Weather Photography

I have always loved the weather. An elderly neighbour during my childhood, Mr. Laskey inspired me to adopt meteorology as a hobby. For years, I had  misidentified Mr. Laskey's Stevenson Screen, a white, wooden weather instrument shelter, for a beehive. He was a kindly neighbour, who would come up his garden to return lost tennis, cricket and footballs over the fence. He found it amusing when I enquired about his 'bees and honey'. I asked if he could one day show me his weather instruments. When he did, I found them fascinating. He owned a maximum thermometer, a minimum thermometer, a grass thermometer, a soil thermometer, Snowdon rain gauge, a hail gauge made from aluminium foil and a barograph in his sitting room. He ran a coal boiler all year, never owned a colour television and neatly recorded his weather observations in leather-bound log books. Those were the days when neighbours actually spoke. Today, neighbours only visit my mother's house to complain about fires. The woman next door likes to throw snails over the fence. Mr. Laskey was a real character and you don't meet people like that today. He died in 2013. The new owners applied for planning permission to build a modernist shoebox next door. The council rejected it, but the owner appealed, won and excavated Mr. Laskey's beautiful old terraced garden, with its heather, primroses, mature trees and gravel paths to make way for an architectural abomination. I don't know who's in the house now, but Mr. Laskey will be turning in his grave. 

I carry a Sony mirrorless camera in my backpack at all times for capturing high quality images of things I see. My mother studied art and she has a talent for spotting patterns in random objects. When I show her the camera LCD, she'll tell me about an old man sweeping leaves and a giant face blowing over a pane of glass. I share this trait too. I saw Joe Biden in dried toothpaste on the bathroom windowsill. I can definitely see a bird in the second photo. There's an angry bearded man riding a puffin in the third last image. The final image is a rainstorm at sunset, but it could easily be a massive wildfire or a distant mushroom cloud from a nuclear weapon used as a last resort at the end of a war. As a photographer, I am limited only by my imagination.