Archive June 2022 by Kathryn Polley Photography

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June 2022 Archive

Helensburgh & Lomond Highland Games 4th June 2022 There was glorious weather for the first Helensburgh & Lomond Highland Games since Covid-19 put a stop to play (and everything else). I took members of the Photography & Wellbeing Group from Jean’s Bothy along for what turned out to be a fantastic afternoon. I only wish I’d thought to wear a hat!

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Helensburgh Community Hub Volunteer Day 11th June 2022 For some time now I’ve been pondering the large number of amenites we enjoy in Helensburgh which are tended to or even fully provided by volunteers. Things that we might once have assumed the council would take care of seem more and more to have been left to volunteers as budget cuts have forced services to be similarly slashed: weeding the beds in the new town square, putting up Christmas lights, beach cleans, maintaining parks, managing woodland...these are just a few of the things our community benefits from and which rely on the services, skills and time that people give freely.

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I know many of us have volunteered in some shape or form during our lifetimes. It might have started in childhood with something like the Guiding or Scouting movement, or as an adult in between jobs. Some of us will have first experienced volunteering when our children started to attend playgroups, Sunday Schools, dance classes, sporting activities; we signed up to be on the PTA at schools, or we were needed as part of the fundraising team for a cause that was close to our hearts.

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It occurred to me that the very visible volunteering activity that I was reading about in the local paper was actually just the proverbial tip of a much larger iceberg. There were countless volunteering roles out there being fulfilled, quietly, diligently and without fanfare. I wanted to know more about both the people choosing to volunteer (who they were, what led them to give of their time and energy and why they chose the roles they did) and the organisations that needed them (why volunteers instead of employees, what was different about working with volunteers rather than employees, how did they recruit these unpaid positions) What were the benefits, and the challenges on both sides of the equation? It was evident to me that there were tales to be told here, but it also seemed like an opportunity to do more than mere storytelling. A project, celebrating local volunteers whose community spirit does so much

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to make our town a better place for everyone could act as a spotlight on the practice and help make volunteering more visible and accessible. Until recently, most of these thoughts were just jumbling about in my head with nowhere to go. A chance encounter with Gill Simpson at Helenburgh’s Community Hub gave me the chance to air out some of my ideas and plans are now afoot to work on a collaborative project on volunteering which I hope to be able to say more about in the very near future. In the meantime, as a soft start, what better way to get into it than to photograph some of the goings on at the Community Hub’s Volunteer Fair.

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Glenarn Gardens, Rhu 18th June 2022 The Photography & Wellbeing Group from Jean’s Bothy gathered in Rhu for a walk around the lovely Glenarn Gardens. The group is intending to enter into a photography competition being organised by Scotlands Gardens Scheme and we have three eligible gardens to visit close by - we will be making our way around them all.

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Experiments in Digital Design I have a new project to pitch to a local group and wanted to design my own graphics for the presentation. It started out well enough and then went horribly wrong when somehow a combination of my clumsiness and the presence of my cat meant that the smudge tool was not just selected but also dragged down my drawing. I quite liked the effect and finished off what Maddy started.

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Sorry This Photograph Does Not Exist I don’t remember what I was looking for at the time but clearly I didn’t find it because when I reached the site where I hoped to be educated, uplifted, inspired, whatever, all I found was this marker. Which gave me pause to wonder. Had the photograph ever existed? Is it only not on the internet now? Or only not on this part of the internet? Is it sitting, dusty, on someone’s hardrive or has someone truly taken it round the back and duffed it up until it’s no more? Did it ever exist? Is this just some cruel con trick to make me think there was something there of interest that I could have seen if only I’d been fast enough? Might it exist some time soon and this little black card is the photographic equivalent of Lorem ipsum? Should I keep coming back to check, just in case? A marker or placeholder of course made me think of gravestones and now I’m

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wondering if not too far into the future we’ll be remembering our dead not with ceremonies and headstones but little black online boxes telling anyone who stumbles round the world wide web and into our virtual graveyard that they’re sorry but we no longer exist. I wonder if we’ll be allowed to to select our own typeface? (Just think, all the jokers out there choosing Comic Sans to be ‘ironic’, added to all the people choosing Comic Sans with no sense of irony at all. How will we tell the difference once they’re dead?)

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What really amused me though is that whatever this announcement might be, the thing that’s clear is that it isn’t a photograph. It is a bit like me walking around with a sign around my neck saying ‘This Panda Bear Does Not Exist’. But that got me thinking about what a photograph is. Afterall, once it’s online it is just a collection of pixels and our little black calling card here isn’t any different. (And maybe, if all the atoms that make up me can and will have been a zillion other things first, I can claim to be part panda!) When I was about eight I was given my first camera - a Kodak Instamatic that made square prints and provided extra light to your scene by means of rather satisfying ﬂash cubes. I think they were even called magi-cubes and I know I found them magical to hold and gaze at. The light they produced was a bit harsh and unﬂattering but at that point I can’t say I cared all that much. I distinctly remember feeling though that photographing something was magic. There was a sense that I was performing a sort of graft, shaping and

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peeling away a thin slice, a veneer of reality to take away and keep for myself. With no physical print necessary now, do I still feel that way? Yes, because for me it’s the moment of capturing the reﬂected light in whatever box it is I’m holding that matters. The click of the shutter is like the turning of the key on a box of treasures. Whether I take those treasrues out or not, whether those treasures turn out to be bottle glass rather than diamonds, whether I develop and print or digitally process the treasure on a computer doesn’t matter to me. The photograph exists because I made it. I don’t need you to see it, I don’t even need to see it myself. It is quite simply, there and does indeed exist.

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Posters Designed For Argyll & Bute Violence Against Women Partnership As part of my day job, I represent UHI Argyll on the A&B VAWP. As the war in Ukraine continued, and as women and children from Ukraine started arriving in Argyll, the Partnership wanted to look at ways we could get information to them in case they found themselves in difficulties. Someone suggested a poster to be placed in supermarkets, doctors surgeries, on the ferries, in train stations and so on. I offered to design it if they could provide the relevant information to be included. The original English language poster has now been translated into both Ukranian and Russian (the two main languages of Ukraine) and is being included in Argyll’s welcome pack for those arriving here to try and stay safe.

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Amimated Sequence - Wee Jaggy Plate I found the Wee Jaggy Plate at the Helensburgh & Lomond Highland Games at the beginning of the month and knew it wouldn’t be long before it was pressed into service for a recipe video. You can do more than make garlic puree though. In this video I also used it to grate nutmeg.

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Slow Cooked Squirrel In Dark Ale for Kezie Foods This was a first for me - I’ve never even considered eating, let alone cooking squirrel before. The recipe included prunes and nutmeg as well as sweet potato and tomatoes and overall it felt like a really lovely autumnal meal to enjoy with buttery mash and greens. The squirrel was quite robust and gamey in ﬂavour - so if you like that sort of thing you’d be in for a treat.

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