Shettleston’s Annick Street church – as NOT seen from Aldi

Some time ago, I was walking near Shettleston’s Annick Street when I noticed an alternative of view of the church located there,

I collected a set of pics, anticipating being unable to do so later.

I was right.

If you want pics anything like this one today, you either have to think about it, as you’d have to be able to take pics THROUGH the Aldi they built on the concrete slab in the foreground, or speak nicely to the manager, and get onto the roof.

Alternatively, take a WIDE pic from the street, with Aldi behind you.

Now that I’ve said that, I might try it, just to see what the result looks like.

Whitevale Baths remains – but not as you’ll see them now

I chanced across a set of pics of Whitevale Baths – but NOT as they look today.

Neither pic could be taken today, as flats now obscure both of these views – completely in the case of the view of the back of the old building, and partially in the case of the front view, which you have to go along Whitevale to see the facade now, thanks to the new build across the road, on the former open ground.

There used to be even more behind the facade, but I’m guessing someone ‘On High’ was offended by the sight, and ordered it cleared.

And now, it’s a local landmark!

Interesting to reflect on the fact that there’s been sufficient time to pass for the original tenement that stood here to be demolished (I’m guessing in the 1960s), be replaced by a block of ‘modern’ flats (guessing again, from the 1970s), which were then demolished (I can only guess around 2000) to leave the open ground seen in the above pic, which stood vacant for many years, and then for ANOTHER block of ‘modern’ flats to be recently built on the same site once again.

I don’t know when the first set of ‘new’ flats were demolished, but it felt as if they weren’t there long before the building was emptied, sealed (I watched it being boarded up, flat by flat over time, from the bus), then eventually demolished. I always wondered why, as they weren’t occupied for all that long, and a load of houses (where there are now more being built on the same land adjacent to the Bellgrove Hotel retained exterior) are now being built once again. The first lot disappeared so fast, I almost didn’t realise they’d gone. Then again, that may also have been a time I wasn’t in that area very much.

I’d appreciate the dates, if anybody knows them.

When pics go bad (with apologies to Stockingfield)

I didn’t know I still had the set this pic came from, the rest were binned months ago.

But when I saw it again, curiosity grabbed me once more, and I had to see if anything could be done with it.

I don’t have any of the EXIF data that should have been recorded with the pic, as that seems to have been just one more thing that wasn’t set up properly at the time.

You’ll just have to guesstimate from the sky, and the fact that the lights were on.

I’ve placed them as an image compare, but they’re not aligned as editing the image’s crop and alignment were among the fixes, and I wasn’t going to waste time aligning the original to the edited version.

I just wanted to see if something better could be made of something my first reaction had been just to hit the Delete button on first sight.

Jekyll and Hyde camera games

I came across some unused pics I took of the Stockingfield Viewpoint recently, unused because I couldn’t decide if they were any good.

The problem was that I’d arrived there fairly late, and dusk was falling (as evidenced by the various lights), and I was only carrying a compact camera. I didn’t want to miss the shot, so grabbed a few before carrying on home.

Finding them later meant I wasn’t so critical (in other words, I’m spoilt by taking night pics with a dSLR, and have become really critical of anything else), and was surprised by the decent pics (provided I didn’t zoom in and look at detail).

Being from a compact means they’re noisy, but I tried combining denoising and sharpening, which kind of works, provided no zoom and crop is required. There’s a little exposure tweaking for the shadows and highlights, mainly to bring out the sky.

I guess it’s not too bad – you can see the crane in the distance on the left, and the spire, or bridge suspension support has come out with detail and colour, and that’s something that just gets lost if the camera’s really not up to the job, and better left in a pocket when the light falls.

Was Ayr’s ‘Experimental Crossing’ experiment a failed experiment?

You’ll find a few posts in here, made when I first spotted an odd road crossing near Ayr’s Carnegie Library, just after the New Bridge.

This will find most of them Ayr’s Experimental Crossings

In those posts I expressed a number of concerns, not because a new system was being tried, but because there was absolutely NO INFORMATION provided, and no guidance for users.

In fact, the only way I found out anything at all was to address emails to the local council.

Since then, I discovered more of these systems, one on St Leonard’s Road, near the level crossing on Belmont Road, and another on the first roundabout after Prestwick, at Prestwick Airport. I have no idea if there are/were more, those are just places I happened to be, and noticed them while I was there.

All anonymous and unmarked, with no road marking for drivers, or instructions/guidance nearby for pedestrians.

It’s almost as if someone WANTED this to be a failure, or just didn’t care

Vandalism seem to have been the main observable result, with the flashing amber lights being attacked. These were already missing in some cases when I first saw these crossing, have deteriorated further, and have never been repair (at least not the last time I saw then a few months ago).

This was the Carnegie installation recently (the only one I can really photograph easily).

Note the amber lights that alert drivers of people crossing, detected by the presence detectors. Oh! You can’t, most have been pulled off the poles.

I gave up trying to find out any more about this, or if there was any official report, and decided to hand it over to an AI search tool.

It worked, interestingly (or alarmingly) apparently finding all the same negative comments I had made about the system months ago. I wonder if it’s just regurgitating my comments, which may be the ONLY info it could find online!

In recent years, an experimental road crossing system was indeed installed near the Carnegie Library in Ayr. Here are some key details about this initiative:

System Overview

• Location: The crossing system is situated on New Bridge Road, adjacent to the Carnegie Library.
• Technology: It features presence sensor-controlled lights. These sensors detect pedestrians and activate flashing amber lights to alert drivers.

Community Feedback

• Uncertainty: Many local users have expressed confusion regarding the operation of these lights. There are no clear road markings or signage indicating the rules associated with this crossing, which has led to uncertainty for both pedestrians and drivers.
• Drivers’ Reactions: Observations indicated varied responses from drivers; some yielded to pedestrians, while others continued without stopping.

Concerns Raised

• Safety Issues: The lack of markings and clear instructions can pose safety risks, as pedestrians are unsure when it’s safe to cross.
• Vandalism: There have been reports of damage to the lighting system, suggesting that the infrastructure might not be very robust.

Conclusion

This experimental crossing aims to enhance pedestrian safety but has faced criticism for its execution and lack of clarity. The project appears to be part of a broader trial of non-standard roadway technologies, but further communication and guidance for users may be necessary for it to achieve its intended goals.

I don’t think there’s anything I can add, after my initial observations ages ago.

Other than to comment on the joke amber lighting installed on the poles – lightweight materials and wiring that a child could have pulled off with their hands, and probably did.

Although I suspect some people might want to know what it all cost, who got the money, and if anything came of it.

Didn’t have the heart to leave this little guy behind

Since I’d used up the best of the worst of the high ISO test shots I collected recently, I just couldn’t leave this little character behind.

It’s a little ornamental doggy in someone’s garden, behind a fence.

The pic’s SUPPOSED to be small in here – making low resolution images bigger doesn’t make them easier to see, the opposite in fact. Make it small, and all the bits can magically merge and reveal the subject.

Not sure why the camera even took the pic, since there’s no way it could have considered this to be in focus, but it did. It should have locked out the shutter button.

With any luck, you’ll be able to make out it’s eyes, the hint of a nose, and the bone it’s holding in its mouth. That’s the colour it has under one of the last sodium street lights around here.

Every time I pass it, I think it looks more like one of the sea monsters from the 1970s, as seen in Doctor Who. 😇

I think I’ll have to get a REAL pic of it one day.

There’s not much you can do with something like this, other than play the making it small trick.

Good news?

If you’ve been driven nuts by these experiments, then the good news is that I seem to have run out of them.

And been inspired by the more sane type of night shot using sensible settings.

Given that I see little daylight, and won’t for the next few months, it’s time to get back to working on more rational views, of the non-flash hand held variety.

Trouble is, I seem to have, once again, forgotten all my settings for pulling these off, and the first few have already gone in the bin as they were terrible.

😢

Did someone have a REALLY bad day on their bike

I’ve ‘accidentally’ collected a couple of junk bikes over time, with the intention of restoring them to barely rideable condition, for use in high theft risk areas if I have to leave my ride for more than 5 minutes, and it’s out of sight.

Needless to say – this hasn’t happened. All I do is shuffle the bits around.

Truth be told, part of the reason for this is down to the price of parts, even cheap bike parts are actually expensive compared to buying them all at once on a complete new bike. Just like cars!

Some years ago I came across an old YouTube feature where some ‘Waste of Space/Skin’ DJ had his moronic fans send him money (they got nothing in return) so he could build his ‘Dream Car’ from parts, apparently some 3-series BMW. According to this video (I think the series is gone now), he succeeded in building his car, using BRAND-NEW DEALER SOURCED SPARE PARTS, not parts obtained from scrapyards.

According to this video, he spent around £300,000 to build the car, which I imagine could have been bought from a dealer’s showroom for more like £70,000. At that time, I think a top end street (not race ready) Porsche would have been Between £80,000 and £100,000 of you went mad on the options.

I made a start on these two bikes, but soon lost interest when I started totalling the price of basic parts, not even major brand names. A few brake levers, bits of braking system, gears/chains, all pretty basic, but all really trashed, and the total rapidly build when added together.

Eventually, I admitted defeat, realising that a new junk bike from Halford or even Amazon was only around £100.

The way my parts bill was climbing meant I’d soon reach that and still have work to do.

I should have thought about this sooner, having replaced one MTB wheel twice, and passed ⅓ the price of the bike just for that (buying the cheapest named brand I could find), and just one could easily have reached half the price of the bike when I bought it (and it was not an expensive posing piece).

I happened to be shuffling those junk bikes around, and had a look at one of the wheels, and pulled the tyre off, since it had always been flat.

I wonder what the story behind this inner tube was. I’ve had holes and punctures, one that even wrote a tyre off (the inner tube would just burst after cycling 10 feet, such was the damage to the tyre).

NOT patching that!

Wonder if it was a material failure or manufacturing defect?

I once caught a puncture while cycling along the canal through Maryhill.

No hassle, I foolishly thought, only to find I couldn’t inflate the tyre after changing the tube.

Pitch dark at night, I did have light with me, but moved closer to the street and street lights.

A guy in an electric buggy came along and offered to help, Despite the buggy, he actually cycled, and went to his house for another pump, but got the same result with it.

Eventually, I dug out another tube (the first had been sealed new in its box from Halfords).

After all the hassle and furious pumping, we looked at each other in disbelief as this one just inflated right away – we assumed a faulty valve, and I just went home.

I tried replacing the valve on the first tube when I got home, but still couldn’t get any inflation.

I was less than amused when I threw that tube in a bucket of water, and found it had a hole, fitted from new!

Like I should be surprised, with my luck 😩

Remember those times I said strobe lights were a pic problem?

Well, not this time – something was different, and I don’t know what.

I’ve previously moaned about the effect of strobe lights on pics, after grabbing night pics at sites where the emergency services (police, fire service) were in attendance.

These light are extremely high intensity, short duration sources, making it difficult to deliberately have them in shot, or avoid. Rather than waste time trying to do that, just take a series of shots, and hope to get a result amongst them.

I got a chance to do this recently, during my high ISO games, when I came across some gas service vehicles. There had been a vehicle here for a few nights, strobing away for hours, although it was just parked where anybody could have parked normally (any excuse to play with the toys 😉), and there was nobody around to alert others to.

This time there were bodies to be seen, creeping around with what I assumed to leak detectors.

The next day, there was indeed a hole in the pavement, with barriers around it – but nobody to be seen, and no vehicles.

Anyway, I took advantage of the vehicles and their strobes to grab a few test pics, to see if they showed the effects I had suffered before.

The did. But, unlike a previous occasion, when landing on a strobe flash completely destroyed the one pic I took (I hadn’t encountered a night strobe before this one), these seemed to come out reasonably well.

I wonder if it’s a side effect of using very high ISO? Or the fact that this encounter was amber, rather than blue? I also recall those blue strobes were emitting rapid double flashes – two flashes each time they flashed. Does that make a difference?

Also interesting that the pic taken with NO strobe light present was completely underexposed, a surprise, since there was more than enough street light (you should be able to see that the large van is actually parked directly under a LED street light) for a reasonably well exposed shot.

I wonder if this is related to the extremely short duration strobe light, and the timing of the shutter operation, slightly behind whatever scene the camera metered?

I’m guessing, and will have to watch for this if I ever come across another night strobe scene.

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Complication

I’ve noticed a change in this effect.

This is probably down to the ability of simpler/cheaper LED light sources to be pulsed extremely quickly, and simulate the effect of ‘real’ strobe lights.

The originals used xenon flash tubes, driven by high voltage pulse circuits, producing extremely intense, genuinely short flashes of light, and used in camera flashes. These could easily get down to 1/30,000 sec or less, and be used to freeze motion.

I’m not sure how close LEDs come to this (I’ve yet to trip over any relevant tech articles), but I’m guessing their flashes are a lot longer, and arrays are needed to produce similar brightness.

Just another grotty high ISO night pic

About to run out of these high ISO test pics, but this one caught my eye as there’s (not counting the lack of detail) not much wrong with it, ignoring the burnt out white highlights of the downlighters on the house.

It’s better than I thought, but did need to have noise removed from the dark areas, and a touch of contrast enhancement and sharpening, just to add some edges.

The light has been reasonably rendered with a cold white on the house, something warmer for the LED streetlights, and some golden yellow for the HP sodium at the bottom of the hill.

The trees are reasonable, as it the road, and the completely unlit area with the trees on the left has come out as black. Even the bare branches on the tree in the middle can be seen against the sky.

One thing I haven’t mentioned in the test pics is the sky.

A few years ago this would have been yellow, from the nationwide LP sodium street lighting of the day. Alternatively, it may have suffered some weird colour shift (nobody ever told my why) and shown another colour, often gaining lots of blue, which could be a pig to correct/remove.

When I run out of these tests, I’ll have to try to find some way to improve the focus/sharpness.

I used to think it was either bad focussing on my part, or the camera, depending on conditions, but that seemed unlikely as various attempts to cure both didn’t make much difference.

I thought it was my habit of always shooting hand held, and related to the settings and higher ISO I tended to use (nowhere near as high is the recent test shots featured), but when I fired off a few low ISO setting using a tripod, I STILL couldn’t get sharp focus, and the results weren’t really all that different.

I must be doing something wrong, or missing something obvious. ☹

Interesting – novelty or significant?

I almost wish we couldn’t have a personalised registration without having to fill in a database entry recording its meaning or significance.

While most words, names, initial, and things like dates are easy to have a guess at (not necessarily correctly), and even novelty plates can be recognised, there are still those who change plates simply to have something that is undated, or anything that’s not part of the current scheme.

I’ve even been contacted by owners of plates which just seem to be random collections of characters, but are clever representations of their name – and obvious, IF you know their name.

That said, I’m generally thwarted by anything like this, although there is one obvious connection, unless I stalk the owner, there’s no way to know.

IIG 80 caught on this white 2018 BMW 318D Sport.

That was in irritating pic, possibly because it was a white car.

Almost everything I did to improve the low light shot affected the whole image, and I couldn’t find a tool that just affect an area I wanted to adjust.

Trying to make the white whiter – just made everything lighter/grey.

Something ALWAYS goes wrong – 2025 Fireworks NOPE

I’m sorry. Somehow this became a ramble.

Skip about halfway down to avoid most of it, and get to the pic waffling.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Glasgow City Council ended its Glasgow Green fireworks the year after I made my first visit back for years, and had by then managed to acquire a camera that did the show justice, when I had a look for alternatives this year, things just went downhill.

The only big alternative was Strathclyde Park, which I did get to last year, but couldn’t get very near, public transport options are limited, as in there’s only one bus. That said, for just viewing the show, there is a selection of nice high viewpoints, which almost work for pics too. The problem is really mine, have been spoiled by the great close view offered by the Glasgow Green show.

And the news told me – NO Strathclyde Park show this year, thanks to extensive works being carried out in the park, near the watersports area.

Well, that’s really my own fault, having barely made it to the park at all this year, and that wasn’t recent.

I tried

I was initially just going to forget it this year.

I’ve gone to a high road that overlooks the surrounding area, and the view is interesting, but everything is far away and small, so quickly gets boring.

Then I remembered I’d spied some high spots not far from home, and wondered if they might be better, not being so far away from the action.

The 10-minute walk revealed a reasonable viewpoint, although I had no idea what might be seen, and there did not seem to be anything listing any sort of local displays. As it was, it seems some wealthy people were burning their own money, with some sizeable shells being launched nearby.

While the view was reasonable, the same cannot be said of a few old trees (in other words, they were big), or a few streetlights, which unfortunately land both sodium and LED right in the view. While I found I could climb a little higher and almost get above them, I had to stand in some more recent trees, and their low branches got in the way, leaving only a few places where I could stand.

But, there was a REAL problem

I’ve mentioned this before, when just rambling about really low light night pics, when it gets too dark for the camera’s autofocus to operate.

By then, it’s too dark to see any detail in the viewfinder, and switching to manual focus doesn’t help – modern cameras don’t come with the eyeball focussing aids seen in the old days of film and NO autofocus.

Then, we had split prisms in the viewfinder – all you had to do was find a line somewhere, and adjust the focus until that line was not split by the prisms, and you were focussed. You didn’t actually have to be able to see anything. The other common one was an area of microprisms – once they disappeared and the area looked smooth, the lens was focussed on the subject under those microprisms.

In this case, all I could see in the distance were the dots of streetlights, and it was not possible to see when they were sharp.

Just to make things worse, a consumer level lens is really only made to work with autofocus, and/or bright scenes, so its manual focussing mechanism is far from brilliant. My lens seem to have terrible hysteresis in manual, meaning the focussing ring has to be moved a lot before it starts having a noticeable effect, then it just too coarse,

I didn’t really get anything worthwhile – although it did appear to be OK in the rear LCD. In reality, it wasn’t once inspected at full size.

But, at least now I know – all I need to do is find £3 k to £5 k to get close to shots I consider good.

A few from the night – but focus was largely a disaster.

I usually overcome this sort of thing by focussing on something at the same distance as the subject, but here, there was just nothing.

This was the first shot I took, wide to get an idea what it contained, and autofocussed because there was light from the streetlights.

Note how the old sodium light has thrown so much glare it’s impossible to see/recover anything near it, while the LED has completely controlled its light.

I haven’t caught such a wide area of sky in a shot like this for some time, and it’s abundantly clear that white LEDs have now displaced the once dominant yellow sodium light.

This was just the next one that came out with a semblance of focus.

Could it have been improved?

Probably, but time is still a factor.

This one did have a reason.

Unfortunately I don’t know it, but the illumination of the clouds from some ground source was strong at this time, although it did diminish later.

All I could work out was that it was south of the East Kilbride Expressway, on a line through Blantyre and Limekilnburn – but it’s hard to be exact in the dark.

This one caught my eye because of that rising column of smoke.

It was interesting because to the eye, it wasn’t nearly as noticeable as the view recorded in the pic.

Last of the remotely usable pics was another unexpected result.

Seen here, the exploding firework is almost all visible.

But, to the eye, the portion behind the tree was almost completely invisible.

When I first saw this, it looked almost as if the firework was in front of the trees, rather than behind, which it wasn’t

A little more info

This was a spontaneous outing, with no planning or real thought, just to see if ANYTHING could be captured.

As usual, all shots are hand held, demonstrating that the usual open shutter and tripod with a delayed or remote shutter firing is not the only way to take firework pics,

I see that the typical shutter speed was in the order of 1/20 sec – mix all the rest as you like.

Unlike last year, where I was obliged to use a tripod, I didn’t get any trails with wavy lines from vibration – my own fault for manually triggering the shutter while fireworks were exploding, but unavoidable as the distance meant I couldn’t hear the launch, and preempt their arrival.