Wind up the week

My bookshop is fairly busy today, market day in Ramsgate produces a slightly different average customer, if there is such a thing in amongst bibliophiles.

There are now so few bookshops of reasonable size where you both stand some chance of finding a book you want and the price being competitive to the online price, that some are in a state of shock.

There is also the problem of running out reasonable non food or clothes shops to browse in, almost a sense of there being hardly anywhere left to hide.  

Anyway what with one thing and another I haven’t been able to get out and buy an Isle of Thanet Gazette.

As newspaper websites go the Gazette’s on is a bit peculiar and requires devious means to separate the Thanet items from items on the whole of Kent, here is the link I use http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/people/Isle%20of%20Thanet%20Gazette/profile.html for want of something better.

The articles come up in particular order, meaning that the headline maybe the bottom line.

I suppose the headline is probably something like, “Animal Death Ship Jolene Switches to Ipswich After Animal Massacre Ramsgate Ban” that is providing they found out about the ship sailing off to there before their copy date.

Have we won on the live animal export front? Well that remains to be seen as the exporters may raise some sort of legal challenge to the council’s ban.

Three articles on the problems of drunks and night time behaviour, this week. http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Seafront-turning-area/story-16955941-detail/story.html and http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Police-consider-imposing-late-night-levy-licensed/story-16955887-detail/story.html  and http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Campaign-reclaim-streets-yobs/story-16955865-detail/story.html      

The whole business of town centres becoming no go areas of an evening needs solving and I guess that paying for this needs in some way relating to the sale of alcohol. 

I have just been looking at details of the next major exhibition at the Turner Contemporary; Alex Katz: Give Me Tomorrow, this exhibition will be moved from Tate St Ives and open in Margate on the 6^th October.

It will be the first main exhibition not to feature any work by JWM Turner, below is the film Alex Katz did for the Tate St Ives  

I am not quite sure what to make of his work, but am very much looking forward to seeing the real thing instead of photos of his paintings.

Further learning curve on the new phone camera, this time Ramsgate Harbour with diminishing light and then night shots http://michaelsbookshop.com/laptop912/id6.htm

I generally work on the adage that as a photographer I will never be as good as a very basic camera, by this is mean that there is always more to learn with a film camera that has the usual settings, aperture, shutter speed, film speed and focus. With a digital slr you get these thing partially simulated and can get by, with something like a phone camera you are mostly at the mercy of its automation and so different skills come into play. I was a bit deliberate with various types of camera shake here, and I am coming to the conclusion that I can manage with the camera on this phone.

I should point out here that even a conventional film slr camera doesn’t normally have a conventional shutter speed in the way that say a box Brownie has, the sly has a thing called a focal plane shutter, at faster shutter speeds it doesn’t open completely, but works like the curtains on a window would if you were opening one while closing the other. The shutter speed translates to how long were the curtains open for and the answer is they are never completely open.  

I may ramble on here