', when you mean you don't care at all. Think about it.

Nikon D2Xs + Tamron AF Zoom 55-200mm f/4-5.6 Di II LD Macro lens.

"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept". (Henri Cartier Bresson) I used a Canon EOS 20D with a Carl Zeiss Jena 50mm f/2.8 Tessar lens deliberately missing focus for a watery effect.

There is a tea room in the Stables Yard at Lacock Abbey where excellent cheese scones and cake is available. Close by is a second-hand bookshop where you can buy something to read whilst you munch. Today I bought a slender volume of eighteen love poems which George Bernard Shaw wrote for Ellen Terry and 'Small World' by David Lodge. The latter was typeset in Plantin which is a good dense Roman face and easier to read than some weedy excuses for typefaces they use routinely to save a dollop or two of ink in the production run. My work compiling an Occasional Gourmet's Guide to Cheese Scones in Sundry Catering Establishments Along the A350 (discussed here a few years ago with the incomparable Steve Bucknell - see www.ipernity.com/doc/341635/48133194) has pretty much ground to a halt. Few vendors of cheese scones seem likely to supplant Lacock in my estimation, and although I have not charted the whole territory, I find the A350 so busy these days that it's better all round to stick with what I know. Nikon D40 and 18-200mm lens.