Red berries, blue sky

 

Like it says on the tin, red berries against a blue sky - the tree they're on has lost most of its leaves and the sun is shining on the berries and the tree's silver bark.  The tree caught my eye as I was walking home from a doctor's appointment today.

#100Photos #35

River view

 

The Peterborough office of the organisation I work for has done rather a peregrination around the city over the years.  Mind you, that's true of some of their other offices as well...  Many public bodies do that as Government priorities and policies change and Departments (and Arms-Length Bodies) are repurposed and reorganised accordingly.  

At the start of this year, we relocated to a newly-built Government Hub office on the far side of the river, on some land that, truthfully, had desperately needed regeneration.  It's a really nice office, and for me one of the great things about it is its proximity to the river, meaning that on office days I can still walk along by the river.  

I took this photo on the way to the office one morning not long ago when it warmer and drier than it has been over the last few days (I'm writing this in the aftermath of Storm Babet).  River views are always (well, sometimes) a Good Thing, and I loved the way the new development is sitting in the landscape.

#100Photos #34

Broken symmetry

Before Covid 19 and a change in role within the organisation I work for, I used to travel across the Fens by rail to Cambridge quite often; I miss that journey!  I do like the open landscapes and the big skies of that part of the country.  I was actually born in a Fenland town in Lincolnshire (long story, I wasn’t supposed to be…), so I guess there’s an inbuilt sense of home for me in the Fens.

My favourite part of the journey to Cambridge is the couple of minutes that it takes to cross the Ouse Washes, especially on the outbound journey as you look northwards into Norfolk.  The hydrology of the Washes is interesting; in the summer water is pumped off them and cattle graze there, unlike the surrounding areas where they’re pumping water onto the land for irrigation, and in winter water is pumped onto them while they’re pumping water away from the farmland.  The cattle are replaced by wintering birds – the Washes are famous for the thousands of Whooper swans that arrive from Iceland to overwinter, and in recent years there have even been cranes on the surrounding land!  I was absolutely thrilled when I saw them for the first time (and still really pleased every time since)!  It’s always fun to see the astonishment of fellow passengers who don’t know the area when they see the miles and miles of water either side of the train.

One of the things I love about the Ouse Washes is that in winter, particularly, the light changes every time you see them.  On a still day, the surface is a mirror, and on a windy day you could be looking at a seascape.  When I took this photo, you can almost see the cloudscape reflected; it’s a broken symmetry.  I’ve learned enough physics for that to amuse me even if the photo does break the rules of composition!

Speaking of the photo, one thing I’ve learned through this project is that my palette tends to silvers, blues and golds, largely because those are our local colours.  This was a phone photo, by the way; my phone (currently a Samsung A23) tends to be my main camera simply because it’s always with me. At photo 33 I’m a third of the way through the 100 photos, looking at what works from the ones I’ve taken previously and looking to improve my photography in the time the project takes.

#100Photos #33

A modern icon

 

There are not many modern buildings in the UK that are instantly recognisable.  It's not that we're short of great architecture but apart from, say, the London O2 and Belfast's Titanic Museum, there just aren't many modern icons.  The Selfridges building, though, clad in metal discs, is iconic in a way that very few other buildings could hope to be. It is the highlight of the remodelled Birmingham Bullring.

This day, under a glowering sky, was the first time I had ever seen it close-up.  It has the wow factor in spades.

#100Photos #32 

The lamp

A few months ago, I found myself staying in Bristol overnight after a rare face-to-face meeting. 

From what I've seen of Bristol in the two or three short visits I've had there, it's an intriguing city.  I had (and took) the opportunity to look around the Cathedral and my colleagues and I had the bonus of a working visit to a city farm the next morning before we returned to our scattered homes.

For this visit, I stayed in a hotel in the city centre. The reception area was very modern, with an ‘Instagram wall’ that I couldn't resist standing in front of and asking one of my colleagues to take a photo of me.  I don't normally do that!

The room I was in was very different from the Reception area and I loved it from the moment I walked in, but it took me a few seconds to realise that it was really steampunk. The safe and the coffee fixings were in an alcove with wire grill doors. And take this wall lamp - it had a really ancient-looking style of bulb which was exposed by the wire-frame ‘shade’ and an industrial cable duct from its power source. It was artfully bright enough to light the room but not bright enough to hurt your eyes. I'd never seen anything like it!  The room had a really comfy bed as well, which is always a bonus.

#100Photos #31

Marston Marble

 

This photogenic, fossil-rich, limestone hails from Somerset in England's West Country. It's not often that a polished slab of stone photographs decently with just a smartphone, but I was really pleased with this photo.  The main issues I find with this sort of shot are (i) holding the phone rock steady (genuinely no pun intended), and (ii) the fact that cameras tend to focus straight through polished surfaces onto something – often the photographer! – being reflected.  This slab is inside a glass case, which tends to add an additional complication in terms of reflections, but I was lucky here and this photo didn’t need to have a filter used or to have any adjustments made.

Incidentally, this variety of stone (which dates back to the Lower Jurassic) is not actually a 'true' marble in the sense that geologists use the term - limestone metamorphosed by heat and pressure - but stonemasons use the term to describe any limestone that takes a good polish. This one certainly does that! Stonemasons were using some 'geological' terms long before geologists were. 

This beautiful specimen is in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, UK - do go and see it for yourself!

 

#100Photos #30

Norwich - leading lights

Everybody has favourite places. For me, there’s Edinburgh; partly because of its history and partly – mainly - because of the story told by the exposed geology of Holyrood Park, Castle Rock and Calton Hill.  If a certain brewery did geology trails, Edinburgh would be the showcase one.  At the other end of the size scale I have lovely memories of a village called Uley in Gloucestershire, where my great aunt lived and where I rode a horse for the very first time.

Then there's the county of Norfolk on England's East Coast.  My grandmother came from Castle Acre; it's a beautiful village with a ruined castle and the remains of a Cistercian Priory.  My father was twice stationed in Norfolk with the RAF, and I went to boarding school near Norwich when he was posted from Norfolk to Germany.  Add in visits since then to the Broads and to North West Norfolk and the North Norfolk coast and you've got a bucket full of memories.  I've been back to Norwich a number of times with my partner and it's very definitely my favourite English city.

We were walking through the Royal Arcade one day and I took a truly mundane photo as we did. I've cropped that photo since then and it's almost what I would take now if I were trying to take a photo of the lights. I could have done with standing slightly further to my right, which is what I hope I would do now, but I do quite like this as it stands.

#100Photos #29

The coming storm

One Saturday morning, I was on my way from Exeter to spend some quality time with the red cliffs just along the coast at Dawlish when the train went past the Warren, and I took this atmospheric photo through the train window. Dawlish Warren is really important for its coastal geomorphology, so it has a good Earth science interest in its own right.

Looks idyllic, doesn't it?  It’s what the photo doesn’t show that comes to mind when I look at it.  Out of the window on the other side of the carriage, the sky was black.  Not just grey, but black-with-menaces.  The sort of black that a daytime sky has no business being. 

As we rounded toward the small town and seafront station of Dawlish (which is now famous for the railway line being washed away there in a later, rather more massive storm and equally famous for the Herculean work of the 'Orange Army' who repaired it), the heavens opened.  As those of us who were getting off the train there did just that, and those who weren’t getting off looked smug, we were lashed by horizontal rain, salt spray and rather stiff winds.  The passengers who had a particular destination in Dawlish made a run for it, but I just took shelter in the station, wondering whether my trip was in vain.  

Luckily, the storm was reasonably short-lived although I did watch several more squalls going past out to sea during the morning. I did get my quality time with the cliffs (Permian sandstone, as you ask) - and a long journey back to the Flatlands of the East, tired but happy, afterwards. That said, it will be a long time before I forget that storm!

#100Photos #28

St. John's, Smith Square

If there's a type of stone that characterises London, especially the Government estate and major historic buildings including Buckingham Palace and St Paul's, then that stone is Portland Stone. It's a limestone, dating back to the Jurassic Period; some facies (varieties) are very fossil-rich, with Grove Whitbed being rich in oysters, and Roach Stone being famous for it's 'Osses' heads' (Trigoniid bivalves) and Portland screws, a variety of gastropod mollusc.  Other facies are freestones, very suited to carving by stonemasons.

There's a reason for the popularity of  Portland Stone in London, and for its use to rebuild St Paul's after the Great Fire of London in particular - Sir Christopher Wren owned shares in a certain quarry on the Isle of Portland!  His use of the stone set a trend, and now, in addition to the buildings I've already cited, think in terms of Regent Street, the Old Bailey, the Bank of England...  One of my favourite buildings is St John's in Smith Square, Westminster. It's a deconsecrated church now in use as a classical music venue.  One really hot day, I happened to walk towards it, and there was something about the light, the gleaming stone and the green of the trees that was beautiful and almost exotic.  Being me, I raised my camera almost in supplication; this photo was the result.

#100Photos #27

Conditional discharge

 

These spent batteries were at the top of a full, tall but narrow cylindrical recycling bin.  If that's one snapshot in one shop then hopefully there are many thousands more being recycled each week across the country.

But:  How many more are *not* being recycled?  And how the heck many are we using??  Why???

#100Photos #26

Blue up

Just an opportunistic snapshot from a lunchtime -  I was heading back to the office and looking for something other than swans to photograph after stretching my legs with a short riverside walk, and I looked up to see these colours and shapes.  It just had to be done.

#100Photos #25

Marmalades and nectar

I'm very much a country mouse.  We live at the edge of a city, so we're close to amenities, but I spend hours walking through local countryside. Most weeks, I see far more sheep and cattle than I do people -  and I'm more than happy for it to stay that way.  I see deer, foxes, the occasional weasel, and rascally rabbits,  I hear skylarks singing, there are red kites circling overhead, kestrels hovering, flocks of titmice and charms of goldfinches, and the summer is full of swallows.  There are wild hops growing near the village pub, and the hedgerows are full of blackberries at this time of year. 

We get an amazing variety of invertebrates - I'm not expert enough to be able to differentiate all the hoverflies, for instance, but some are easy to identify; the hornet mimics are amazing, and have abdomens with stunningly pure yellow stripes.  I love the marmalade ones - when I'm in the garden, the air is often full of them. Hoverflies don't have stings, by the way, so it's safe to get up close even to the hornet mimics; they have evolved wasp-like colours as a form of protection.  I was lucky enough to get this photo of four of them one day this summer; I love the vibrancy of the colours!

#100Photos #24

A sideways look at life

To quote a friend on a message board I used to frequent, "Sometimes you just gotta."  I stood my phone on the arm of this bench and took the photo.  I was originally just interested in the bench (yes, I know, but photographers are like that) and the sideways look at life was purely serendipitous.

#100Photos #23

Vanishing from St Pancras Station

 

Please let me stress that it wasn't me vanishing from St. Pancras!!

When you start doing art at secondary school, whether that be a Grammar School or a Comprehensive or one of the modern Academies, they make sure that you know that the pointy bit of the pencil goes on the paper, and that the chewy bit doesn't unless you need it to. When you've mastered that bit, they start teaching you about things like composition and perspective and vanishing points and the rule of thirds (which is not about school dinners).

As my Other Half and I were looking along the platform, that came back to me across the decades, and I was amused that the vanishing point - where all the lines meet in the distance - was not in the centre of our view which is where you start practicing from when you're 11, and that from where we were standing, it was directly in line with the change from glass to opaque roofing and along the infrastructure directly underneath that.  Mind you, it does follow the rule of thirds quite nicely!

#100Photos #22

The view from the train

I hadn't been through Manningtree, in Essex, for donkeys' years until the day I took this photo; seeing the Stour Estuary took me right back to my schooldays.  I'm the first to say that this is not a great photograph, but:

Picture this.  Me at twelve years old. Abba had not yet stormed the Eurovision Song Contest, and we'd not even joined the Common Market when I first set foot on Manningtree station, and it was just a few short years later when I last did and I had entirely forgotten or had never previously realised just how tiny it is!  Mind you, I hadn't seen that many stations to compare it to... I was travelling on my own to and from boarding school - my parents sent me an RAF travel warrant (well, my father did - he was the one in the RAF) and a note that said they'd meet me on the platform at Venlo, on the German border in the Netherlands.  That set the pattern for the next few years; a local train into Norwich then an onward train to Harwich,  

I had to change at Manningtree a couple of times and I knew when I got there that I was that much closer to boarding the Avalon (lovely old ship!) or the Queen Juliana (hmmm...) for the overnight voyage to the Hook of Holland and the train to Venlo on the German border across the much larger estuaries in the Netherlands.  My suitcase was bigger than I was, and this was back in the day when suitcases didn't have wheels, but you know what?  I didn't actually care, because I was going home!  OK, there was always a return journey, but for some reason I don't remember changing at Manningtree on the way back;  I might not have done, I may have gone up to Norwich before changing.  Who knows?  But I certainly looked out for this spot even then.  

In my later schooldays, the RAF did what they were good at and got us to and fro by air from Luton to Wildenrath, firstly by charter flights and then by a VC10 from Air Support Command.  My memories of those journeys involve tube travel across London and Bloodhound missiles on the perimeter at Wildenrath.  The last time I made the outbound trip, I stayed overnight at RAF Hendon, now the site of the RAF Museum.

This photo is no great work of art, but it''s pure nostalgia for me.  There's also something in my soul that this sort of landscape appeals to, in the same way that I love charcoal or pencil sketches and lovely old black-and-white photographs.  I love estuaries; I love saltmarsh, I love glasswort and sea purslane, I love the creeks, I love the bleakness on a winter's day.  I also love rich, deep colours but they're for another day and another photograph.  

I'll say one thing, though; I didn't go through Manningtree again until the late 2010s, when I took this photo, and it was only then that I realised how small the station actually is.

#100Photos #21

Honeysuckle

I was in Bristol a few weeks ago for a face-to-face meeting of one of work's Networks. It actually turned out to be cheaper to travel via London than via Birmingham, thank goodness - they've done a great job with the concourses in 'Brum', and you can get a fairly decent coffee, but the platforms still have roofs of Stygian darkness, and they sometimes change trains' platforms at rather too short notice for my liking and mobility.  Going via London Paddington gives an opportunity to spend some quality time with the fossils in the limestone platforms, and that is always a bonus.

Getting back to Bristol, though, we had a good session at the opening meeting, and most of the group were taken on a foraging trip to learn more about it. That was up a rather steep hill, but our office happens to be just near the Cathedral, and if there's one thing I'm a sucker for, it's a good cathedral.  The history, the atmosphere, and for me as a geologist the very stone of the building, and the various decorative stones, are always interesting whether I'm wearing a professional hat or a personal one.

(The evening meal, by the way, when we all met up again, was Japanese - my partner and I love Studio Ghibli films, so I just had to sample a bowl of ramen for the first time. It's the law.)

Coming to this photo (in a rather roundabout manner, I'm afraid), the following morning entailed a visit to a City Farm, where we were given a tour and an explanation of the Farm's work with the local community, and the role of their volunteers.  The able-bodied among my colleagues did an hour's good honest hard work to say thank you for the tour; I took quite a few photos for work, and took a few snaps like this honeysuckle for what I laughingly call my own 'archives'.  I do like flowers that have a wonderful scent, and this honeysuckle had that in spades.  It photographed pretty nicely as well for a passing shot with a mobile phone!

#100Photos #20

Portholme - a slightly misty meadow

 

I remember the morning I took this one.  I was on a train on the East Coast Mainline, on my way to the QEII Centre in London for the annual UK conference hosted by ESRI, the Geographic Information Systems software giant. It was a red letter day in my calendar for a number of reasons - mainly because ESRI use the event to showcase advances in their software, using it to demonstrate all manner of fascinating things.  There was a fair bit of cartography in my day job back then, and this was food for all sorts of techy thought.

They also have great speakers - two that come to mind are Dr Hannah Fry, who was demonstrating the use of GIS to predict the progress of a pandemic (this was in 2018, before Covid-19 but a very clear warning of how such a pandemic would spread), and geographer, writer, explorer and TV personality Nick Crane making the plenary speech on the power of geography.   I also vividly remember a speaker from Disney showing us how the company use used their City Engine software to design a city for Zootopia.  They also have great food every year, some fascinating exhibitors, and some pretty good swag.  

Coming back to this photo, delegates were taking photos of their journeys down and posting them online; the train went past one of my favourite meadows, Portholme SSSI, Huntingdon, as the light was perfect and the Great Ouse was mirror-like.  This photo was the result of luck rather than planning!

#100Photos #19

Swans and clouds, reflected

We've moved offices a couple of times over the many years I've been with my employer; our last office was just 100 metres or so from the river*.   I spent many a lunchtime walking along the riverbank, either alone or with one or more friends, getting some fresh air and watching birds or butterflies (or both) or looking to see what was in bud or in flower.  One day the light and reflections were just perfect for this shot. We were some way away away from the spot where the swans usually congregate in the hope of free food - where they mass, you'd never see enough actual water to see reflections like these!

#100Photos #18

*Our current office isn't that much further from it, but we're closer to the other bank.

Snap, crackle and Rock

A macro photo of Ketton Stone, demonstrating the ooliths it is composed of

A lot of photos don’t really come out like you hope they will.  They are fine, yes, but nothing to write home about – bog-standard landscape shots or whatever...  On the other hand, one occasionally does come out like you were really hoping it would, a landscape that takes your breath away or a detail of something you’ve seen.  This was one such photo, and yes, it does look like a certain well-known breakfast cereal!  I don’t think milk would soften it much, though.

This particular photo is a macro shot of a piece of oolitic Lincolnshire Limestone, so we are looking at a fairly small area of it.  The ooliths, which are each smaller than 1mm in diameter, are formed of layers of limestone – calcium carbonate – which have formed around a tiny piece of sand or shell.  I was lucky in that when I took the photo, the sun was shining – the lighting makes all the difference in photography!  I didn’t take it out on site – I laid the rock horizontally on a picnic table in our back garden when the sun was just at the right angle.  The height of the table also made it comfortable to take the photo.

To set the photo in its context: The Lincolnshire Limestone (but the piece in the photograph came from Ketton Quarry, in Rutland) was formed roughly 155 million years ago, in the Jurassic Period.  The area that is now south-east England (and a lot wider area, actually) was then a warm, sub-tropical sea.  It would have been rather like the seas around the Bahamas are now!  The seabed was subject to some quite strong currents, so the ooliths were being rolled around and coated in calcium carbonate.  Rutland may be England’s smallest county but, with an impressive record of changing climatic and depositional environments, it is certainly not the least interesting from a geological point of view.

100Photos #17

When cream oozes honey

I noticed a huge fungus at the base of an oak tree as I was walking to the shop yesterday morning (it's just gone midnight as I'm typing this). Being me, I walked over to have a closer look at it, and I took some photos. I was taken with the way the surface of the fungus had shedloads of droplets of liquid oozing out onto it. There was even a fly trapped 'Jurassic Park'-style in one droplet at the top of this photo! I have to confess that I didn't see it until I looked at the photo on my laptop. I looked this one up on a Famous Search Engine, and it's an Oak bracket fungus - sometimes known as butt-rot fungus(!).

Yes, I got a couple of funny looks from passers-by while I was taking the pics, but I'm used to that! I'm a geologist by training and I take photos of rocks and stone-built walls, often macro shots that need me to have the camera just a few cm away from the subject.

I'm trying to improve my photography at the moment so I've been blogging some of my 'archive' photos here along with new ones,and I've realised when selecting them that actually, my palette does tend to lean towards creams, golds, and blues when I'm shooting in colour. Much of my photography - like this photo - is opportunistic but I'm starting to use a tripod more and I'm experimenting with a lightbox.

I was also thinking, as I took this photo, just how handy it is to have a digital camera that's light enough to always carry, be it in a phone or a dedicated camera. That was rapidly followed by the thought that it's really good not to have to send a roll of film off for developing at quite some cost before you know what you're really got photo-wise and that you can discard as many photos as you want to with no cost implications. I graduated from a cheap and nasty APS camera that used film rolls of 25 exposures to a 7MP digital camera (Fujifilm FinePix S5700), and then to smartphone cameras, which do me proud! This one was taken with a Samsung A23. I do still use the FinePix sometimes.

#100Photos #16

 

A little bit of Cornwall, in my soul

 

When you see granite in an urban setting, it's usually a polished slab on the wall of a bank (or former bank which is now occupied by purveyors of mediocre coffee) or rough-dressed as setts.  Sometimes it is scuffed and scratched so still very interesting to look at but not good for photography unless the scuffs and scratches are the subject of the photo.

This particular piece, though, is rough-dressed and at a perfect height for photography.  It's in the wall of an extant bank in Peterborough city centre, UK.  It comes from Cornwall (SW England), and it tells a story:  It is a minute part of the Cornubian batholith which shapes the modern landscape; the said batholith was emplaced some 280 million years ago in the early Permian Period as magma solidified underground after the Variscan mountain-building episode further to the south.  Cornwall is a lovely county, famed for its scenery, it's pasties (a historic local food), and its geology.  I have been lucky enough to visit a number of geological sites in Cornwall  - as well as the Eden Project and the Lost Gardens of Heligan - and a number of places with interesting and very different geology in Devon, the next county to the east. 

The snowy-white mineral making up the bulk of this sample in this photo is plagioclase feldspar, the grey is quartz, and the black and shiny ones are varieties of mica (biotite and muscovite respectively).

#100Photos #15

A shine of paperbarks

 

This isn't what I'd call an 'arty' photo:  A friend and I went to look at the 2012 Olympic Site in Stratford, London to assess the Earth science interest of the site, but there are many things that catch your eye as you walk around.  I loved these paperbark trees, a.k.a. Tibetan cherries - the bark was so well oiled (yes, that's apparently a thing) and the grove really well planned. I'll bet it looks amazing when those lights are on!  I also reckon that the collective noun for this species should be a 'shine.'

(We had a look at the fossils in the Jura Yellow - a very fossiliferous Jurassic marine limestone, full of cephalopod and sponge fossils - floor at the Westfield Centre as well, but that's another story, for another time.)

#100Photos #14

Stained light

There's no deep backstory to this photo; my partner and I were out in Sheffield for the day, learning that it's a lovely place with some great sculpture in the streets, sweet winter gardens (which were hosting Luke Jerram's amazing giant E. coli artwork at the time), and stars dedicated to famous sons and daughters of the city - including Olympian Jessica Ennis (now Jessica Ennis-Hill), Paralympian Grace Clough, and comedian, actor and traveller Michael Palin.  I'd been to Sheffield before before, but I'd only been through the city centre on the way to or from a conference or meeting venue rather than having the time to explore; it was my partner's first visit.

It also boasts two no fewer than two cathedrals.  We had a good look around both of them, and I was captivated by the light shining through one of the stained glass windows in the Anglican one, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, colouring part of this column beautifully.

#100Photos #13

Paddington assumes a mantle

 

I'd be quite hard-pressed to say why, but I quite like London Paddington station.  It's not because of convenience; I always get there on the Circle Line and it's a fair hike from there to the main concourse.  It's not because of the association with a certain Bear (although that certainly doesn't make me dislike it!).  Yes, I like it partly because of the amazingly fossiliferous limestone it's paved with, and partly because it feels airy and has amazing architecture, but that's not 'it'.  The station just has something about it.

I went through there on Saturday on my way to visit Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, which was a Bucket List (caps intended) trip for me.  At least one photo from the museum will no doubt appear on here at some point, but here's a photo I took of Paddington on the way through.  Standing on the dividing line between two arches, it feels like the station is mantling you with its wings.

#100Photos #12 

Monochrome

There is no backstory to this photo, and no reminiscence attached to it.  It's just our kitchen.  I was looking at the in-camera filters last week, and I took this photo in black and white.  It's definitely not perfect in terms of composition, but I loved the light and the work surface and how shooting in monochrome gives the room a completely different feel, so instead of putting it in Room 101, I'm sharing it.

#100Photos #11
 

Under the skin of a predator

If you mis-spent your youth hanging around natural history museums, you've seen a good number of skulls. You've almost certainly seen the cast of a T. rex skull, and probably the skull of an Allosaurus as well; you may have seen the skull of my favourite dino, Stegosaurus, or the pointy Triceratops.  You'll know that Diplodocus had peggy teeth, and that hippos have scary ones. Sabretooth cats were, well, scarytooth cats, and Megalodon teeth are all the more impressive when the teeth of a great white shark are displayed next to them.

This, though, is the only skull so far that has made my partner exclaim “What the hell is that??” when he’s seen the photo on my monitor.  Just look at that jaw mechanism, the pointy head, the spiky bones at the base of the skull.  Do first impressions tell the whole story, though?  What is this, and where does it, or did it, fit into its ecosystem?

Gentlebeings, this is the skull of an active predator.  May I introduce you to Gadus morhua, more commonly known as… Cod.  Yes, cod, as in fish and chips.  Humble to us, but the bane of prey species including other bony fish, crabs, lobsters, squid, mussels and other molluscs, and worms.

I was really pleased with this photo, which I took in Leicester's New Walk Museum; pics taken through glass aren't always the best.  This one definitely deserves a place on this blog.

#100Photos #10  .

Did theropods dream of armoured sheep?

Sophie the Stegosaurus in all her skeletal glory

I had a 'free' afternoon, having a morning in the office that day and an evening meeting in London.  I cleared it with my Team Leader that I'd take the afternoon out  and I made my way to the Natural History Museum to look at the fossil marine reptiles.  After I'd spent quite some profitable time perusing those, I made sure I had a good look at Sophie, the most complete Stegosaurus ever found and the only one on display in Europe. Steggies are my favourite dinosaurs (yes, I'm a grown-up with a favourite dinosaur. I'd bet you a tube of fruit pastilles that I'm not the only one!) so visiting her was a must.

After you have been awed by her size and her plates, the one thing you do notice is that she has a tiny 30cm-ish (about 1 foot in British terms), narrow, head in relation to her size. The species name, S. stenops, actually highlights this.  On a balcony overlooking the skeleton, the NHM have a clear Perspex model of a Stegosaurus' skull, and this has a coloured model of the brain inside it.  The brain is about the size of a plum.

I remember reading, far longer ago than I would like to admit, that steggies had two brains - one tiny one in their heads and another one near their pelvises.  Current thought is that the 'second brain' was more probably a glycogen body, so their tiny brains, at well under 100g each, were all they had by way of grey (and while) matter. 

Yes, they were predated by theropods (hunter-killer dinos), and yes, they defended themselves with their tail spikes (known as Thagomisers, but that's another story).  There is fossil evidence of an injury to an Allosaurus caused by a steggie using its tail spikes in self-defence, but their anatomy does also suggest that they were no Einsteins.  They were dim, they probably roamed in herds and they grazed.  A bit like armoured sheep in a way.  Now, I like sheep and I see many more sheep and cattle than I do people most weeks, but it does have to be said that they're not the brightest animals on the planet.  Sheep brains weigh in at about a comparatively large 140g, by the way.

Again, yes, Sophie is an amazing specimen; when I look at this photo, I still feel the awe I felt when I was standing in front of her.  Allosaurus were probably not so impressed, but I bet that they dreamed of hunting Sophie and her kin.

Yes, if you followed my earlier blog on this site, you will have read about this photo before.  Sorry (not sorry) 😊 - it bears another look.

#100Photos #9

Transported - to the past

 

It's funny how something can instantly take you back through the years!  I remember once walking through town, here on the edge of the Fens in the UK, on a really hot day.  The smell of hot dust and the harsh light on the limestone of a historic local hotel transported me through space and time to Malta, where we lived for a few years when I was a child.

This morning, I was looking at bowls for ramen (our cereal bowls are on the petite side and just aren't up to the job).  Looking at all the crockery instantly took me back to when I was a teenager, leaving home and buying what I needed for life in my first flat.  It was an amazingly strong feeling and unleashed a flood of nostalgia.  We're still using the cutlery set one of my friends gave me then but I only bought one or two of everything else to start with. We do seem to have bought multiples of things since then!

I've just worked out how many years that cutlery has been in use for.  Don't ask.

#100Photos #8

Mud, mud, pristine white mud...

Pristine, beautiful, white mud

There’s mud, there’s Mud, and then there’s Mud.  There’s your normal mud, like you find in fields; I remember trying to walk my way across a wickedly muddy field with a group of my friends one December day.  The sky was a glorious pale blue, the shadows were seasonally long, but the ground...  Oh dear, the ground.  We were sure there was a path there somewhere - or so the map was telling us!  It wasn't dignified.  The mud didn’t ruin the walk, but the memory of it does elicit a wry smile.  It was just mud.  The greater memories of that day are the amazing National Trust Property we were going to see, the red kites soaring overhead where we were parked, and the superb lunch in a country pub afterwards.  This was the day I developed a taste for peppercorn sauce.

Then there's Mud:  Like the last day of an Open University summer school (SXR260, anyone?) that had otherwise enjoyed dry weather.  During the week, we had looked at geology everywhere from Staithes on England’s east coast to Shap Quarry in Cumbria.  The last morning was a practical assessment in a quarry in County Durham - and even Noah would have been impressed by the rain that fell that day!  I was lucky enough to have borrowed a weatherwriter to keep my notebook dry, and I saw a lot of clear plastic bags being put to good use protecting other notebooks and hands.  Our boots got absolutely covered in beige mud created by pulverised magnesian limestone – it looked as though someone had melted a Farley’s rusk factory.  When we got back to Durham there was much changing of footwear before the afternoon’s further assessment and homeward travel!

Then, thirdly, there’s Mud.  I was in a chalk quarry some distance south of where we live.  You don’t need me to tell you that (most) chalk is white – think in terms of the White Cliffs of Dover or the Seven Sisters cliffs on the East Sussex coast.  Chalk is soft, it pulverises very easily, and quarry machinery is heavy.  It had been raining earlier so the mud was shiny and you just know what the quarry floor is going to be like, even before you get there. 'Claggy' would be an understatement.  'Glutinous'?  'Porridge-like'?  Any and all of these, quite possibly combined.

When chalk quarries are not your usual habitat (our local quarries, which I am much more used to, are honey-coloured Jurassic limestones or grey clay) the quarry floor is startlingly snowy-white and strangely beautiful, holding sharp impressions of quarry activity or shoes.  Walking across it, it feels like you’re in the Antarctic, especially on a January day when the wind feels like it has come straight off the South Pole like it did this day. It did not help that there was one thing I didn't know at the outset:  I was coming down with an awful cold at the time.  No wonder it felt even colder than it actually was!  In spite of that, it's the colour I'll never forget from that day.

The chalk there is food quality, by the way, and yes, you did read that correctly.  Have you ever had bread or cereal with added calcium?  This is where the calcium comes from.  They grind the chalk to a fine powder, roast it, and sell it to the bakers/manufacturers.  Genuinely.  Have you taken any white pills today? The active ingredients are mixed with chalk. Salt is not the only mineral to come from the ground!

I also know a fellow geologist who tells me that he keeps a lump of chalk on his bedside locker for when he gets indigestion.  I know him well enough to believe him.

100 Photos, #7

A foxglove in sunlight

 

Pre-Covid, our office used to be on the opposite side of the Nene from our current location.  I occasionally used to take the opportunity of a lunchtime walk along the riverbank and even more occasionally, if I had a longer break, I'd walk as far as the Boardwalks, the Local Nature Reserve.

Every now and again, I walked along the opposite side of the river, where there's a small railway museum (Railworld) next to the Nene Valley Railway. The sound and smell of the NVR's steam engines were just so evocative! When the 'Santa Specials' were running, we'd here the engines' whistles as a backdrop to our working day.  Railworld has a small nature reserve attached, and I just happened to be there one gloriously sunny day.  I couldn't resist trying to capture a view of this foxglove from a different angle.

#100Photos #6

Edible geology from Herts (12)

Hertfordshire Puddingstone - pebbles of flint in a fine matrix.

When I was knee-high to a tabby cat, my parents had the most wonderful atlas.  It was huge!  It was a good 50 cm high by 30 cm or more across and quite thick. That's not just me looking back at it through the eyes of a child, although I  remember having looked at it when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  I'd never seen anything like it!  I know it was that size because we lugged it around various RAF stations until (a) it was falling to bits and (b) it was given to me when I left home.  I eventually binned it when it had totally disintegrated. 

I really do wish that I'd kept some of the pages but the actual atlas was fairly much obsolete by then, and that was before - for example - the break up of the USSR!  That's another thing - when we were growing up, countries felt eternal and absolute.  Who knew just how ephemeral they are and how quickly local and world events can split them apart?

After the atlas proper, though, there were other equally interesting pages.   I remember a page about precious stones, with (of course!) pictures of a diamond, a ruby, an emerald and a sapphire and another page about semi-precious stones.  I also remember seeing another page with a sentence or two about Hertfordshire puddingstone and a good photo to illustrate it (If you are interested, by the way, the 'plums' in the pudding are flint and the 'pudding' they are in is a finer matrix of sand and silica cement).  

To me it's also a trip down memory lane.  I don't know why, but the name is one of those things that stuck with me from my childhood.  Perhaps it just sounded incongruous?  Anyway, it would make a great crossword clue.

#100 photos #5

The snakeskin wall

 "Why did you choose geology?" asked the tutor of each of us in turn. "Well, I suppose it was 'Once a rock chick, always a rock chick" I replied.  I actually had that as my tagline in my course's message board signature at the time, and one of the other students commented that she had seen me and the said tagline on there.

It was true for more than one given value of the word 'rock'. I had listened to a fair bit of it during my teens and early twenties; Deep Purple's 'Black Night' still puts a smile on my face (Incidentally, I know that it's a rather heretic view, but I actually prefer Steve Morse to Richie Blackmore).  I can take or leave quite a lot of rock nowadays – but I get really excited by a good orchestra(!)

I had become fascinated by geology and palaeontology in the very early parts of my degree (and I still am). I'd planned to study biology and ecology, but my foundation course was multi-disciplinary and I contracted a severe case of adult-onset geology. I love what every bit of an outcrop, feature, rock or even slab of polished stone can tell us about its history and I marvel at the sheer variety of geology. Don't even start me on the beauty of thin sections!  You can see why I loved this serpentinite.

Like all polished stone surfaces, this was a so-and-so to photograph, and I was ridiculously pleased with this photo when I looked at it on a large monitor when I got home. Serpentinite gets its name from the fact that it looks like snakeskin. You can see why! The slab in this photo is cladding a wall in Nottingham city centre. When you look at the surface of a well-polished serpentinite it can give the illusion that you're looking into a 3D structure and you can almost lose yourself in it.  That was especially true in this case - just look at the top-right quadrant of this photo.

A blog isn't the place to go into the petrology of serpentinites but, in a nutshell, they are formed by hydrous alteration of rock rich in iron and magnesium - this can happen at, for instance, mid-ocean ridges or some parts of subduction zones. And just look at how minerals have infilled where the water penetrated!  

100 photos #4

A solitude of sand

Holkham beach - wide, clean sands and and blue sky

I've only been to Holkham a few times, but it's one of my favourite National Nature Reserves and a place that speaks to my soul in a way I can't express in words. There are huge, wide, open beaches, pine woods, dune systems, agriculture and grazing marshes. I saw my first ever marsh harrier from a hide at Holkham, and to my everlasting delight I saw my first ever spoonbills there as well. I'd read about spoonbills but I had never expected to see any in the UK!

I remember playing frisbee on Holkham beach and I remember an amazing meal in a pub just across the coast road. I remember going bird watching there with friends at 6:00 o'clock one morning (a truly bizarre time to be out and about if you don't have to, if you ask me). I remember being dropped off at Wells-next-the-Sea one morning and spending the whole day walking around the reserve without seeing a single other person until I walked into the pub at the end of the day. I remember getting sunburned on the beach on one occasion, while we could see some awful thunderstorms just inland - we drove home through the most torrential rain. I remember the hot, Mediterranean, scent of the fir trees behind the dunes that same day.

Norfolk is my favourite English county, and Holkham is definitely my favourite beach anywhere. Even on a hot day with lots of visitors there, I took this photo and there's not a living soul in it. It just so brings back memories of special times at a wonderful place.  It's been my wallpaper for ages and I've no intention of changing it just yet.

#100Photos #3

Rock-hard toffee (or vice-versa)

Portoro marble - looking more like a dessert than a rock

The day I took this photo was a feast for the eyes and the soul; whilst a rehearsal for the following week's Trooping of the Colour was underway nearby, my Other Half and I were visiting the [then] Queen's Gallery  at Buckingham Palace, London. It was the first time we saw any of the Royal Collection. We saw a Fabergé egg for the first time, and it was as beautiful and as finely wrought as we had imagined it would be.  We saw the golden Exeter Salt, we saw sculptures carved from the finest marble, we saw paintings by Old Masters and we saw, for the very first time for either of us, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci with notes in his mirror writing!

One thing I also drank in, though, was this polished slice of Portoro marble. Stonemasons often refer to any stone that will take a polish as a marble, but Portoro is a true marble, i.e. a limestone that has been altered (metamorphosed) by heat and pressure; it comes from La Spezia in Italy, and this slice adorns the top of a very ornate (actually overly ornate to my Philistine eyes) table.  The structure of the rock shows the effects of the heat and pressure that altered it from the limestone it once was; the black in it comes from organic marine material, and the gold and fawn colours come from oxidation of that same organic matter. As it was reformed, it was pulled like toffee - but it's probably best not to try to eat it. The heat, the pressure, the stretching, doing this to solid rock!  To my eyes, though, it looks like a dessert you could get a spoon into.

#100Photos #2

A shutterbug refreshed

Welcome!

Some time ago, I blogged here.  Always about photographs, principally about geology but sometimes about other things as well.  My premise was that a picture is worth a thousand words but you sometimes need words to tell the story behind the picture. Now, in true Hollywood fashion, I'm rebooting the blog; this time around, I'm going to tell the stories behind 100 of my photos.  I'm no great photographer, but I hope that the photos and their stories will be interesting.

This one, though is just pretty rather than enigmatic or worthy of a long story.  I was out for a walk a couple of months ago, and this was the canopy above me  - copper beech leaves contrasting with the pale greens of other Spring-clad species in rural Cambridgeshire, England.  It was one of those days that make you glad to be alive, and the contrast in colours and the delicacy of the tracery entranced* me.  It just seems apt to post a photo that captures this to open a newly-reemerged blog.

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*By the way, have you ever noticed that when a noun and a verb are spelled the same way, the noun places the emphasis on the first syllable, and the verb on the second?  Think in terms of 'a protest' and 'to protest' or' an entrance' and 'to entrance'...  You've got to love language. 

#100Photos  #1