The Harvest Moon, arguably the most famous Full Moon of the year, arrived on Saturday the 29th of September this year over Leeds, this full moon is the closest to the autumnal equinox (Sept 22nd) for us in the Northern Hemisphere, and for me signals the true onset of winter, a time of year I really enjoy.
My shot of the Leeds Harvest Moon 29th September 2012 [Click to Enlarge]
Watch out for the next Full Moon on October 29th, It’s called the Hunter’s Moon!
The Scenic Route to the Yorkshire East Coast just off the A166 to Bridlington is quite a forgotten and beautiful drive in my opinion, as nowadays most drivers prefer to get stuck in the queues on the A64 for some unknown reason, it starts just as you leave Fridaythorpe at The Seaways cafe ‘aka’ The Bike Shed a traditional stop off point for bikers, motorists and walkers deviating from The Wolds Way. The first of our glorious views was as you come out if Fimber on the B1251, the weekend of our visit was the farmers Harvest with fields as far the eye can see full of bails of hay.
Continue reading The Scenic Route
Maybe its my creative side coming out, but I seem to see things like faces and animals in all manner of places, they say it’s a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, something I do quite often of late, this Pareidolia phenomenon is also proving quite popular on the social photography app Instagram with over 93,000 images already posted under the hashtag #iseefaces, here’s a selection of ones I’ve posted.
This History
The legendary Carl Sagan hypothesized that as a survival technique, human beings are “hard-wired” from birth to identify the human face. This allows us to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces. The evolutionary advantages of being able to identify friend from foe with split-second accuracy are numerous; prehistoric (and even modern) men and women who accidentally identify an enemy as a friend could face deadly consequences for this mistake. This is only one among many evolutionary pressures responsible for the development of the facial recognition capability of modern humans.
The actual word Pareidolia comes from the Greek words para (παρά, “beside, alongside, instead”) in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον “image, form, shape”) the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is also a type of apophenia, (seeing patterns in randomness) and hierophany (a manifestation of the sacred) but these perceptions of religious imagery quite a lucrative phenomena with the publicity surrounding the sightings of religious figures and other surprising images in ordinary objects has now spawned a market for such items on online auctions like eBay. One famous instance was a grilled cheese sandwich with the “Virgin Mary”‘s face.
With Halloween just around the corner, this has to be best Halloween ‘Themed’ Drinks idea for the budding mad scientist to create, simply add chilled Vodka and Lime juice to a shot glass, then use a straw or small tea-spoon to drip Irish cream into the mix. The acidity from the lime juice will cause the Irish cream to curdle, creating realistic blobs of ‘brain’ and for that extra ‘gore’ just add a few drops of blood-red grenadine into the drinks and abracadabra you have Halloween Blood Brain Vodka Shots.
There’s very few ‘perfect’ vantage points to take photographic vistas of the Leeds Skyline, I can count on one hand the various locations and one of them is my bathroom window, which now has its own hashtag on Instagram #privypics. So I’m always on the look out for that perfect spot for picturesque sunset photography, which I finally seem to have found a few minutes drive away from the house the other week…..enjoy the pics from the last three visits to ‘My Vantage Point’
Continue reading Vantage Point
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