Symbolic Forest

A fortnight after our holiday, I’ve finally managed to start uploading our holiday photos. We went to Bristol, and photographed outlying parts of the large and rambling railway station.

photography, Bristol

After posting pictures of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last week, it got me looking at my Flickr account and wondering what pictures are the most popular. Flickr will, if you like, give you pages of tables and graphs to tell you how many people have been looking at each of your photos,* so I thought I’d see if there’s any general pattens in what sort of photos people like to view at full size.

The results were rather surprising. The least popular photos: pictures of random countryside, close-ups of tree bark, that sort of thing.** More popular than that: trains, with steam trains and “heritage” trains being more popular than normal ones. But, what photos get the most hits, and fastest after they’ve been posted? Food. Pictures of food being cooked or ready to be served. I don’t know what you think, but I wasn’t expecting that. Post a picture of a nice meal being made, and hits come up right away.

Given that: here’s some pictures of a nice meal being made. Pan-fried parmesan-crusted chicken breast, with salad. Very very easy, and delicious.

* in my case, the graphs (for individual photos) are generally rather flat with the occasional spike

** That’s not quite true: the very least popular are photos of people at parties. That’s unsurprising, really; photos of people at parties, unless they’re exceptional photos, are usually only likely to attract other people at the same party.

A photographic interlude, from a couple of weekends ago.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is near West Bretton, between Barnsley and Wakefield, and is open year-round.

I don’t have, at the moment, that little piece of grit inside me that I think I need to constantly churn out posts here. Everything is calm and happy, and my energy is going into other things and other projects. I am, for once, committing my thoughts to other plans and other projects.

So, instead of something more substantial, here are some cute kitten photos. The kitten belongs to K’s parents.

All of a sudden, this week, summer seems to be on the way. It can’t just be that we’re doing everything an hour later than we were a week ago. There’s something particular about a cool summer morning, or a drowsy summer evening, that this week has in spades.

By comparison: here’s some photos from Wales, not even a fortnight ago now, but another season entirely.

Spotted on a building site in Harrogate, whilst on our abortive condensed milk hunt last weekend:

I’ll remember to tell people that in future.

Keyword noise: advice, kinky, misreading

After Thursday’s post, Kahlan got back in touch, with a tip-off. Apparently there had been a rumoured sighting of a can of own-brand non-evil condensed milk, in a Waitrose. So our Saturday was spent driving 25 miles to Harrogate, the nearest branch,* to find … Nestlé products firmly on the shelves. Oh well.

To make up for the disappointment, we bought a jar of dulce de leche instead, and tried to make cookies, from this recipe. They didn’t quite turn out as I expected, being rather flat and soft, but they still taste good, albeit so sweet that I can barely manage to eat a couple at once. Not surprising, given the huge amount of sugar in each one.

A quick redaction of the recipe, the way we did it: take 230g of butter, chop it up, and beat it until it’s soft. Open your jar of dulce de leche and taste some just to make sure it’s not off or something. Beat 3/4 cup of light brown sugar and 1/2 cup of granulated sugar into the butter, then add 3/4 cup of dulce de leche, assuming you can scrape it out of your measuring cup, and beat that in too, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Lick your cups clean, and your fingers, and anything else the stuff has stuck to. Add 2 eggs, mixing them in one by one, before sifting 2 1/2 cups of flour, half a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of bicarb into the mixture. Rest the dough for a few minutes before putting teaspoon-sized balls of it onto baking trays lined with greaseproof paper, and bake at 160 degrees for 12-14 minutes. Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes before removing them from the baking tray; then when they are properly cold, carefully pair your cookies up into matching-sized pairs before using the last of the dulce de leche - if you have enough left - to sandwich the pairs together. Yum.

* and the only post code district left in the country that’s free of the Mighty Tesco

Keyword noise: food, recipe, cookies, dulce de leche

“Water” was the title of a photography series I did back at school, back when I was 17 and in the darkroom, wearing torn, fixer-stained jeans,* and getting my Art GCSE. I spent the February bank holiday travelling round the Pennines with the parents, taking photos of waterfalls; then augmented it with studio shots of dripping water against a dark background.

So, the other weekend, when the rain had been heavy and the rivers were expected to flood, I went into town with my camera to see just how high it was, and how it poured over the falls below the castle. I was slightly disappointed, in that there was no flooding at all; but we stood by the river as young boys threw stones and things in the water and watched the floating things race down over the falls.

* and with bleached-white patches from A-level chemistry spills, too. The Art GCSE was a sideline whilst doing my A-levels.

Keyword noise: photos, river, water, waterfall, spate

Following up from last week’s ink polaroids: some photos. This batch: gliders, at Kilburn.

Keyword noise: photos, yorkshire, kilburn, gliding, glider, Yorkshire Gliding Club

A while back, I mentioned that the house was going to be hell: we were rebuilding the kitchen. And I was going to post photos.

Well, it still isn’t done, properly, so the photos haven’t appeared yet. But as it’s been so long, and isn’t going to be completely finished for a while yet, here’s two. Our kitchen: before and after.

Apologies for the slight asymmetry in the thumnails there. If you’re wondering about the lighting: those photos were both taken with roughly similar exposure settings on the camera,* which just shows how much better the lighting is now. The cat, as you can see, was keen to make his dominance of the area felt.

* Not quite the same, but comparable. The exact details should be still in the EXIF tags, if you care.