Category: Photography

Part of our recent wet-and-dry whirlwind tour of some interesting places in England took in the city of Lincoln, its cathedral, castle and the Poppies Wave installation, which has also been touring the country since its inauguration at the Tower of London in 2014 as Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.

It was a poignantly wet and grey day to photograph this memorial to the fallen of World War I, 100 years since the start of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916. Find out more about the installation here and see additional photos from my collection here.

A Virgin hot-air balloon was looming low over Cottenham, just North of Cambridge City on the evening of 22nd June. Drinkers enjoying the sun and the ale outside The Chequers pub were stunned to see the enormous inflatable bobbing low over houses opposite. The pilot seemed desperately trying to gain height and had the burner on full power.

The balloon eventually lifted up and floated a few metres above the sweetshop and Chinese takeaway opposite heading for the Community Centre and Co-op store on the dangerous dog leg in Cottenham’s long High Street. Fortunately, it was at an altitude of about 40 metres at this point, although it did not stay high for long.

With nowhere safe to land at this point in the village witnesses assumed that the pilot was desperately trying to navigate to a field or open country away from the houses.

“It literally skimmed a tree in my back garden! It was frighteningly low,” said Cottenham resident Sian Williams. “I could feel the heat from the flames in my bedroom. Is this allowed?” she asks.

“It was extremely low when it came over Rooks Street, another Cottenham resident and local businessman Chris Fryer said. “It cleared the houses but landed very shortly after. I’m no expert but it didn’t look deliberate.

The law is very strict on ballooning. Except with the written permission of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) an aircraft shall not be flown closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel vehicle or structure. “Virgin seems to have form in breaching the Air Navigation Order like this,” says Russ Swan who filmed a similar incident in 2010 that elicited an apology from Virgin on local BBC TV.

Experienced glider pilot David Allan told me that, “The only way they can get around this is in the case of an emergency landing (gliders and balloons have an exemption for field landings). If there was a problem the pilot should have set the ballon down before drifitng over a town – when there is nowhere to go.”

High Street balloon photo David Bradley. Balloon on Tree photo by Sian Williams

A few of my photos from Cambridge’s Strawberry Fair 2016 get the monochrome treatment

More photos and the colour snaps of strawbs out and about at the Fair in my Flickr Gallery.

Memories of a free festival, Strawberry Fair, Cambridge Saturday, 4th June 2016. I have lots more photos in the sciencebase Flickr gallery but here’s a sample montaged against an instrumental of mine called El Canalla.

“The Sun Machine is Coming Down, and We’re Gonna Have a Party” — David Bowie, Memory of a Free Festival

Phil Bradley [no relation] alerted me to a site called LibreStock which does a meta search of image sites and only returns those images that have a Creative Commons “zero” licence. A zero licence, as Phil points out with a quote from LibreStock site itself means “you can use these pictures freely for any legal purpose. This means that they are free to use, even commercially, you can modify, copy and distribute, and you don’t need to attribute.”

That’s useful to know. I often need to grab a quick image to illustrate a throwaway blog post, Facebook update or tweet, but don’t always have a camera to hand nor the object I’d photograph with which to illustrate the update.

I gave it a quick try first search for apples and getting loads of computer and phone shots. A search for bananas was more on point

Another search for “Ford Mustang” brought up just 5 shots, a search for “guitars” brought up some nice photos although some of them were of saxophones. Ten snaps for a search on robots one of which was of the Mars Rover and another of R2D2. A search for “garbage” and then “rubbish” brought up some odd results, a perfectly good skateboard and some leaves for instance, although other pictures included a pile of broken phones, a plastic bag caught on a tree and some wheely bins.

It looks like a useful and potentially inspiring source and the problematic results it returns may be an artefact of incorrect tagging of the photos by the original sites.