Legitimate Interest [557]
Greetings from The Borders...
I’m Christian Payne, autotelic, photographer and writer. You have, I assume, already OK’d this dispatch into your inbox. Its stated purpose is reflection, mild curiosity, and the sharing of small observations.
Your attention may be collected briefly, then released back to you intact.
Thanks for joining in.
#TheAction
Rain, ice, a smattering of snow and sunshine in between. Without tempting fate here in the Borders, we’ve so far escaped the worst of the weather hitting the UK.
This morning a delivery driver got a little stuck trying to leave our driveway. Overnight rain had turned it into a sheet of ice. I headed to a roadside grit locker, filled a bag with salt and sprinkled it over the worst parts.
And what was in the delivery? Ice skates. Not for our ponds, although one of them is thick enough that she could skate on it. (I tested it by walking on it. Badly.) The skates are for the ice rink in Kelso, where she’s having lessons as part of her Duke of Edinburgh award.
Much of my time has been spent hauling firewood in from the barn or hiding out here in the den, sorting and playing records.
I’ve also managed a photo walk with a friend and a return trip to Cambridgeshire in a large van to bring my mother-in-law’s remaining belongings up here.
We are already a third of the way through January and it feels like it has passed in no time at all.
I won’t dwell on how any hope of a normal 2026 evaporated the moment I opened the news feeds. I suspect we are all sharing the same collective madness.
#ThePictures
Me and my Friend gordontant headed out on a freezing cold day to shoot some film around Berwick-Upon-Tweed.
That’s me all wrapped up just finishing a film. I’m yet to get it developed but here are a few digital shot on the same walk. Taken with my FujiFilm X100VI.
I don’t mind wandering around town, hoping a person might walk into frame, but landscape photography sits well outside my comfort zone.
Street work is reactive. I wait, watch and let changing scenes hand me a frame. Landscape photography feels exposed because nothing arrives to save the image. It’s less obvious to me when the scene is ready.
Living somewhere with big vistas and fast skies is forcing the issue. Not because I’ve particularly enjoyed landscape photography, but because this place keeps insisting on being seen.
I only own one landscape photo book and can’t remember ever opening it. But I did read somewhere that the key is to treat the landscape as a stage, not the subject. To look for weather and changes in light. I imagine even the presence of human or animal will work.
Perhaps it isn’t that different from street shooting after all. Maybe the trick is to wait in the landscape the way I would on the street. I suspect you just have to wait longer.
[If you are interested, there is a photo group on Wire called ‘Snapper Chat’ that is open to all. Plus there is also the Discord for supporting subscribers. Let me know if you want in on any of them.]
Nicklas Pettersson is a press photographer currently in transit back to Denmark after working in the Ukraine.
I spotted his photos online and it looked like he exclusively used the Leica Q3. Which would be quite something if he was able to crop into the image for all the focal lengths he needed. So I reached out to him.
He said… “…it (the Q3) covers almost everything. I always have a Sony with a 24–70mm with me, but I only use it if I really can’t get any closer with the Leica. The Q3 is awesome, especially for the image quality and the freedom to crop a lot. I also keep an Olympus MJU in my pocket, mostly just for fun.”
Next week, as soon as he’s home, I hope to be able to share some audio from Nicklas.
I found this cool little app via Dense Discovery. It’s a batch image conversion tool for Mac that will also remove the metadata and enable you to save presets for different images you need to resize or reformat.
It’s called Convert & Compress and is free at the moment with a lifetime price of £9.99 should you wish to pay for it. I’ve converted all the images in this post with it.
#TheWords
This came out of a phone chat with a friend about how much of our lives now run through US owned apps and platforms. About how alliances no longer feel as solid as they used to.
We got onto the question of how ‘private’ those (WhatsApp) conversations really are and how anyone in NATO might talk to each other if privacy actually mattered.
Carrier pigeons came up.
Rather than turn it into a political rant, I put the thought into a poem.
Terms and Conditions
Europe woke up mid sentence.
Later than expected
A blinking cursor where a friend once was,
a joke half sent, a treaty half cached.
Ursula sees the cloud has teeth now.
It chews Marea, chews Dunant,
chews the small vowels of private lives.
Servers hum like loyal dogs
but the hands on the leashes smell of oil and greed.
What shall we do, said Brussels to itself,
when the wires all run west,
when freedom logs everything
and forgets nothing on purpose.
NATO clears its throat.
Deletes a calendar.
Deletes a chat.
Deletes the warm lie that allies do not snoop
when bored or angry or paid.
Ursula is tired of t’s and c’s.
Tired of trust rendered as a checkbox.
She remembers cafés, smoke,
arguments that vanished when spoken,
no backup, no subpoena.
The new plan is very old.
Ink.
Paper.
Walking.
Languages spoken badly but face to face.
And when even that fails,
when the routers log and the satellites grass,
someone opens a wicker door.
Out they go, feathered and stupid and perfect,
carrying nothing but crumbs of truth
and the relief of being unlogged.
Dialogue between a developer and a kid.
“The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.” ― Cornelia Funke
#TheSound
Currently listing to a compilation album of electronica called Multi Source.
#TheConsumed
If you keep feeding a sourdough starter without baking, you eventually need to remove some to make space in the jar. This is known as discard. Rather than constantly doing this, I usually keep my starter in the fridge between bakes, which puts it into a kind of stasis. The only real downside is that it needs around 8-12 hours to wake up and be ready for baking again.
After doing more baking than usual over the holidays, I started looking for other ways to use the discard. One morning, having run out of bread, I used it to make a simple flatbread in a pan. Just enough to build a sandwich for a train journey.
Ingredients: 1 part sourdough discard to 1 part plain flour, 1 tbsp of olive oil and half a teaspoon of salt.
Method: Just mix everything into a soft dough let it rest for 15 mins.
Divide it into balls to roll thin and then cook in a dry hot pan for 1–2 minutes per side until puffed and spotted.
You could also add cumin, chopped herbs or seeds to change things up.
I just buttered while warm and added mozzarella, avocado, red pepper and tomato with a little garlic mayo and seasoning,
This recipe will also work for wraps, dipping bread, or a quick pizza base.
It was bloody lovely.
#TheBody
I’ve been following Rory Cellan-Jones trip round CES and some of the cool health monitoring tech he’s been researching.
#TheThings
You can now laser etch colour onto metal.
Are you able to communicate with no internet? It’s worth considering your options. Especially as experts are warning that the internet will go down in a big way.
As you might know I have another slightly nerdier email newsletter that I occasionally put out focusing on amateur radio. Although it’s the oldest global social network it has not rested when it comes to experimenting and developing new ways to communicate using radio.
Ham Radio operators can chat without an internet connection using voice with SSB, AM, FM, CW plus with text and data modes RTTY, PSK31/63, JS8Call, FT8/FT4, Olivia, & MT63 as well as send images via SSTV & WEFAX. There’s also packet or networking radio with AX.25 and location logging and sharing with APRS.
Finally you can mesh network locally and further afield with apps offline apps and software using Winlink and Meshtastic. There are far more ways to communicate than I’ve mentioned, as this hobby is vast and I’ve only dabbled in a handful of these modes.
There is something for all budgets though.
Should you be interested in getting the relatively simple first licence I will share some details in my next post on G5DOC.net.
You can also visit EssexHam.co.uk or you can check this map and find out where your local club meets.
Mid century furniture fetches far more money than I thought it would. There are some fascinating pieces on this site selling for 10 times what I would have thought.
#TheThanks
Massive thanks to the paying subscribers who continue to support this dispatch and the adventures/experiments that make it. You know who you are. ♥️
If you value these words, ideas and curation, please consider an upgrade to paid…
Or if you prefer a random hat tip you can do that via PayPal
or Monzo …Either way… Thank you for reading, sharing, liking and supporting a human doing manual work with their brain.
#TheWeb
Have you found your friends on Bluesky? I was a littler nervous about adding my contacts to find new connections, but it looks pretty secure if this page from Bluesky is to be trusted. I still added folk selectively as I have 888 contacts. Not all of them are human (some emails or numbers for automated services) and some people are no more. There was also some Arabian royalty, celebs and politicians in there. You never know. They might be on Bluesky. This is me if we are still not connected.
Thoughts on Trumps plan to reshape the world.
If you are reading this in South America please feel free to drop a pin on the Documentally community map. & greetings @andybeddy ;-)
CPIP stands for carrier pigeon internet protocol.
Life in a secret Chinese nuclear city.
Some of my other places include these… Supporting subscribers also get access to a Discord server. Message me for a link. 👍🏽
Some of the things you probably don’t need spotted a CES.
Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first.
#TheEnd
Well done. We managed to avoid 86 toggles of questionable necessity. Thanks for reading. Life is too short not to take any and every opportunity to read. I hope some of this was useful to you.
All errors are sign of life.
If you feel like it, please do that thing where you like, comment, share and (i’m my wildest dreams) try out being a supporting subscriber for a while.
Most of the house are watching Traitors or some such thing, so I’m off out to bring in more firewood, pop a cork and sit in front of the fire with a book.
“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ― John Green
Escape.
See you out there.
Over…
It was definitely cold and was glad I bought those gloves. Hope to develop the film in next couple of weeks