Paul Capewell

I thought it was time for a round-up. Now that we’re inexplicably in July, let’s talk about some June highlights.

I didn’t watch any films this month. That troubles me slightly, especially as I got into quite a good habit of watching a few earlier in the year. I think with the longer evenings, I have less ‘time’ where I think ‘ooh I’ll just stick a film on’ and so maybe it’s just not a summer thing. I’m also less inclined to voluntarily choose to sit in a dark room for two hours when the sun is out.

I did go to the sort-of cinema though, to the Science Museum’s IMAX screen to see an exclusive cut of the Smithsonian Channel’s APOLLO’S MOON SHOT with a live soundtrack from Teeth of the Sea. It was phenomenal. The footage looked great on the huge screen, and the sound was majestic – the band’s mix of post-rock with some psychedelia and bleeps and bloops worked perfectly and sounded gigantic over the IMAX sound system.

I finished watching FLEABAG after a few month between blocks of episodes. I enjoyed it, and have really enjoyed the occasionally very on-the-nose insights into the inner monologue of a protagonist I think a lot of us can relate to. After not seeing the ending around the time it aired, and being aware of the hot takes about the hot priest, but not the details, I think I expected something more…unsavoury? Instead it was just a believable storyline that fit with my expectations within the universe.

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Having said I tend to watch less films in summer, I now realise I’ve spent probably most of the time I could have been watching films playing THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD. I’ve clocked up more than forty hours in the game now, and recently conquered my first Divine Beast.  The game is so full of small and huge milestones that you always feel like you’ve achieved something, but that milestone was the biggest yet. I am still enjoying almost every aspect of this game, particularly knowing I have a lot left to enjoy.

I wish I knew how long I’d put into JUST CAUSE 2 a few years ago. That’s the nearest comparison I have to BotW in terms of a big openworld game that I played and tried to ‘finish’. There’ve been others like FAR CRY 3 and BIOSHOCK INFINITE that were more linear, but I feel like I spent a long time finishing JUST CAUSE 2 in a different way, and one which I really enjoyed. I’ve also played a bit of JUST CAUSE 3, but it hasn’t grabbed me in the same way. Similarly, I stopped trying to care about SKYRIM and haven’t thought about once since.

M has been playing LEGO CITY UNDERCOVER, which has been enjoyable for me not just because it’s a fun game to watch while doing something else, but also because she seems to be having a great time playing it. It occasionally has a stage she can’t seem to crack, and I’ve realised it’s partly because some stages rely on pre-learned l33t gaming skillz which not all plays of the game will have. Mostly driving skills and sometimes weird 3D game world movement. But I’m very impressed at the overall polish the game has, particularly in the open world setting.

I’ve also played a bit of STEAMWORLD DIG on my 2DS, which is a game I love the vibe of. I just forget about it from time to time and need to re-learn its flow each time I pick it up. But when I do, I really like it.

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We’ve been watching more and more of the ladies’ World Cup football. I’ve really enjoyed the lack of arrogance but no less passion of these women’s teams. It’s the same game but played a bit differently, and most games we’ve watched recently have had heart and drama and skills which have kept us both hooked. The new rules and use of VAR is at times very clunky.

We’ve been cycling a bit more lately*, after we attended a bike maintenance class recently which was laid on for free by the local council.

* I say we; M rides her bike to and from work almost every day rain or shine – it’s definitely me who’s the sometimes/fair-weather cyclist.

The course was really well done – pitched just right for a group of ten with a range of levels of expertise, and the right size for everyone to get periods of one to one help, and the opportunity to get way more hands on than I’d expected. The instructors were so friendly and knowledgeable and had a lot of patience for us all. We were even given a free multi-tool. Our local one has a bit of a waiting list but I’d thoroughly recommend it if your local council offers something similar. I learned a lot about my own bike and some of the bits I’ll need to change soon.

And perhaps sooner than I’d realised, too, as M and I will be going to France for a week soon, taking the ferry to one port, then spending five days cycling up the coast to another. I can’t wait. But I do need to make sure my bike and I are in the best shape we can be before we go.

Earlier this month I ran my first proper half marathon in St Albans, which was a really enjoyable experience. I had great company, good weather, and the course was interesting and at times very pretty. I hadn’t done masses of training, but spent the week or two leading up to it at least giving it some though. I was really pleased with my first official time – by far a PB, especially given it was the first uninterrupted course I’d run over that distance.

I don’t think I want to run a full marathon. I am aware of the areas where my body starts to creak between 10-20km. And although I get into quite a zen state over those distances, I just can’t yet see any personal benefits in doubling that challenge. I would like to run another half because it’s enough of a distance to be a challenge to me, but one I might be able to refine in terms of pace and strategy. And it definitely hasn’t put me off running – even a 5k is enjoyable for me, and can often be a huge mental health booster at a time when I need it.

I also went bouldering/climbing a couple of times this month. M and I have been really enjoying watching the World Cup. And it’s been great climbing with David as he is a) pretty bloody good but b) is patient and offers helpful advice whether I’m eager to go tearing up something I’m not quite warmed up for, or pushes me to try a technique I hadn’t spotted or considered possible. I want to do more climbing more often, I just need to work it into my schedule. Maybe once the French cycling trip is out of the way.

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I recently replaced my Galaxy S7 with a Motorola G7 Power and haven’t looked back. The S7 had a great camera and screen (and the size was nice), but it was always being let down by poor battery life. Most days were fine, but some days the standby time would be surprisingly poor, where other days the features that I enjoyed like the camera or location-related stuff would work fast and well, but absolutely cane the battery. It became so that I’d barely make it to the end of a day doing normal stuff, and I’d gotten used the battery being dead on my way home from a more active day where I’d inevitably used the phone more while out and about.

Conversely, the G7 Power has a weak camera and screen, though both are perfectly fine, but the battery is a beast, giving more than two full days of real use on a single charge. I’ve managed to get to the early evening of a third day, too. I anticipate that taking the phone on trips away will either a) give a long standby time when, say, camping and not using it much and b) work all day with no signs of low battery with intense use tracking bike rides and using the camera and whatever.

One other feature I liked about the S7 was the stereo mics and I recently got a more into making field recordings using it. But I picked up a second hand digital recorder over the last month and have started getting to grips with that. More on that another day, but suffice to say that it’s like going from a half decent cameraphone to a dSLR in terms of quality (not to mention the headroom to clean up audio afterwards, ala RAW files).

I just need to figure out what I’m trying to achieve with these field recordings. But in the meantime it’s a lot of fun just capturing stuff and seeing what grabs me.

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Finally I led a walking tour last week on the subject of Charles Paget Wade. Three years ago I wrote and self-published a small book on Wade and his early life and work, which received some nice feedback and sold about as well as I’d hoped.

In the intervening years I have done more research on him, and decided to run a new version of the walk again. The first walk was the first I’d ever led, but since then I have led two or three more on other subjects.

This time round was quite enjoyable – I had a small but interested and friendly group, and the weather was perfect. It lasted two hours, and I got through all my notes in the right order, and delivered it – I hope – quite naturally and mostly from memory.

In the run up to the walk I have also been finishing a new second edition of the book. I’ve been able to add a few bits and bobs here and fleshed out the details of other segments where I’ve found more primary evidence. I’ve also just been able to give the whole thing a slight wringing-out in terms of flow and readability, and altering the format/size/cover a little. I hope this new edition will be available fairly soon.

In his latest newsletter, Craig Mod briefly touches upon (in a quote from another writer) that the woods are untouchable in words or pictures because of their complexity. This is why, notes Craig, we more often photograph vistas and openings instead. He does point out though that rain or mist brings woodland into relief, traces the contours and depth of some of those seemingly infinite layers.

I find woods can only be reliably photographed on rainy days, mist abounding, giving shape and depth to the otherwise shapeless and boundless.

This all served to remind me of some of the days Megan and I had when we walked the South Downs Way last year. So much of our route was under a blanket of fog, with visibility at times down to less than 100m or so. It made for some quite excellent and otherworldly views and treks, particularly as we trudged along ancient hollow lanes, as shown above.

Some of my favourite photographs from that work were taken, ironically, on days with poor visibility. This was all in striking contrast to our expectations of views to the coast and beyond, particularly as so much of the walk takes place along a ridge line.

I also read a brief summary by Om yesterday in which he tries to distill his growing love and knowledge of photography. One sentence in particular struck me in which he described that (if I interpreted his point correctly) using film taught him that he doesn’t need photography to be pin sharp as it is only a representation of what we see, and we do not see crystal clear all the time anyway.

And it made me think that unfortunately this is something I sometimes forget and I often see photography as a tool for recording a scene in exactitude – a record of the scene, and one in which I want all lines to be sharp and all colours replicated perfectly. And sometimes this is fine and is a good use of my time. It is nice to look back on a (literally) photorealistic image of a place to help transport me back there.

But increasingly I realise that some of my shots that are (perhaps accidentally) not pin sharp or technically perfect but are nonetheless beautiful as a standalone image, and the ones that stick in the mind.

I think there is room for both types of image in my photography and I will continue to just see where the mood takes me in the moment.

Back to Craig Mod’s point on writing about (and photographing) woodlands – I found it to especially interesting to read this in between sessions of reading John Lewis-Stempel’s THE WOOD, a gloriously lyrical diarised memoir of a year spent tending to Cockshutt Wood.

His writing flits effortlessly between light, delicate snatches of poetic writing and multiple paragraphs teasing out the history of biology of an aspect of woodland life. It’s a very enjoyable read.

Lewis-Stempel manages to cover so many aspects of the woodland in this book that I have to believe that it is possible to adequately describe woodland in writing – it’s just that you probably need a full year and about 300 pages in which to really do it justice.

What’s cool today is:

Later I’m going to the Science Museum with Megan to see a special cut of a new Smithsonian Channel documentary about the Apollo program called APOLLO’S MOON SHOT. It’s being shown on the museum’s IMAX screen (which is I believe the fifth largest in the country), and is being introduced by a veteran pioneer of aviation who also happens to be a lady, and it’s being soundtracked by some sort of psychadelic guitars-and-saxophones-and-effects-pedals outfit called Teeth of the Sea.

The poster is really cool:

Somewhat related to this (in the sense that one almost trips over references to the first moon landing at the moment as we near the fiftieth anniversary of that immense event) is a cool set of pictures curated by The Atlantic of when NASA tried to make a dusty corner of Arizona look and feel like the moon to test their equipment.

On the one hand it’s a bit ugly in the way they just blew up vast chunks of desert to replicate the moon’s craters. On the other hand it’s astronauts in the desert wearing denim jeans and spacesuits, driving lunar rovers. It’s wild.

Check out the gallery here.

It ends on a link to the location in Google Maps which stills shows signs of those man-made craters and is a particularly dangerous click if, like me, you often find yourself Streetviewing your way around desolate stretches of highway and sparsely-populated towns in the Arizona desert.

What’s also cool is this guy’s write-up of using a particular piece of journalistic technology called the TRS-80 which was a kind of electronic typewriter-cum-modem which allowed hacks to file copy from the road using acoustic telephone handset couplers.

It has a very specific aesthetic and I kind of love it:

I particularly enjoyed reading this piece because, as Wayne says in his introduction, “I didn’t write this for clicks, or popularity, or recognition. I wrote it for my own edification,” and that’s an attitude I can absolutely get behind when it comes to detailed, passionate, indulgent, readable recollections and memoirs. I loved it.

I stumbled on Wayne’s TRS-80 story in the Hacker News comments on another more mainstream story in which someone describes using a 30-year-old computer to write a column for The Atlantic.

And finally, in a very and finally sort of way, a mis-Googling of ‘TRS-80’ for ‘TR 80’ turned up results showing cute Asian girls holding a digital camera which looks more like a pocket make-up mirror and led me to the product page for the Casio TR 80 which confirms that it is indeed a digital camera from a few years ago which offers, among other more standard features, the following:

• Pimple and Mark Removed
• Lip Effects
• Cheek Effects
• Nose Sculpting
• Eye Translucency Processing

Well, now.

Fortunately (and somewhat inevitably) Sam Byford covered this genre of gadget for The Verge a few years ago:  How Casio is selling $900 selfie cameras in China.

The development of this type of gadget led to the creation of this, which is just so damn cool and I kind of want one: