All Things Bright & Beautiful

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Well folks, it's 18:20, September 7th 2021: dateline Rachub, North Wales; and the temperature in our garden is 26°C in the shade. I'm sitting writing this with a cold beer outside the cottage, and it feels like the Med. and this after an August (High Summer?) so indifferently dull and chilly as to have marked itself out as odd - although August has been a weirdly changeable month for some years, now.

The kicker for me is that I loaded up some relatively 'slow' B&W film into the old Nikon F2: 80 ASA (or ISO, if you insist) which in my day would have been 'slow' enough for any bright summer's day in the UK. The required exposure indicated by the camera  - given that I wanted the widest aperture possible to reduce the depth of field - when I went to take a picture of one of the flowers outside the front of the house was 1/2000sec at f5.6; indicating a level of brightness I first became aware of in 1979 on our first trip abroad, to Greece.

At that time, I was working as a photographic technician at Birmingham University (blog-posts passim) and so was technically savvy. What I hadn't anticipated was the power of the Mediterranean light: the film I was using was at least two exposure stops too fast (if this means nothing to you, Google it and take up using film;-). The light levels here in the summer months these days surpass those I first encountered in Athens forty-two years ago by at least half to one stop. Gotta be a reason for that, dontcha think?

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