Out And About

I started the day delivering an emergency mouse, and ended up doing some impromptu computer repair. I'd brought my camera and so took an exceptionally indirect route home, heading out along Riverside. I've long been a fan of the spiky postbox:

The chimney of the industrial museum is visible from all sorts of places; Arbury Rd, which I often cycle down, points straight at it. Intentional or not? Here it is from closer up, anyway.

I looped up around Tescos, which had pasted a notice regarding an application to extend the hours in which the can sell alcohol on all sides of the building, though there can't be many people who go along the back of it. More visually intereting than that was their signage, which could have done with a better choice of paint:

Along similar lines the entrance to Stourbridge Common has degenerated to the point of resembling fridge poetry:

I headed across the comon towards the railway. There were several crows pottering around on the path, though as I approached they flew a fairly exact semicircle round to the path behind me. I decided to switch to a zoom lens on the way back and continued to the railway bridge. (I did later snap a passing train but I didn't have time to think about shutter speed and it was just a little too blurred.)

That shot's actually through the fence at the top of the bridge, and took quite a bit of fiddling before it looked vaguely natural. The sky suffered somewhat. Switching to just the fence and the sky produces a nice effect:

I'm not sure what the significance of the graffiti here is. A boat club logo? I like the criss-crossing structure, anyhow.

An essential camera accessory:

A bit after that I switched to a zoom lens (borrowed from Dan) and turned round. I spent a while trying to shoot small birds (swallows?) swooping over the river, without much luck. The crows proved better subjects though - the shots of them on the path aren't very interesting but I got a few snaps of one in flight:

ISO 1600 may have been excessive, but given both the camera and the subject were moving pretty fast I didn't feel like risking anything slower.

I also spotted this fellow:

(The URL says “bee” but we think it's probably a hoverfly in fact.)


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