James Clay Stuff

December 22, 2015

At WHSmith you can afford to give them anything but the ordinary this Christmas

WHSmith Christmas advert from 1983, click image for a larger version.

Looking at the prices, you realise how much cheaper some things are today. Of course inflation means that these prices in today’s money would be much higher. The ZX Spectrum at £99.95 was expensive, today you can buy a tablet, which is a lot more powerful for as little as £50! Of you can recreate the ZX Spectrum experience for £90.

The one that surprised me was the Indiana Jones VHS for £19.95, today you can get all four films in HD on Blu-Ray for roughly the same money!

Back in the 1980s I do remember going to WHSmith to buy Christmas presents. My local branch was in the Lion Square development in Cambridge. The top floor was records and I remember buying quite a few cassette tapes up there as well as the odd piece of vinyl.

The gaming section always looked exciting, the covers of the games always seemed to be so much better than the actual graphics of the games themselves, but that’s 1980s gaming for you.

There was something warm and comforting about the brown and orange that WHSmith had back then. Today of course they seem to have lost their way a little and I am surprised that they are still around.

So what memories of WHSmith in the 1980s do you have?

December 21, 2015

Buongiorno Italia

Back in the mid to late 1990s I visited Italy quite a bit, usually going twice a year, once for the carnival and once in the summer. I initially would take my 35mm SLR film camera, but in later years replaced this with the first HP PhotoSmart Camera. These images are from my 35mm camera, which were developed and then scanned into the computer.

On many of those visits I went to Venice, but I have very few photographs of that place from my 35mm collection, though I have some digital ones from the PhotoSmart camera. I really liked Venice and though it was full of tourists, one of the advantages of having a friend who was a local, was finding those really nice places for coffee, cake and pasta, that were frequented by locals. So yes you could spend €4 for a coffee in St Marks Square, the places we went to, you paid €1 for an espresso. This photograph is one of the Grand Canal.

The local restaurant in Venice we went to, was more of a cafe then a restaurant, but served some delicious food, the seafood pasta I had was great with clams, prawns, squid and lobster.

Another place in the area I visited was Verona.

This is Piazza Bra in the heart of Verona.

This is the Arena di Verona, which is a Roman amphitheatre in Piazza Bra in Verona. Back in Roman times, nearly 30,000 people could sit inside, despite its age, today 15,000 people can sit inside.

The one place where I spent most of my time when visiting Italy was Padua.

An early morning walk with the mist slow rising before the hot summer day.

Interestingly from a technical perspective, the prints from those trips are still with me (in a box) however the original digital images seemed to have gone missing, they were probably backed up to a series of floppy disks that I discarded many years ago when moving house (this was in the days before cloud storage became ubiquitous and a quick and easy way to backup and store digital photographs). What I do remember from those images was how awful the quality was, 0.3MP or similar if I recall correctly.

December 11, 2015

Real or Flat?

Really quite like these anamorphic illusions.

The ones you find on streets also are quite impressive.

December 5, 2015

Adele at the BBC: When Adele wasn’t Adele… but was Jenny!

This was even better than I thought it was going to be…

December 4, 2015September 2, 2022

Bristol Harbourside in the 1990s Part Two

As mentioned previously, back in the 1990s when I was teaching at a college in Bristol, I use to undertake regular field trips to the Bristol Harbourside as part of a unit on urban regeneration. There was at the time to much happening down there after years of inaction that it was an ideal place to demonstrate the impact of investment and change of use. Bristol had been an important port for hundreds of years, this all came to a halt in the 1970s and regeneration plans were developed. Not much happened for twenty years, but in the last twenty years we have seen major regeneration of the area, massive building of offices, business, residential and entertainment, as well as visitor attractions such as at-Bristol (where incidentally I worked for a while when it opened).

During one of those field trips, I took my SLR camera with me, and digging around a box in the garage I found the prints, which I have since scanned in.

This is now Za Za Bazaar, but has been many different establishments over the years.

Over on the other side of the river is Narrow Quay with The Architecture Centre and The Bristol hotel.

Longer view down the harbourside, in the distance is the old Bristol and West building, now the Radisson Blu Hotel.

Wet and muddy building site.

In this view (on the left) are the Old Leadworks, you can see the chimney. This initially became offices as part of Wildscreen-at-Bristol, and I worked in those offices when I worked at at-Bristol in 1999-2000. After Wildscreen became Wildwalk and then closed, the buildings were empty for a while, but now house the Bristol Aquarium.

Sometimes Bristol changes and sometimes it doesn’t.

November 16, 2015

Out and about in the Lake District in 1998

Following on from my last blog post, here are the final pictures from that Lake District trip. It was rather cold up there and every so often you would see something that reminded you of this, this frozen waterfall is a good example.

I loved how this bridge was more than just stones as the local fauna dover the sides, making it look like a living bridge.

This is one of those images that has uses for presentations that talk about barriers. It was used to keep the sheep in the field…

One thing you find a lot of in the Lake District are sheep!

November 2, 2015

Some more holiday pics from Normandy.

I’ve already published some blog posts about a trip I took to Normandy in the 1990s. In the first I talked about Honfleur and the second was on Caen. Here are the remaining pictures. Back then of course I was using film in my 35mm SLR, which I was quite conservative about the number of photographs I would take and in some cases there would also be prints with the little stickers that the developers would place on those underexposed, blurred images that I would occasionally take.

There was something quite special (as well as quite annoying) in taking photographs with film and then once you had handed it into Boots (or similar place) and then a few days later, collected your prints in the wallet, leafing through them as you walked through the town to see how they turned out. We seemed to have less coffee shops back then too, otherwise I am sure I would have sat down in one of those, ordered a coffee and looked over the photographs. These images, looking at the “box” they came in, were sent off for developing and the postman would have delivered them to the house. In today’s digital world, I now take substantially more images (as I did on a recent visit to London) and there is more instant gratification, as you see them on the small screen on the back of the camera (or phone); or as you load them onto the computer or laptop.

The first stop of the trip was arriving into Ouistreham, it serves as the port of the city of Caen. We had undertaken an overnight trip to France and this was the early morning arival at the port.

As well as serving large ferries, many sailboats also are moored in Ouistreham, used for cruising up and down the Normandy coast.

Of course with no GPS, I have no idea where the following images were taken. I remember stopping at a cafe for coffee and a croissant for breakfast. Knowing the journey we took from Ouistreham to Honfleur, before driving back to Caen, I would guess this was Cabourg, but could be Houlgate, or somewhere different. I did take a quick look at Google Maps and Streetview, but to be honest there was so much to look through I didn’t think it was worth the effort.

I do think that this final shot is Honfleur, but I could be wrong…

Looking back over these old photographs, makes me realise how much I enjoyed visiting Normandy back then, so I think I might start planning a return visit soon.

October 31, 2015

Hang on, lads; I’ve got a great idea – The Italian Job in Lego

Very clever little short film of the Italian Job in Lego

October 14, 2015

Ludlow Castle

I have taken quite a few photographs of Ludlow Castle, but I have never actually visited the castle itself.

These were taken back in 2000 (or possibly earlier).

Click the images for larger versions.

October 13, 2015

Shooting the Moon

The Moon

When we had the recent super red moon, I did think about taking some photographs, then I realised I would need to get up at 3am so made the decision to stay in bed.

However the evening before I decided I would try and take some photographs of the moon and you can see from this first attempt, I failed miserably…

rubbishmoonphoto

After doing some reading, I realised that I really should use a tripod and change the settings on my camera.

I used my 75-300mm lense on my Canon EOS400D DSLR. I used full manual settings, the ISO setting was set to 200, f10 and a shutter speed of 1/200.

As it is night we often forget how bright the moon actually is, so though I might usually use a higher ISO, with the bright moon, you can set this right down to ISO 200 or 100.

I didn’t want the aperture too closed, but still needed a reasonable amount of time for the shutter to be open. As a result I used full manual settings to set both the aperture and the shutter speed. Rotate the dial to the M setting to get to the full manual setting. You can then use the rotating dial to set the shutter speed. Holding down the exposure compensation button you can use the rotating dial to set the aperture (the f number).

This is what the exposure compensation button looks like on the camera.

I also used a tripod and a remote control. This kept the camera steady and avoided any blurring from moving the camera.

The end result I was quite pleased with, not perfect, but much better than previous attempts to photograph the moon. Click the image for a larger version.

I did crop it for posting onto Instagram, which is the photo at the top of this blog post.