BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS FOR U3A

All photographs taken with a Nikon D5100 except for the last one.

Five important books

The book ends were picked up at a car boot sale from the Greenside car park in Edinburgh.  They were a bit dusty and in amongst a lot of other things.  I picked them up and asked the price.  "Seventeen pounds," the stall owner said.  I bought them right away.  They are very heavy and probably made in Bali.  It could be teak or ironwood;  but there are so many other types of wood from that region. 
They are beautifully carved and polished depicting male and female in traditional headdress and jewelry.  The books I've chosen to picture are what I think are essential reading for today along with three reference books:  Collins Medical Dictionary and Politics, and A Cloud a Day, the last a present from my daughter from the Cloud Appreciation Society of which I'm a member.  There are also Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prizewinner in Economics, and 21 Lessons for the Twenty First Century by Yuval Noah Harari.

Black poppy vase

This black vase with poppies has a story behind it.  Another vase was bought as a wedding present for the son of a friend.  Grant was marrying  a girl from Ireland and the reception was to be held at the Crystal Palace in Glasgow, a beautiful venue on the Glasgow Green.  It was a blood-red glass vase about 0.5 metres in length.  I placed the vase on the table along with the black poppy vase and decided to keep the black vase and give Grant the red one.  After the wedding I got a note from Craig thanking me for his present saying, "Thank you for the vase.  Red is my favourite colour.  So now I have the other.

Japanese mime at the Edinburgh Festival

This photo was taken at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019.  She or he may or may not be Japanese.  That's all I know about her or him.  I thought she was a girl in opposition to most who seem to think her a boy.  

Kudos, she makes everyone laugh.  Instead of speaking she has a whistle in her mouth, like Harpo Marx if you're old enough to remember.  The original in colour is expressive in it's own way as you can see from another shot.

Here you can see her makeup and the varying shades of blue in her clothes and the background.  She engages with the audience; she gestures to you to come on in to her funny world.

Sake bowl

I bought this bowl in Japan, on an American air force base camp about an hour from Tokyo.  How I came to be there is another story.  In the camp there was a gift shop that sold cups and saucers, hand-painted wall hangings, beautiful carving of dragons, and many other craft goods.  I saw this set of sake bowls and bought four.  

The bowl was placed on an upturned translucent plastic box with a lamp inside.  After many shots I got what I wanted.  The shot is post-processed in Lightbox.  The image is shot from above at an angle and  inverted.  The box itself is softly out of focus and vignetted.  

Again, I like the shades of blue in the original before editing in B and W.

Two Friends

And neighbours.  Jackie and Helen.  This photo was taken with my mobile on Helen's 50th birthday.  They're in Elgin Terrace outside my house.  I like the way the tenements loom at an angle in the background.  They're faces look natural which adds to the image.