Landscape. Where sheep may safely graze?

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
When the shepherd guards them well.


Bach Cantata No 208

There’s a salutary tale here. I have a compact camera and I’m trying to bond with it. So I’m trying to get into the habit of taking it with me whenever I go out. Like most compacts it has a range of effects buried away deep within the menu system and I’m playing with one in particular when I come across this scene.

This is Campbell Park in Milton Keynes; it’s an artificial landscape - an attempt to bring the countryside close to the City. Since we’ve been blipping, Anniemay and I have wandered around this palace looking for blip opportunities and we’re both amazed at just how beautiful it can be, at times.

From where I’m standing, it’s a fairly bucolic scene and then I notice a couple of buildings lurking on the horizon, as if they’re peeking over the edge, watching. And then Big Brother comes into my mind, along with the tune about sheep by Bach.

I snap away and then try the ‘Dynamic Tone’ effect. It looks all right on the camera LCD, but when I get it home and look more closely on the computer I see all sorts of grubby artefacts lurking about that weren’t apparent at first glance. (Any resemblance to an ex-Prime Minister also known as Dynamic Tone, is purely coincidental.)

And this is where I come a bit unstuck; I want to use this image because it’s the only one where the sheep in the foreground appears to be looking at the building on the horizon. But I don’t have a clean one, just Dynamic Tone. So I squirt it through my editing software to see if I can muck it up even more. And I manage to do this quite easily.

So be warned; I resolve to take a leaf out of Anniemay’s book; whenever she uses in-camera effects she always brackets them with a clean version. Just in case.