Visits by candle light

Having enjoyed the Nuit des Musées in Versailles - open from 7 in the evening till half past midnight - I decided to look up what other nocturnal attractions might exist.

There aren't as many as you might think, though many museums now have one late opening every week. The National Gallery, in London, is open every Wednesday till 9 pm, with live music from jazz to Renaissance lute solos. And the Louvre is open late on Wednesday and Friday evenings - which are often much less crowded than during the day.

I was overjoyed to find that one of the rather special nocturnal events is quite close to us - so we will be heading there probably at the weekend. Vaux-le-Vicomte, the chateau which inspired the better known Versailles, has candelight openings every evening in summer. Even better, one ticket will last from 2 in the afternoon - so you can see the fine formal gardens - until midnight. Then, your coach will presumably turn into a pumpkin drawn by frogs unless you hop it smartly.

The chateau of Valençay also offers candlelit visits, which can be combined with dinner from EUR 26 (the basic ticket, assuming you're not hungry, or take a picnic, is EUR 10).

These are aristocratic palaces just made for seeing by the light of the fine chandeliers. But a more down to earth experience is provided by Monday evening visits at the Dennis Severs House in London's east end.  You'll need to book via the web site for this, as times vary depending on the time of year. This fine Georgian house is presented in eighteenth century style, just as if the occupants have left - even their dinner plates are ready on the table. It's a little spooky, and intriguing, and you can go for a curry in Brick Lane afterwards.

While researching York Minster I came across an interesting, and indeed rather moving, account of the restoration of the south transept rose window by the glazier.

And he says two things in particular that are very interesting.

First of all, he's convinced that the window only survived the fire because it has already been restored, so it was in good shape - the pieces of glass weren't loose in the leading, so they didn't fall out.

Secondly, which I think is most interesting, he mentions that when the restoration of the glass was half complete,  he exhibited it in the chapter house so that people could see it from close up. I've noticed that conservationists and craftsmen nowadays are often - not always - keen to show what they're doing.

The old practice was to swathe the object of restoration in layers of netting, and ban visitors - it's still being done in Italy, unfortunately, which seems to be one of the least progressive countries in Europe in this regard. (I would love to be proved wrong.) But if people can't see what is being done, how will they know that it's worthwhile?

Anyway, enough of my views; read the article for yourself.

The sound of the Low Countries

One of the things I've come to appreciate as I've travelled around the Netherlands and Belgium is the sound of bells. Carillons are everywhere.

In Antwerp, the cathedral carillon plays 'La Follia' every hour. That's a tune I know from the Renaissance, being a musician, so I felt welcome in Antwerp right from the start (before the nice guy in the tourist office marked my map with the three best serious beer bars in the city - De Waagstuk, Oud Arsenaal, and Kulminator).

And in fact I've got a closer connection with the carillon than that. One of my favourite composers for the recorder is van Eyck - a blind musician who published 'the flute's pleasure garden' or Der Fluytenlusthof in the 1640s. But recorder playing was only his second trade; he was a carilloneur, too - and, what I didn't know, probably started the famous bellfounding Hemony brothers on the right route to producing properly tuned bells, something that had proved difficult to achieve up till then.

So I was happy to find this exceptional recording on Youtube. Credit to Mr van Eyck (any relation?) for this fantastically exciting piece, played on the carillon of Mechelen cathedral.

Intimacy with the past

It's always fascinating when you come across the past intimately - when you find one of those little things that we overlook, that are completely everyday, that suddenly allow us to step out of our own world and across the boundaries of time into another.

For instance there's a painting in Mechelen cathedral that shows a dockside scene - and on a sack, the merchant's mark. It's not a great painting but that single detail gave me a shock of intimacy - connected me with that merchant.

Or like the time I found a photo of my grandfather as a young man of seventeen. He looked so exactly like my brother - yet his clothes were clearly not contemporary. Again, there was a real shock that the past was so vivid - as well as so far away.

So I really enjoyed this posting by Gawain about  old Venetian playing cards. It's not an "easy reading" blog, but it's a good one. I came across it when I started researching Punch and Judy (Tiepolo sketched a number of Pulcinellos, some in quite surreal positions) and I've been reading ever since.

Bob, bob, bob

A fantastic press release from Travelodge appeared this morning. My favourite of the year, so far, and thank goodness it's not April 1st.
If you are stressed out, they now offer you the opportunity to book quality time with a goldfish.

Two Travelodges, in Leeds and Birmingham, will have nicely equipped tanks for their guests to watch. And we're assured they will be properly looked after.

I certainly would book myself some time with the goldfish if I were staying. It does seem one of the nicer services offered. I remember another hotel chain where you could book out a Nintendo Gameboy for a rather different method of de-stressing.

Why  'bob, bob, bob' in the headline, you may ask. If you can lip read, you'll realise this is what goldfish keep saying. A good thing they only have an attention span of thirty seconds.

Flower power

A little diversion from my usual travel photos; I've been photographing the bearded irises in the garden, on a dewy morning.

It's the first time I've ever taken flower pictures. Normally I never use the closeup ability of my camera or lenses, so this is something new.

A few lessons.

Just because the flower is a few centimetres away doesn't mean I don't need depth of field. I actually needed f22 to shoot down the tunnel of an iris and have the furry stamen clear all the way back.

On the other hand a really wide aperture lets you shoot the flower and keep the grass behind well out of focus, just a blurry green background. It's amazing what a difference that makes.

Don't ever use autofocus doing this. It unerringly picks up just the bit of the plant you don't want in the picture. Use manual focus and choose carefully exactly where you focus - whether it's on the furry inside, the raindrops on a petal, the texture.

Keep moving in all three dimensions - around the plant, up and down, sideways. These are complex shapes - every inch you move will show new vistas.

Zoom in. Relentlessly, zoom in to find a line, a pattern, a texture, a vortex, that makes a complete picture on its own.  Showing the whole flower is for simple flowers, like harebells. A bearded iris has too much complexity for that. I'm amazed how poor my shots of the whole irises are, compared to those shots where I zoomed up close.

I've done nothing with lighting today. No flash, no reflector. Just using ambient light. I might think about using some light next time to get a little more definition on the shape of the irises.

Rain is your friend. Nothing makes an iris sexier than raindrops on the petals.

Last lesson: don't overlook your own back yard. Today I was still a travel photographer,  but I travelled inwards, not away.

Next week: photographing cats.

The station as a destination

I like stations.

York station - a great curve of vaults above the track. Antwerp - a neoclassical nightmare out of Piranesi's prints. Milan - the monstrosity of modern machines created for a Fascist railway. Or even  some that don't exist - Adlestrop, the station of Edward Thomas's poem where no trains stop now, or SAP Walldorf, which shows up as a station on the Deutsche Bahn web site but is (as far as I can find out) actually a bus stop.

Now I've discovered there are other people who think stations are a destination, too. There's a Zone One Tube Race in London on the 18th of May. Every single station in Zone One has to be visited (though as long as the train stops and the doors open, you don't have to get out).  There's an even bigger version visiting every Tube station in all the zones... Zone One on its own takes about 3 1/2 hours if you're leisurely.

Never mind the race. But I think I might take a whole weekend and visit all the London tube stations - and see what I find. I might decide to take a little walk outside the Tube at some of them, to see what I find. That would be a lovely way to take a slice of London. Or perhaps leave a bit of it up to chance; get off at every fifth station, let's say.  Or throw a dice and get off whenever I throw a six.

But... does the Docklands Light Railway count? Or shall I be a purist?

If any readers fancy a trip - let me know. Some time late August might be fun.