Colour Walk – Walking West Continued

Very unsettled weather led to an ever changing sky. From heavy brooding grey clouds to perfect blue and back again in the time it takes to take off your jumper. Pausing every three minutes to take a photograph looking straight up.

The wonderful sugestion from a friend to use the resulting image as a mood descriptor – today I have been feeling rather E6, but I am hoping tomorrow will be C5…

Colour Walk – Walking West

June 6th

7.6 miles through Windmill Hill, Bedminster, and Ashton Gate, then across fields before trailing through the very appropriately named Long Ashton and finally ending in more fields.

A walk focused on discontinuities, divisions, and joins. The easiest to spot – mends in the tarmac, joins between old and new walls. The largest – the huge bridge built to carry the new Metrobus.  Built to join areas of the city together, but currently unused and gathering graffiti, visually dividing the landscape and creating a physical divide in the public footpath. I found unexpectedly sharp divisions of land use where a brand new housing estate buts right up against an area of wildlife. I thought I was walking along a clear division – a fence dividing two fields, one containing me, the other full of cows. But then the fence ended. The physical division was no more and I had to create a mental one, convincing myself that the cows were quite happy on their side of the field and had no desire to join me on mine.  Luckily they agreed with me.

This is the first set of photos that I have taken whilst consciously thinking how they would work when pixelated. I deliberately positioned the discontinuity along the midline of the photo (either horizontally or vertically) in the hope that it would be clearly visible in the change of colour in the pixelated image.

Colour Walk – Walking North

May 30th

A walk through sprawling Bristol. My aim was to try and walk as far North as The Mall shopping Centre (the group of white buildings above and slightly to the right of the furthest north point of my walk). I got tantalisingly close, but in the end was defeated by a combination of a locked gate, a grumpy caravan owner, and the extreme heat of the day. I did get to Filton airstrip, now defunct but still a huge mark on the map of Bristol.

My first timer went off as I walked down a cut through between houses – high brick wall on one side, a fence on the other.  The only spot of colour, a ‘danger of death’ sign on an electricity transformer box, gave me my theme for the rest of the walk – every three minutes I took a photograh that included some element of text:

Old favourites, company names in the frogs of bricks piled high on a demolition site.

Sign in a window ‘These premises are alarmed!’ – by what?

Grafitti – ‘we have to start somewhere’ and ‘no going back’.  Signs of the times, but sounding to me like the start of a Margaret Atwood distopia.

‘Look right’ sprayed on the grass at a golf course. A safety warning, or sartorial instruction?

WAITING.  For what?

Colour Walk – Walking East

May 16th

Walking East, not an easy thing to when there is a river in the way. There are surprisingly few places to cross the River Avon to the East of the city, hence the large detour North before I could head east again.

The rule for this walk, a photograph of the ground every minute, suggested itself as soon as I left the house – wearing walking boots rather than my normal sandals, I was very aware of the sound of my footsteps on the pavement.  I took the photos without judgement, looking directly downwards every minute as the relentless buzzer went off, but turns out even a quick photograph and a speedy reset of the timer takes time – I was out for four hours, but according to the number of photos, I was only walking for two of those.

I am drawn to the images of the grey tarmac, especially those that have captured a mend, or join, an unconformity in the continual surface of endless paths.

Colour Walking 2

May 4th

A circular walk beginning and ending at my house.  Learning from my first experiment, this time I had rules.  I took two photos every two minutes, the first a close up of the most colourful thing near me, the second a wider view of something nearby.  Not too restrictive, and it gave me more of a structure than on my previous walk.  The first colour grid shows the colours resulting from computer manipulation of the photos, the second are the colours I feel best represent each photo.  As a lover of the muted colour palette, I think the computer has made the better choices.