Category: the lockdown diaries

Day 437 – Photos and postcards

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A run on the mountain yesterday, a surprisingly hard game of football in surprisingly warm conditions this morning.
I are a bit broken. I have sat down to blog and I might never be able to get up again. But it’s all been fun.

Today: A photography competition judged by someone called Trevor.

Win A Canon Kit Worth R68 999

Decent prizes there, including the chance for your image to be featured on the Sea Point Prom, where it will be seen by literally thousands of people every day. And also some cyclists.

But then you look more carefully, and there are separate prizes for Pros and Ams. I have to say that while the Powershot is very nice, the R6 and that monstrous 800mm lens (that’s clearly not it in the image above) is far more tempting. So, do you have to be a Pro enter the Pro arm of the competition? What exactly is a Pro in this context? I regularly take photographs in exchange for money, so can I enter that one? Especially now I’ve got my nice, new, big lens (bought from Orms, by the way). And while we’re getting the props in early, I also follow Trevor on Instagram and once advised him on Facebook of a good place to get a laptop screen fixed.

I’d say that I’m pretty much a shoe-in for this one.

All I need is a decent photo of a bird. Hmm.

And then, this.

I love the Postcard from the Past twitter account – I said it was good back when it started.
An image and a line or two from any postcard in Tom’s collection, presented without context and thus really prompting some thought into what exactly might have been going on in the writer’s mind (or on their holiday).

I have a virtual concert to attend on Thursday evening, so sadly it’s going to be difficult for me to do this one, but if you are interested, all the details are available on the link just above the image above.

[too many aboves, above? – Ed.]
[Nah – no-one will notice. I’m just going to hit the Publish button.]

Day 435 – This was nice

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I made a mistake the other evening. Right before I went to sleep, I read a bit of Reddit. Nothing hugely unusual in that, except for one of the last posts I saw there, which did me no good whatsoever.

Here’s the featured video therein:

(sorry – not sure why it’s SOOO BIIGG)

Now, I don’t scare easily, but the end of this little video weirdly took me back to a recurring nightmare I had in my childhood. This might seem a bit weird, but then dreams are weird, aren’t they? The unpleasant dream in question (and I can see it very clearly in my mind’s eye, right now), featured large, slow-moving humans and (ok, here comes the weird bit) Liverpool Cathedral.

I know that many kids have nightmare experiences with the Catholic church, but, for the purists out there, it’s the Anglican Cathedral I’m talking about. This one:

The eye-popping Liverpool Cathedral design that never happened - Liverpool Echo

Magnificent*. And a bit scary to me as a child.

The end of the video above wasn’t enough to scare me per se, but it was enough to induce some very disturbing memories of having my Liverpool Cathedral nightmare – but not the actual nightmare itself.

There’s scope for some very deep psychoanalytic research here, but I think the alternative – just continuing with my life as if the big face at the end of the video wasn’t actually there and Liverpool Cathedral was never anything more to me than a place where people went to sing and pray on a Sunday morning – is probably easier to do and a whole lot easier to deal with.

Anyway… sweet dreams.

* annoying, distracting building on the horizon on the right. I would have done something about that
(in the photo or in post, not like with TNT or anything).

Day 433 – Not a horse

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I was at a local riding school, ostensibly to take photos of some of the horses for their social media, but there were also cats (and dogs and chickens and guineafowls) around.
So even though it wasn’t feline Friday, I shot a bit of them too.

This guy is a Cape Leopard Bengal cat.

Apparently:

…many people consider the Bengal to be a wild cat that only pretends to be domesticated

And that fits pretty well for this chap, who doesn’t like to go indoors or hang around humans. But will always be nearby when there’s food on offer.

But that’s your feline studies lesson over for today, because right now, I need to get on with editing some horse pics before the football.