Who needs window dressers?

Window dressing is, I'm told, a job. If you aspire to the heights of that line of work I imagine you end up dressing windows in somewhere like Oxford Street, London. But, there is another way of encouraging people to stop and examine the items you are selling. Simply cram the windows of your establishment with the multifarious objects you sell. That seems to be the approach of The Architectural Store in Ross on Wye, Herefordshire, which has several windows filled in this manner. And, it works. After I had taken my photograph I crossed the street to look at what was for sale.

photos © T. Boughen     Camera: Lumix FZ1000 2

Window, wall, LEDs and pennants

The arrangement of shapes and shadows, both bold and fragmentary, drew my eye to this window, wall and especially the sphere with LEDs. It was in Hay on Wye and obviously the latter came into its own (along with several others) after the sun had gone down. During the day multicoloured penants (see below) were the town's chief decoration. However, that ball and its LEDs set my mind wondering. Does the increased number of LEDs used for decorative purposes overwhelm any savings made by the obviously energy-saving substitutions of the newer technology for filament lights? Probably not. But it has to be conceded that LEDs now crop up in places and numbers that we wouldn't have thought possible when they first came into use.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Lumix FZ1000 2

View from the coffee shop window

This photograph gets its pixellated effect from translucent plastic that has been fixed to the window to mimic frosted glass. At the bottom it lets very little of the outside world through and the decreasing size of the "pixels" as you go up the window allows you to see more and more. We often sit at this window in one of the local coffee shops and I take the occasional photograph through it, fascinated by the effects it produces.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Lumix FZ1000 2

View through coffee shop window

The view from the coffee shop window was unremarkable - vehicles, passing people, and a few market stalls, with the stone-built historic buildings the most interesting things on offer. The view through the window was another matter due to the sheet of dots that had been laid over the lower half to give the coffee drinkers a modicum of privacy. These dots, that decreased in size the higher they went up the glass, gave every object seen through them a pixelated-cum-Pointillist-cum-newspaper print flavour that kept me amused for quite some time.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Sony DSC-RX100

Ornate pub window

Britain's Victorian and Edwardian public houses (pubs) sometimes seem to have been decorated on the premiss that more is better. Ornate designs covered most surfaces, particularly walls and any area that was tiled. The latter often included the whole of the exterior. Windows were rarely left untouched. Typically they told whether the room behind the glass was the public bar or the saloon bar, and frequently designs celebrated the pub's individual name. This example, that I passed in London, is a mass of cartouches, foliage, flowers and fruit, with at its centre what looks to be a thrush or blackbird.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Sony DSC-RX100

The feral pigeon

The feral pigeons that we see in the towns and cities of Britain are the domesticated descendants of the rock dove (Columba livia), a wild bird that is still native to the UK. The feral versions carry the same Latin name even though in many (though not all) instances they look quite different from their wild ancestor. Today the truly wild rock doves inhabit a just a few northerly sea cliff locations. However, their descendants are everywhere. This feral pigeon, perched on a sill at the old Borough Flour Mill at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, perhaps saw the building as an inland cliff.

photo © T. Boughen     Camera: Olympus OMD E-M10