The pictures in this post were taken in early 2011. A bit cold, a bit damp, but you should get a feel for the place from them as very little will have changed.

The Chesapeake Mill is the main antiques shop in Wickham and it’s very easily spotted on account of its timber frame and abundance of all signs on the exterior, particularly vintage dog food signs. The mill itself has an interesting architectural history in that those wooden beams came from the heavy frigate USS Chesapeake which had fought the British in the War of 1812 then been captured, pressed into service for the British, and ultimately broken up.

All this to say that here then are some photos of the street art around Hilsea Lido on an overcast day in March.

While it may not be the greatest example of artwork featured, we were nevertheless very pleased to see a cruise ship represented. Did you know that we like cruises? We hardly ever mention it.

While there were some lovely pieces by lots of well-known artists there to enjoy, the piece that most people visited for was the collaborative work between local legends My Dog Sighs and Fark.

This was from our very first cruise all the way back in 2008 aboard Diamond Princess in Asia for our honeymoon and it was taken on one of the last sea days of the fabulous experience. I didn’t really take very many photos of the ship at all which can be explained by a lack of mobile phones with good cameras on them and me only having a 50mm prime lens on my DSLR at the time with the photography hobby being very new. I did pick up a Tokina wide angle lens in Hong Kong during the cruise and this shot was using it and getting more of the ship in view. But because it was late in the cruise all the excitement and strangeness of being on a ship for the first time had eased away into wonderful relaxation aboard and things like photos and videos of ships just wasn’t a thing back then. Oh for a time machine.

The photo now is a lot brighter and sharper, with a lot of the noise colour noise removed and some brightening of the shadows to just pick out what’s going on under the covers. A pale wash to both lighten the yellows and make the water in the pool pop has been added and the curves have been stretched to bring out more contrast.

Did you know that deer like to eat clothing? Well we didn’t know that but there was a gated section within the wildlife park where you could walk amongst the deer and I still have fond memories of laughing along with numerous other visitors there at the time who found ourselves the sources of nibbled hoodies and jeans and undone shoelaces.

These sculptures, though, were from much closer to home, and a few minutes’ walk from where I used to work in Chichester back in 2011. The cathedral would often put on art displays over the years, sometimes with religious themes – see Sacred And Profane for one example – but also with wider appeal too. In fact, the sculptures in this post were on show just a couple of months before those in that link.

I’ve tried to hunt down the names of the pieces and sculptors in each case here but haven’t been entirely successful. If you recognise any work that I’ve listed as Unknown and feel in a helpful mood then by all means leave a comment or shoot me an email and I’ll fill in those knowledge gaps.

A hazard of taking photos from bus windows is that they are prone to colour tint problems, dirt issues, motion blur, and reflections from inside the bus or from windows on the opposite side. The last of these was the issue with the original photo here but this picture makes use of the Camera Raw algorithm for reflection removal and the result works very well. Other than that, just a little bit of sensor dust removal, some noise reduction, and a bit of a boost in colour and brightness finish off the adjustments to the original shot.

Car registration number plate dumping was all the rage in 2011. Everyone was doing it.

The building that looks a little like the upper part of a modern destroyer is part of what’s now known as the Portsdown Technology Park, but for those of us who’ve lived all our lives in Portsmouth it will always be ASWE. That stands for Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment and we all just assume that horrifying experiments took place there and may still do. That’s what watching too much sci-fi will do to you.

A concluding photograph looking down on the great, historic city of Portsmouth as we arrived back at our car. As is mandatory for anyone at any high point near where they live I must now state that I can see my house from up here.

For more views from near this vantage point there are also some pictures taken from Fort Purbrook.

A second thing to bring up here as well is that technically this place is called Lee-on-the-Solent but I don’t know anyone around this part of the world we live in who calls it that. We haven’t got time to throw definite articles into the middle of place names like that.

So, the following pictures come from a short stop here over fourteen years ago as I write this now. Why did we visit this coastal part of Hampshire? You’ll have to jump into a time machine and go ask Past Me about that because Present Me doesn’t know for sure. Maybe we’d hit Fareham’s shops and decided to go exploring instead of heading straight back to Portsmouth. I just can’t remember. However, we did go through a phase of parking up along beaches all around England and taking in some sea air so it’s not even out of the question that we headed here on purpose as the only thing to do on that day. It was a Monday, straight after Super Bowl the night before, so we would have had the day off work and likely feeling a little jaded after an early hours of the morning finish.

There was a lot of barbed wire fencing around properties on our walk. Were the people of Lee-on-Solent all untrustworthy criminals? Are they still all untrustworthy criminals? Or was the fencing to stop whatever was inside from getting out?

Some of that fencing was to stop anyone from apparently stealing a hovercraft from the Hovercraft Museum. You’d be surprised how many elaborate heists involve the use of hovercrafts and why it’s important that security is top quality around establishments like this.

Actually, that Hovercraft Museum looks cool. We’ll have to head back to Lee-on-Solent one day when it’s open and have a proper look around.

Very interesting to look back at the photos now and see Tux, the brand identity penguin for Linux on a café sign. Looking through Google Maps snapshots it looks like they finally changed this between 2017 and 2018, possibly after someone questioned them as to whether they had officially followed the licencing rules for use of it.

The original photo was decidedly flat and rather dull, suffering from a lack of exposure caused by the variation in light between the sky at the end of the street and the shadowed street itself. For this rework the image has been sharpened, had contrast added, and had the colour boosted. Acid treatment to enhance some of the greens and reds in particular has been overlaid with low opacity just to get a little more depth into all the elements. The detail in the clouds has been brought out a bit and the overall colour temperature has been brought up a little too.

However, in 2015 there was at least some halfway decent reason to bring up the air fighter campaign over Britain from 1940 and if you’re good at subtracting numbers or reading post titles then you’ll have already worked out that it was the 75th anniversary of this period in time. September 2015 was therefore a time to thank those still alive who’d been there in the best British way possible – minting some coins, producing some jingoistic tat, sticking a Union Flag up in the window, that sort of thing – and part of that included a flypast of aircraft from the era.

At the time I was working in Chichester and this was part of the route that some planes flew over or practised flying over so at lunch one day I headed off to a suitable spot like many other people and waited for the drone of engines to fill the sky. Here then are some photos of the Battle of Britain 75th anniversary flypast in 2015 and I’m not going to pretend to tell you what the aircraft are. Sure, I can recognise the distinctive shape of a Spitfire and it’s very possible that there are Hurricanes here too but I’m not prepared to dig deeply into this to work it all out. If you like planes from the World War II era then you likely know what these are anyway.