Light, Universe and Everything

I was out on a photo shoot last week when the sun decided to make a rare appearance. I captured the above image on Bridlington north beach as the tide was receding. The picture was taken with a polarizing filter and rendered into black and white with Photoshop. It looks a bit like an Ikea poster but there's something appealing about it?

Still Looking North

Just thought I'd mention the fact that I had my 5th image featured on the BBC's "Look North" news program last night. A short video clip is posted here, if anyone is interested. Note Peter Levy's slightly sarcastic tone relating to the additional information regarding clouds.

Ambient One

Have a free ambient track from the album.

Ambient One by

CarlStephenJacques

You Can Dance

It's been a while since I've published a post and I apologise for that. To be honest, I've been working on a new project in a desperate attempt to fill the filthy winter days. I've been putting together an album of dance music. It consists of ten tracks (possibly more to come) and lives on MySpace. There's also a rather naff video on YouTube for one of the strongest tracks, Tacion Filmstar. I've called the album Time To Land for no better reason than I took a dramatic image of a glider when out and about last summer.

It's taken about eight months to complete, although I must have spent as much time again getting to grips with the production software. The album is a mixture of dance and ambient tracks created entirely on my humble PC because I don't own a keyboard and can't play one anyway. I usually start with a genre in mind and select a number of synthesizer patches and audio samples that seem to work together. Usually, I can put down the first two minutes of a track quite quickly and then I need to leave it for a week or so (I start many more than I finish.) Once completed, it's a case of producing the finished item by mixing down and adding effects such as echo, reverb., etc. This is the bit I find most fun because you can completely change the mood of the piece and it involves lots of playing around.

The completed, high-quality rendering of Time To Land is not available to download yet. If enough people express an interest then I'll fork out the distribution costs and submit it to iTunes (and others.)

St Gregory's Minster

Driving back from Sutton Bank we decided to stop and have a look at St Gregory’s Minster in Kirkdale, near Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire. St Gregory’s date back to the Anglo-Saxon period and has a rare sundial set into the outer wall of the nave above the south door. The inscription on the sundial tells how Orm bought St Gregory's Minster when it was all broken down and fallen and let it be made anew from the ground to Christ and St Gregory. The dial and the reconstructed Minster date to the mid 11th century. Which was nice.

Sutton Bank

On Monday, Bev and I decided to visit Sutton Bank in the North York Moors National Park. Sutton Bank is one of the most spectacular inland cliffs in Britain with a near vertical drop of 140 metres. The views across the Vale of York were absolutely stunning. From the top, I managed to bag a (grainy) image of York Minster (bottom left) and Drax power station in the same frame. Not that remarkable but if I tell you that the Minster is 20 miles away and Drax is 36 miles away, you might be more impressed.

Sutton Bank has a flat top made from limey grit stone that survived the gouging action of the last ice age. It’s home to a gliding school and you can watch them being towed up from a path that runs right next to the grassy runway. We had a fantastic time exploring the area on well constructed paths radiating out from the inevitable visitor’s centre. For a meagre £2.20 you can park there all day and that’s not bad in a recession. Highly recommended.

The Town That Never Was

Ravenscar, actually. This little village on the Yorkshire coast between Scarborough and Whitby is a charming little place. At nearly 200 metres above sea level, it has some of the best views in England (in my humble opinion; the image on the left is Robin Hood's Bay from Ravenscar,) and would have been a trendy holiday resort if the Victorian town planners had got their act together. It was marketed as a sort of early Milton Keynes with terraces, gardens, an Esplanade and shops, all based on a grid layout. It never materialized because the development company went bust in 1913 and much of the site is now in the hands of the National Trust.

Yesterday, Bev., and I decided to explore Ravenscar's other feature, a disused Alum works. Between 1640 and 1862, Alum was mined at Ravenscar and used extensively in the textile and tanning industries for fixing dyes and making leather more supple. The finished product was lowered by winch to ships waiting at a small quay below. The story of Ravenscar has been told in a couple of TV series recently (Landscape Mysteries and Coast) and, I recall, that it's possible to see cart tracks worn out of the rock on the beach. Well, it would be if you could find a way down to the beach. It took us about four hours to find the unmarked public path leading from the Ravenhall Hotel's member-only golf course (image right,) by which time the tide had come in and the weather had turned wet. Call me cynical, but I reckon that the hotel owners deliberately make things difficult in case, God forbid, we spoil some tedious middle-manager's "fun."

I can strongly recommend a visit to Ravenscar because the views are magnificent, its history is interesting and you have an opportunity to piss-off a few golfers. All-in-all, a rather satisfying day out.