painting

Hooray for castles. Although none of them ever seem to be as scampery as I remember them being when I was a small. I wonder if it's because they've been slightly ensafened or just because I've reshuffled all my various castle-based memories into a false memory of a theoretical giant castle with miles of pokey, dark corridor and stairs to precipitous ledges and absolutely no signs or little ropes anywhere attempting to restrict access to the more interesting sections. Nothing too Gormenghastly but something around the size and interesting complexity of Fountains Abbey but on the coast like Tantallon, Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh or that one somewhere in Fife with the short conical rooves. I quite like Bamburgh along with Lindisfarne and Edinburgh mostly for their improbably location right on the top of lumpyhills where they must have been incredibly inconvenient to build and maintain. At least their original materials of woodstuffs would have been relatively easier to lug up a slope than the huge lumps of rock demanded by later poshbuggerlandowners to rebuild their fortified homes with added look-at-my-big-house shininess. Maybe they even built them with an eye to the future and the picturesque qualities of a building-enhanced skyline as viewed from a nearby beach.

Every time I've been to Bamburgh it's always turned from sunny to slightly hazy but still bright overcastness by the time we've made it down to the beach; today this was handy as it gave a nice even light for attempting to get a nice family portrait without the added problem of tricky exposure of shadows and highlights along with the standard keep-bloody-still-and-stop-wandering-off problems arising when attempting to get four people to stay still and in focus whilst also looking vaguely natural and unposed. It'll all be a lot easier when I someone invents a floating camera drone instead of having to use a tripod. I was hoping to get a nice usable famblypicture for printing and framing in time for mother's birthday on Thursday but forgot to save the pictures in RAW + JPG to enable quickprinting in a suitably-enabled chemist or photoprintyshop in case they have any issues handling .NEFs. I'll have to find something else to delete in order to re-save the picture in-camera as a JPG and I've generally been editing as I go in order to conserve space which might make another sweep futile. Taking the kind of pictures I usually take isn't too memory-sapping these days but a well-lit beachful of people doing interesting people-things gives the shutter no choice but to click. All the obviously-shaky-hands-blurred are wiped where possible but as I can't check at the pixelular level most of them will have to be kept until they can be inspected more closely.