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Photo was taken Dec 28th, 2011. This is Skaha Lake in British Columbia. Photo was taken with a Nikon D300 10-24mm lens 5 exposures. Processed in Photomatix Pro and then duplicate file processed in Topaz Simplify.
Dynamo ENB V3
Photoshop (Topaz Simplify 3)
Original Image for reference: puu.sh/dMDiU/21f25e0fb7.jpg
I always want to simplify. Get rid of stuff. Less clutter in our lives. Keep it simple. Focus on what is important.
"You cannot pass! I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! YOU! SHALL NOT! PASS!"
Me: "shoo"
These adjoining properties were once in the same ownership. Joan Stevens wrote: 'It is said that when Sir Hilgrove Turner' lived in Gouray Lodge, his sisters lived in the cottage, and there is still a door in the garden wall which divided the two properties.
However, not only are the properties on different fiefs, but they also stand in different parishes. The boundary between the Fief de Vauguleme and Fief du Roi must follow the parish boundary between St Martin and Grouville as it runs between the two properties, Gouray Lodge being in the former, and the Cottage in the latter.
Datestone mystery solved?
In the corner of the north wall of Gouray Lodge, which preserves the older spelling of Gorey, is a gable stone from an older house on the site, with the inscription ICH ELP 1682. These initials have not been positively identified. It has been suggested that ELP stands for Elizabeth, or Esther Lempriere, but ICH, although it would refer to Jean or Josue, is a mystery, there being no surname in Jersey records which would match CH.
However, our own research has identified a marriage in St Saviour in 1675 between Charles Hilgrove and Elizabeth Lempriere. Could the carving, which is not pictured in the Jersey Datestone Register, either have been misinterpreted, or be an error?
Joan Stevens referred to the Hilgrove family but herself made a significant mistake in the connection between the Hilgroves and the Turners. She wrote: In about 1815 Sir Hilgrove Turner bought the house from Josue Falle; his wife Madeleine Hilgrove was a local woman, and he was Lieut-Governor from 1814-16'. This was one of the author's rare factual errors, in her all-too-infrequent references to the owners and occupants of the houses featured in her books. The error was perpetuated by direct copying of the text in the Grouville millennium book.
The Lieut-Governor between those dates was Sir Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner. He was not married to Madeleine Hilgrove; she was his mother, as suggested by his second forename. For a long time he was also assumed to be Jersey-born, and referred to himself as 'a Jerseyman' when he took office. His tombstone records Grouville as his place of birth, but it has now been established that he was not born in the island, but in Uxbridge.
His mother was undoubtedly born in Jersey, in 1736, and she was the daughter of the Charles Hilgrove and his second wife Elizabeth Bandinel. This Charles was the son of another Charles, and Elizabeth, nee Lempriere, whose marriage we have referred to above in connection with the mystery datestone.
All this lends weight to our suggestion that Charles and Elizabeth are the couple referred to on the ICH ELP 1682 datestone, and that either the Hilgrove family connection with Gouray Lodge goes back much further than 1815, or the stone was brought to the property from elsewhere.
Gouray Cottage
Joan Stevens wrote of this property:'From the road one would never guess that there was a round arch in the south facade of this house, the original way it faced before later alterations had changed it to face eastwards.
'On the roadside is a plaque of Caen stone depicting the arms of William III. Although it is crudely executed it is very like the arms of the same King at Elizabeth Castle, dated 1697.' Stevens speculated that the plaque might have had something to do with Mont Orgueil Castle, but suggested that the Cottage was probably older - 'say 1660'.
In the second volume of her book she connected the house with occasional sittings of the Royal Court when an outbreak of the plague forced them to convene outside of the town of St Helier, noting that no other place where the Court is believed to have sat has such Royal Arms and that there was no proof that there had been a sitting here.
A 2004 article suggesting that the Royal Court may have sat elsewhere in Grouville, at an earlier date.
Viking or Breton origin
The earliest reference to the place we now know as Gorey was in 1180 when it was called Gorroic. This may have come from the Viking words – vorr 'a landing place', and vic 'a bay or creek' - or the Breton word gorre meaning an 'eminence'.
CoastMapGoreyVillage.png
The village we know today only really appeared in the years following the end of the Napoleonic War, when the population of the island mushroomed. Before the French Revolution there had only been 16 properties in the area. The village grew because it was the ideal site for the growing number of men earning a living from the sea, as fishermen and sailors, and two small roads of houses were built on the low land behind the Common, beyond the marsh.
It was to this place that, in the summer of 1832, some of the poorer people from St Helier fled to avoid the outbreak of cholera. However, the disease followed them. On 24 August, just over two weeks after the first cases in Town, the first of over a dozen people from the village had died of the disease.
It has often been claimed that the village grew because of the oyster industry, but this is a simplification, because the oyster season only really lasted about ten weeks, and the crews of the English boats lived on board. The local fishermen, however, were active throughout the year and oysters were only one of the catches they went after. As the village grew, it attracted a number of seamen and their families, and in the late 1840s increasing numbers of men involved in ship building. The better-off residents favoured homes on the higher ground.
St Martin’s Gouray
Many of these newcomers were English speakers and a Chapel of Ease, St Martin’s Gouray, was built in 1833 to meet their spiritual needs. The Church tried to levy a tithe on the oystermen to pay for the building and maintenance of the new church but got short shrift as most of the English fishermen were non-conformists.
The village must have been a busy place because, until the coast road was built in 1938, all traffic to the harbour had to pass through the village. Even the track of the coast road did not exist until the late 1880s. By then the ship building boom was over and the railway company was able to buy the land where the yards had been and reclaim some of the foreshore, so that the line could be extended as far as the harbour.
George Eliot
In the summer of 1857 the writer Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, was living in Rose Cottage (now Les Houmets Nursing Home). At the time of her stay, Eliot was still writing for publications such as Blackwood’s Magazine and The Westminster Review; her first novel was still a couple of years off.
She appears to have been taken with the village, writing:
" Gorey stands in Grouville Bay. It was pretty in all lights, but especially the evening light, to look round at the castle and harbour, the village and scattered dwellings peeping out from among trees on the hill, the church standing halfway down the hill, which is clothed with a plantation – shelters the little village with a cloud of blue smoke: still to the right and the village breaks off, leaving nothing but meadows in front of the slope that shuts out the setting sun and lets you see a hint of the golden glory that is reflected in the pink eastern clouds."
Shipyards
She failed to mention the activity along the the shoreline. Gorey seems an unlikely spot for a major industrial site, but the village was one of the centres of Jersey’s Industrial Revolution. Shipyards producing cutters, coastal traders, schooners and brigs – about 150 vessels were built here in the 19th century. One of the biggest vessels to be launched from the village was the 365-ton barque Montrose. She was built in 1861 by George Asplet for the London company of Scrutton, Sons and Company.
The main builders were Asplet, Charles Aubin, Philip Bellot and John F Picot. Picot was the most prolific. He launched about 40 vessels from his yard just to the south of the slip and the Conway Tower. This tower was referred to as Grouville No 8
Just to the south of the slipway, it was the sixth of General Conway’s coastal towers protecting Grouville Bay. Confusingly called Grouville No 8 (because Fort Henry and the Prince William Redoubt on the Common were positions 6 and 7), the tower was actually built in the parish of St Martin.
When it was demolished appears to be a bit of a mystery as the War Office issued orders for its demolition in May 1871 but it is marked on a plan drawn in 1877 by Colonel Bland of the Royal Engineers, and the artist Philip Ouless shows in still standing in his painting of the Military Grand Review celebrating the Queen’s birthday in May 1882. It was certainly gone by the time the railway was extended.
Following the demise of the railway in 1929, the site was sold off and a property called Brook House was built. This later became the Beach Hotel and is now residential apartments.
Just a little fun with spheres. The sphere above each one has a two stud difference between the one below it.
Painting effect created by Topaz Simplify 4.1 plug-in from Topaz Labs (with Corel PaintShop Pro X6 Ultimate)
The Notting Hill Carnival, Europe’s biggest street festival is an annual grand event that has been held every year since 1965 on the streets of Notting Hill, London, UK in the month of August.
Operations image of the week:
The flight dynamics experts working on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter mission meet regularly to assess progress of the spacecraft's almost-year-long aerobraking manoeuvres at Mars.
The TGO orbiter swung into an initial, highly elliptical orbit at Mars on 19 October last year.
Aerobraking - using drag from the faint wispy tendrils of the upper-most part of the martian atmosphere to slow and lower the spacecraft into its final science orbit - began on 15 March, and will take most of a year, following a cautious ‘slow-as-you-go’ strategy.
As with Goldilocks and the famous bears, staying too high won't drag on TGO sufficiently to reach its intended orbit anytime soon, while dipping too low into the atmosphere could slow it too much, with unwanted results.
Therefore, the flight dynamics team carefully assess the results of every aerobraking orbit, and make detailed predictions on the subsequent orbits based on realtime results. This means there is a lot of data to keep up with.
They have, of course, many sophisticated tools, applications and databases available to help determine orbits, visualise trajectories and calculate future spacecraft manoeuvres.
"But the white board in our briefing room is the best tool we've found for giving everyone an up-to-the-date, realtime view of aerobraking progress during our frequent review meetings," says ESA's Robert Guilanyà, seen above, the TGO flight dynamics team lead.
"A large group of people need to see and discuss the data collected from the atmospheric passages to plan subsequent aerobraking activities. Marking up the white board by hand is simple, easy and instantly viewable by all."
From 25 June to end-August, aerobraking is on pause due to Mars and Earth lining up on opposite sides of the Sun in a conjunction that greatly reduces the reliability and robustness of communication to and from the spacecraft.
Aerobraking will resume in August, and should continue until early 2018, when TGO will perform a series of final manoeuvres to transition to its approximately 400-km high, circular science orbit.
Credit: ESA
The modern aerial googlemaps view includes an overlay of the German defenses in red, as best as I can interpret them from 100 year old aerial photos and trench maps. The path and final resting place of Skinner's tank is annotated in blue.
Some details in the German defenses are simplified to scale, or approximated due to lack of clarity in the aerial photos. Accounts and drawings describe periodic narrow zig-zag gaps passing completely through the barbed wire barriers, presumably left to enable German scouting, maintenance and counter attack, which are omitted here. There were also accounts of tunnels and covered trenches which aren't shown. The main road south into Bullecourt and passing through the wire was no doubt mined, plus it also had a massive crater severing it - the result of a buried bomb detonated by the Germans, just ahead of the wire.
Clearly in light of all the photographic evidence of tank 796, the various unquestioned allied accounts of its exploits published in the past 100 years fall short on accuracy. Skinner's tank most definitely hadn't managed to cruise the village, let alone enter Bullecourt and the tank isn't ditched inside a large crater. Indeed, since 1925 the Germans' own divisional account and map never indicated tanks entered Bullecourt on April 11, 1917.
According to C.E.W. Bean and the 48th Battalion histories, the tank was however successful in suppressing the German MGs it was sent against. Furthermore, its plausible Lt Skinner may have incorrectly believed amidst the explosions, smoke and chaos that his tank had penetrated the edge of the village, given the first ruins were just beyond the trench to his forward starboard side. His tank is also stopped before what, at close quarters, would appear to be an enormous crater, exactly as his C.O. Major Watson's account describes - in fact one of several large pock marked pits dug by the Germans.
As is so often the way with conflicting stories, the truth ends up laying somewhere in between... in this case betwixt the barbed wire and trenches.
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Below are some links to the very useful Landships website, including a narrative and map, which hopefully will be updated in due course:
Bullecourt Map:
sites.google.com/site/landships/home/narratives/1917/batt...
Narrative:
sites.google.com/site/landships/home/narratives/1917/batt...
Tank Lists by serial number:
I remember a time when I shot bright, pastel coloured images. Super narrow depth of field and with long lenses. Style evolves as we discover more about ourselves through our work. The understanding that how we photograph is more about use than our actual subject comes and everything changes.
I'm happier now with one camera a 35mm lens and my subject. The simpler the shoot the more at home I feel. For me simplification is amplification.
Shot with the most basic of camera.
Model : Angela
Taken by : Kweong
Location : Taiping Lake Garden
End of this series.
Photo Video : Coming soon.
1. 021, 2. DQS8 # 2 quiltie - 'Rainbow Girl', 3. simplified rainbow quilt, 4. a color crusade, 5. Finished rainbow mug rug, 6. Color Wheel Quilt, black and white, 7. feathers, 8. Rainbow Stripes, 9. X Marks the Goose Pillow
Created with fd's Flickr Toys
This is a colorful version of a classic Gig Harbor photo, using Photoshop Elements with a Topaz Labs plug-in filter, Simplify-Oil Painting-with a color boost.
“Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from it.” Joshua Becker, Simplify
"Live simply that others might simply live." ~Elizabeth Ann Seton
Have a great Friday....and thanks for all your visits!!!! Will catch up soon :-)
© Darlene Bushue - All of my images are protected by copyright and may not be used on any site, blog, or forum without my permission.
Ink and colour on paper, hanging scroll; 137 by 66 cm.
Chang Dai-chien (simplified Chinese: 张大千; traditional Chinese: 張大千; pinyin: Zhāng Dàqiān; Wade–Giles: Chang Ta-chien) was one of the best-known and most prodigious Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Originally known as a guohua (traditionalist) painter, by the 1960s he was also renowned as a modern impressionist and expressionist painter. Chang is regarded as one of the most gifted master forgers of the twentieth century.
Born in a family of artists in Neijiang, Sichuan, China, he studied textile dyeing techniques in Kyoto, Japan and returned to establish a successful career selling his paintings in Shanghai.
Then Governor of Qinghai, Ma Bufang sent Chang to Sku'bum to seek helpers for analyzing and copying Dunhuang's Buddhist art.[1]
Due to the political climate of China in 1949, he left the country and resided in various places such as Mendoza, Argentina, São Paulo and Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil, and then to Carmel, California, before finally in 1978 settling in Taipei, Taiwan.[2][3]
A meeting between Chang and Picasso in Nice, France in 1956 was viewed as a summit between the preeminent masters of Eastern and Western art. The two men exchanged paintings at this meeting.[2]
Chang's early professional painting was primarily in Shanghai. In the late 1920s he moved to Beijing where he collaborated with Pu Xinyu.[4] In the 1930s he worked out of a studio on the grounds of Wangshi Yuan in Suzhou.[5] In 1940 he led a group of artists in copying the Buddhist wall paintings in the caves of Mogao and Yulin. In the late 1950s, his deteriorating eyesight led him to develop his splashed color, or pocai, style.[4]
Forgeries
Chang's forgeries are difficult to detect for many reasons. First, his ability to mimic the great Chinese masters:
So prodigious was his virtuosity within the medium of Chinese ink and colour that it seemed he could paint anything. His output spanned a huge range, from archaising works based on the early masters of Chinese painting to the innovations of his late works which connect with the language of Western abstract art.[6]
Second, he paid scrupulous attention to the materials he used. "He studied paper, ink, brushes, pigments, seals, seal paste, and scroll mountings in exacting detail. When he wrote an inscription on a painting, he sometimes included a postscript describing the type of paper, the age and the origin of the ink, or the provenance of the pigments he had used." Third, he often forged paintings based on descriptions in catalogues of lost paintings; his forgeries came with ready-made provenance.[7]
Chang's forgeries have been purchased as original paintings by several major art museums in the United States, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
Of particular interest is a master forgery acquired by the Museum in 1957 as an authentic work of the tenth century. The painting, which was allegedly a landscape by the Five Dynasties period master Guan Tong, is one of Zhang’s most ambitious forgeries and serves to illustrate both his skill and his audacity.[8]
James Cahill, professor emeritus of Chinese art at the University of California, Berkeley, has claimed that the painting "The Riverbank," a masterpiece from the Southern Tang Dynasty, held by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, is likely another Chang Dai-chien forgery.[9]
Museum curators are cautioned to examine Chinese paintings of questionable origins, especially those from the bird and flower genre with the query, "Could this be by Chang Dai-chien?"[8] Joseph Chang, curator of Chinese art at the Sackler Museum, suggests that many notable collections of Chinese art contains a forgery by the master painter.[9]
I made a product box and tested it out using this old bold and washer. The picture was good but boring so I decided to have some fun using some Topaz plugins I recently purchased. This is using Simplify.
Visited my parents in my home town in the north of Sweden this weekend. This is where I typically take a walk when I am there visiting.
This one for sure looks better on B l a c k M a g i c
Todays challenge for the daily shoot was Experiment in the digital darkroom today. Make a photo and post-process it any way you like to unleash your creativity.
So it was a nice day here and we had some things we had to do, but by about 2:30 we were done so decided to jump in the car and go somewhere we hadnt been before and ended up in Snug Harbor Park on Staten Island a lovely quaint little park which we enjoyed a leisurely stroll around, and this is one of the shots I got today
This shot I played around with in Topaz Simplify, the shot in the first comment is how I would normally have done this shot