Culture belongs to everyone

This is a big year for culture, not least in my home city of Liverpool, where the events of the European Capital of Culture are in progress, with apologies to the good citizens of Trondheim, which is also sharing that distinction this year. Having said that, this week, Everton, my own club, beat the Norwegian Champions, SK Brann, 6-1 in a UEFA Cup game at Goodison Park, with an aggregate score of 8-1 over two games, so we have more than usual to apologise to my Norwegian friends for.

So, what, I ask myself, is my own contribution to culture, aside from filling my house with books and clogging up Flickr with pictures of cultural tourist sites that look just like everyone else's pictures of cultural tourist sites? Am I piling my own mediocrity on top of everyone else's? Do I pull my weight in the world of culture?

So yesterday, I made a small, yet symbolic contribution. Rather than stand in a long queue for the ticket booth and turnstile at Stonehenge, I stumped up £40 to join English Heritage, for a year, and get in by the member's gate. My folks have been members of the National Trust for many years now. This gives them the ability to turn up at stately homes up and down the country, wave their membership cards to get in, and not have to stump up any additional money. Seeing as cultural tourism is one of their major pastimes, and keeps them occupied and off the streets, it works out very well for them. They have a long list of places they want to go to and see, and the time to get out and do it.

However, for me, this represents a crossing of the Rubicon. Although I spend quite a bit of my limited spare time visiting interesting sites, actually stumping up for membership of these organisations has always struck me as something very worthy that middle-class people of a certain age do as part of a social obligation. So, it's not the principle of the thing that worries me specifically. It's something associated, in my own mind at least, with old farts. So, signing up on the dotted line for English Heritage membership is one of the oldiest, fartiest things I have yet decided to do.

It may be a sign that I have weathered my latest(!) mid-life crisis, acquired sufficient big boy's toys to convince myself that it's not necessarily downhill all the way from here, then allowed myself to become even more of a part of the establishment. It may also be that I was feeling a little snap-happy and wanted to get shots of the stones before the busloads of tourists waiting patiently at the turnstiles could clog my viewfinder. So, was the £40 a spontaneous act of queue-jumping? Maybe.

So I took my various camera bodies and lenses around the Stonehenge site, which, due to erosion, is festooned with lines, tapes and fences to keep the site from being damaged further. There is a full-time security presence, presumably to stop the locals from setting up Wicker men to barbeque the assembled hordes of tourists. Or dancing starkers around the stones, or selling them dodgy kebabs, or whatever. Anyway, this means that you have a limited degree of access. The nearest point the path goes is about 10-12 metres from the stones themselves. The central set of stones themselves are reasonably compact. Maybe not as small as the versions seen in the stage show by Spinal Tap, but getting there. The site sits in the middle of a wider Neolithic landscape, with various burial mounds and tumuli dotting the area, all the way to the horizon. So, picking a long lens out of my bag meant I could go further away and still fill the frame. So much for Stonehenge, aside from the excellent large chocolate cookies on sale there.

I went off to one of my favourite chilling-out zones: Avebury. This is about 17 miles further north, and is somewhat larger and older site. It is also much more complex, with long avenues, banks and ditches, and a large conical man-made mound at Silbury Hill. Bizarrely enough, it also has a small, traditional and slightly quirky English rural village smack bang in the middle of it. Having my new English Heritage membership card saved me £2 at the car park, and I wandered into the village, snapping merrily as I went.

I hesitate somewhat to publicise Avebury, as it is subject to the same erosive pressures on the chalk of the ditch and bank as Stonehenge does. Yet whereas Stonehenge needed a long lens to reach the stones, at Avebury, it is possible to walk around, touch, and see out from within. In one stone it is even possible to sit down, as a cleft has been worn into one side. Some years ago, I found a poem, enclosed in a Zip-Loc bag, sticking from a small crack in this particular stone. What's more, there was no security presence, no turnstiles, but a welcoming museum and tea-shop in a timber-framed barn. Wonder of wonders, there is also a pub, right in the centre of the Henge.

Herein lies a quandary. Avebury is an open secret. It's miles better than Stonehenge to see. It's bigger. better and has draught real ale. Here yokels, bikers, hippies, wiccans co-exist and wonder at the place. In spring and summer, sheep are grazed within the henge. It's open to anyone, and everyone who visits loves it. I dare say that, if the locals decided to set up Wicker men, or dance starkers around the stones on a warm summer's night, no-one would bat an eyelid. As for anyone planning to dance starkers ("I believe the phrase is 'sky-clad' M'lud") around the stones at this time of year, good luck to you, it's been a cold week, and you'll need to sit down at the pub afterwards for a good dollop of mulled wine or hot cocoa. And to be honest, it's the kind of place where the local witches and the Women's Institute will probably collaborate to organise it, if they're not already synonymous.

So, culture for everyone, but maybe not for coach parties. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.

The joy of eBay

Lately, I've been finding that my photography is a decent pressure relief at weekends. I'm spending my spare time travelling out to local sites of interest, equipped with a camera and a few lenses, to experiment with different approaches to landscapes and architecture.

Now we are in the last few weeks of winter before spring pops up. The sun is still low in the afternoon sky, and the sky is crisp, cold and blue. I'm enjoying composing images with light, aperture, shutter and a very sparing use of Photoshop, as shown above. I've also been asked by a friend to photograph his wedding this coming August. So there seems to be a useful outlet to give me something to distract from work.

So, I thought, if I'm going to be doing this kind of thing more often, should I at least do it properly? I have photographed a number of weddings over the last two years, for friends and family, from whom I would not accept any form of payment. But, if people are starting to come to me on the basis of word of mouth, what do I do? I'm not a professional, offering the full service at £2000 a go. I don't have time to run a business. I take photographs because I enjoy it, and because I enjoy giving my friends and family a full set of formal and informal pictures without them having to worry about the costs, which are exorbitant for weddings these days.

But, I thought, I need to be properly equipped for the kind of photographs that they want. That means a better wide-angle lens, more suitable for low light than the zoom lens (not bad) that I bought with my new Nikon D50 2 years ago. So down this road I went, buying an excellent wide angle lens, the results of which are shown above.

A friend and colleague suggested I might invest in a second-hand wet film camera body, just for those special occasions. His own work is far better than mine, so I thought, why not? When I was a kid, I always looked up to the serious photographers and photojournalists who used the Nikon FM2, a rugged, simple, fully manual design with a shutter speed designed for taking action shots. So I went for it. So where did this quest take me: eBay. Now, apparently, the great bazaar and forum of second-hand cameras and kit. Stuff that used to fill the shelves of photographer's shops up and down the land is now traded electronically, while the local shops themselves are in decline.

So, off I went to set up my account, identify what the going rate was for the camera I was after, and start bidding. Easy, peasy, I thought, set up a reasonable bid, and wait to see what happened. Twice, I was within ten-twenty seconds of landing what I was after, only to get two successive emails telling me that I had been outbid, and that the item had now been sold. Eventually, at the fourth opportunity, I made a bid and left it to run it's course while I went to my Wednesday night yoga class. On getting home, I found I was the proud owner of a second-hand FM2 body. So far, so good. But herein lies a quandary.

New Nikon lenses are made for their autofocus cameras. My fixed-focal length lenses are of an older design interchangeable between my modern digital SLR and the FM2. My newer lenses are not. They have no capability to change the aperture setting manually. This is done entirely by the camera. They also have very sensitive manual focus rings, and are designed for almost entirely auto-focus, auto-exposure operation.

So, back to eBay, to get a backward-compatible replacement for my longer focal-length zoom lens. The older lens is now out of production, as newer versions have motors to reduce vibration. The glass is still very good, and the lenses are spectacularly capable. They're in high demand, and the last-second bidding even more savage. But I got one. Now for the fun of selling my
previous kit lens, unless anyone reading here can offer it a good home.