Granny Buttons

Maffi's snow is always white

I'm interested to see that the snow pictures on Maffi's blog are pretty much a neutral white balance, without a trace of the blueness that tricks most cameras (see his post from yesterday, right).

Being curious, I delved into his back posts, and found that they've been a good, neutral proper colour for  pretty much as long as been posting them. 

The earliest of Maffi's snow pictures that I can find is on 6th February last year.  

Question for Maffi: do you have a snow setting on your camera, do you alter the balance on the computer afterwards, or do you just have a super-intelligent camera?

Maffi's chionophilia [love of snow*] goes back some way.  His first snow picture appeared 8th April 2008,  when he announced:

Snow snow snow!
Snow snow snow!
Snooooooooooooow loverly snow!

But the chionophilia must surely be wearing thin - and not just for Maffi.  His testiness is already setting in.  In his post yesterday (pictured above) he writes:

We seem to have a lot of snow, does anyone want any?

Of course, it's not the snow that frustrates the boater but the ice, the bloody ice.  For a boater, ice is a prison.  As I write this, the mercury tells me it's been below freezing for over three days and it reached -7.6C (-18F) last night.  I'm told we've got off lightly.

At heart, liveaboard boaters are nomads. Even if we aren't actually moving, we must have the option to do so. There's no madness quite like nomad-ness.

[*Chionophilia - named after Chione, the goddess of snow. No, I didn't  know either until I looked it up just now.]

Maffi's dub pass

I'm slow to say this, because I'm only now catching up on a bunch of blogs, but I just noticed legendary blogging boater Maffi reached a milestone over a fortnight ago:

Happy Bus Pass Day, Fred Flintstone!

This is indeed a milestone, and one that perhaps justifies me calling him a 'veteran 'canal blogger.  Four years in boating is barely an apprenticeship, but in blogging it's a lifetime.

I was interested to see recently that Maffi is also the name of a Dutch dub reggae record label.  One of their successes is Rude Boy, a "7-inch missile" by the legendary Hopeton Lindo.  He is:

...the man who's responsible for one of the 80s-digital-alltime classics ("Territory"), who
co-wrote Shabba Ranks' "Mr. Loverman" - and who blows the most deadly whistle south
of Shinehead.

(Listen to 'Rude Boy' here.)

Keep blowing de deadly sexuagenarian whistle south of Shinehead, Mr Loverman!

Waterways panoramas

Most of my favourite canal websites use Tony Blews' UK Waterway Ranking Site, which allows us all to pretend we don't really care that we haven't got as many readers as Narrowboat World or Jim Shead.

Tony's other big canal effort is Google Earth Canal Maps, which he currently describes as:

... an on-going attempt to maps all the canals of the UK on Google Earths/Google Maps, including all the derelict and in-filled ones.

It is hampered mainly by my habit of accidentally deleting the database every so often. Oops.

He tells me:

In my usual idiocy I've accidentally deleted the Google Earth Canal Maps site, so I'm working to rebuild it.

As part of the reconstruction and redesign, I'm in need of a banner image about 940 x 198 pixels.  Do you have anything in your massive image collection that might look nice on the page www.ukwrs.co.uk/gecm?

How's this, Tony?  It's Edgstone Aqueduct, on the Southern Stratford Canal:

You can take two different approaches to waterways panoramas.  One way is to catch as wide an angle as you can, and hope it looks like a human angle of view. 

The other, as here, is to zoom in a little, and give it the appearance of a 'letterbox', or perhaps a glimpse out of a burka.

In a photo like this, it helps that it's really a fairly normal picture, cropped to focus on one small section, with assorted 'filler' either side of the focus of the image.  This allows for captioning on top without obscuring a key part of the composition. Overlaid text often work against more conventional 'wide angle' panoramas.

I think Tony should have a selection of panoramas, changing them around periodically.  It's such an unusual format that the format itself becomes the image, and the picture is just the detail.  By changing the picture regularly you keep it fresh without taking the viewer by surprise. And there's a psychological bonus: even though it might not be a very good photo, it looks good because the regular visitor knows it's temporary.

A true panorama often doesn't work so well as a 'mood-setting' header simply because there's too much detail, too much to distract your eye.

Here's Lowsonford Lock on the same day, in the late afternoon. The subject is more 'spread out', making it perhaps less suited to any text overlay.

Of course, Tony doesn't mention wanting anything suitable for text overlay. But it's something to consider when doing panoramas.

Fazeley Junction

Like every other boat on the UK waterways, Granny is currently frozen in.  And like about 400 other boats, my prison is Mercia Marina.

However, I'm looking forward - with pathetic and impossible optimism let it be said - to a thaw at the end of next week.  And be that this should happen, I'd like to take a few days off over Christmas and travelling up to Birmingham for the New Year.

Canalplan calculates that journey at four days of short winter cruising, 42 miles and 49 locks at around six hours a day.

One of the most picturesque scenes of this voyage is at Fazeley Junction, the point where the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal meets the Coventry Canal.  I remember coming this way in a warmer time, last July, when I met a man feeding ducks. 

I get the feeling that Fazeley Junction could be on the up as a canal destination. Besides hosting the main British Waterways office in the region (just around the corner on the left of this picture), there's some potentially valuable derelict land on the left that is a very good development opportunity, and other 'brownfield' property in the neighbourhood.

(Canalnoraks will recognise Fazeley Junction as being technically one of two that the B&F Canal has with the Coventry Canal.  Thanks to a quirk of canalmania history the other is at Whittington Brook. Are they the only canals that meet twice?)

I'll keep dreaming of my New  Year trip, and won't abandon the idea until the middle of next week.  I do love travelling on the canals in winter, even with a little light icebreaking, and the week after Christmas is my favourite.

Blackbird bathing

Craft blogger Tizduster recently posted about how she came across a blackbird 'having a bath' in a container in her garden.  (Zoom in to see it properly)

This reminds me of the baby bird I came across at Farmers Bridge Junction about 3 years ago.  It was flailing helplessly in the water, halfway to the junction 'island'.  Only a chance breath of wind allowed it to be blown close enough for me to 'paddle' it in with my hands and retrieve it.

I gingerly picked it up and it shivered slightly - out of fear or cold I don't know - but it was too exhausted to protest.

I placed the poor thing under a nearby bush and gently tipped its beak with my finger; it showed no reaction but cheeped feebly as I left.  I hope it survived and didn't blindly try to return to the water.

The title of this post refers to Tizduster's photo, and it's clear that my bird isn't black, but more than that I don't know. Is it a thrush?  If a duckling, it's clearly an ugly one. 

Removing blue from the rime

More photographing of the snow to remove  the blue colour cast.

Below is a scene near Mercia Marina on Tuesday morning, where the frost was so hard it had created a rime in the naked trees and hedgerows.

But while the air was cold, so cold, what I felt in my mind was a lovely salmon-pink sunrise that isn't represented in the scene that came out of the camera.

This is a little more accurate in my mind, if not quite so cold-looking:

Five minutes later, the sky was even rosier, but you'd not notice it in the camera:

Ah, this is better:

Too-fat Granny

I was trying to work out last weekend why I'm posting less than I used to - less than for about six years.

It might be because a lot of the items now get put into Waterways World's news pages instead.  But even that's no real excuse. 

Granny Buttons is often about a flight of fancy, a ball I pick up and run with, a word or photograph that I tease out into many thoughts.

No, I suspect it's because my boat's going nowhere at the moment. Snug and safe in a mooring, a shoreline connected and all conveniences at hand, I'm not insecure enough, not hungry enough for blog material.

And despite the big freeze of the last couple of weeks, I'm not cold enough either.

In short, I'm emotionally too fat.

Granny can't go anywhere at the moment.  I need to rectify that.  As soon as the ice has melted, I'll be off for a while too gather more material.

Oops

I love the narrow canals, and perhaps the very reason is that guiding a narrowboat into a lock will always be a game of skill.

I've often banged Granny into the brickwork at the tail of one of Brindley's narrow locks, but I've never had the bad luck of having someone photograph the moment that I myself lost a manoeuvre.

Luckily, last February at Weston Lock on the Trent & Mersey, it wasn't me steering.  Instead, Granny was waiting above the lock for another boat to come through.  And here it came, albeit not quite as smoothly as it wanted.

It's no shame.  Frankly, I think a few dents at the bow only go to show experience in steering.

More shiny-shiny

Oooh, look at this, another very shiny boat.

This was a couple of years ago, on my way down to London; I was about to leave a lock on the Buckby flight and the fellow steering Morpheus,  being quite experienced, took the opportunity to come in even before I'd left the lock.

I can't remember quite why we did it like this.  I do remember being single-handed and still on the lockside when opening the gates, and suggested he come in anyway.

Whatever the circumstances, I do remember admiring the glossy sheen of the paintwork and seizing my camera to catch the moment. 

It's lovely seeing my boat reflected in their mirrors.

Don't photograph the blue snow

A popular joke has it that the first lesson an eskimo child learns when growing up is don't eat the yellow snow. 

Of course, we all know that snow - au naturel - is white.  (More technically, it's transparent, a property it shares with polar bear hair.)

Blue casts:

So why is snow blue in our photographs?  Halfie touched on the subject yesterday himself, in his blog post Photographing The Snow.  He writes: 

I'm sure Andrew Denny has talked in the past about why the camera records snow as blue, when we see it as white. Is it because it reflects the blueness of the sky, but our brains tell us snow ought to be white, so that's how we see it

I took the top photo [here] yesterday morning from the bedroom window. That is the desaturated version. What actually came out of the camera is the photo below.

Halfie cites the online Digital Photography School, and its post 'Why Is The Snow In My Pictures So Blue?', which gives a detailed explanation.  (Too much detail, I think.)

Halfie's first instinct is right. The sky is blue, it's the brightest thing around, and its blueness colours all.  Our brains correct the colour balance.

I don't faff around with camera controls.  That gets in the way of clicking the shutter. Instead, I alter it later, using the 'colour cast' control, now included in most editing programs. 

The principle is that you click on a colour that you think should be neutrally white or grey; it then automatically shifts the whole colour balance of the picture away from that colour.

Grey cards:

But colour balance is perhaps a lesser aspect.  Another, more important fault with many snow photos is that they are almost always too dark, have you noticed that? 

Camera exposure meters are calibrated to expect the average scene will reflect about 15% of the light falling on it. Snowscapes reflect much more light than this, so the meter assumes the scene is brighter than it really is, and decreases  the exposure. 

Result: A too-dark picture.

Cure: Increase the exposure.

If you take your photography seriously, for both colour balance and exposure you can buy a 'grey card'.  Wikipedia will tell you all you need to know about grey cards. 

Carry a grey card with you, put it in the scene (in the shade) and photograph it, and  you'll have a neutral grey to compare to the strange blue of the scene. 

But don't get obsessed with colour balance.  Blue is the colour of cold, and if  you remove too much you'll lose the wintry feeling.

For example, below is a scene in Stone last January.  Granny was locked in the ice there for nearly a month.

The first photo shows the colour balance more or less as it came out of the camera. 

The second is as I 'saw' the scene in my mind, with the late winter sun washing the snow a golden white and warming the sky.

But surely it was colder than that? I'm not sure what is right.