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Scrapyard on the Essex/Suffolk. Old metal overflows from here like it’s a curious beast. There are rusty clawfoot baths and rustier sit-down mowers, queued up on field edge. But I like this weird arrangement. The ladder to the windmill.

A tall and tightly structured hedge - like the hedge for a maze. A ladder is leaning against it, though doesn’t reach the top.

There’s a sign for the scrapyard, screwed to a post that rises out of the hedge. Atop this post is a weathervane, and atop the weathervane is a metal depiction of a windmill.

It’s is cluttered, but it has a surprising flow.

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This year I’ve been thinking of tractors as vast blue-collar space freighters, turning past the rays of a dying sun, answering the distress call from LV-426.

A tractor and seed drill, turning to roll back up the field, silhouetted by the low ball of furious sun.

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For #FingerpostFriday - just passed this, tboth nice in the clatter of the remaining letters (as if a storm passed through), and the ghost font left behind in the cleaner white wood.

A wooden road sign with the pointer towards
sewards End
Radwinter

Missing a large number of letters, so it now reads:

SEW. D. ND.
A I E

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Dr Eleanor Baker @eleanormaybaker.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Heard myself calling the cat (Rula) by my name this morning. "Not now Toby" This is the second step in the spell where cat and man gradually change places. First step was last night, when I ate a handful of dry breakfast cereal not unlike cat treats.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

Well...the 'wulf' is out of the bag. Professor Daniel Wakelin and I were the Middle English consultants for Robert Eggers' upcoming film Werwulf, in UK theatres on January 1st 2027!

An image of a screenshot from a webpage from IGN that reads 'Eggers did copious amounts of research on England in the 13th century for the screenplay, he co-wrote with his The Northman collaborator, Sjón. The film’s dialogue is in Middle English, although it’s been altered by dialect coach William Conacher to make it more comprehensible for the modern ear. Eggers also worked with two Middle English scholars at Oxford University, Eleanor Baker and Daniel Wakelin, who helped make the dialogue more period accurate.'

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Zombies - but all bitten and turned while on a hike, so their undead walk is with trekking poles, at the creepy half a hurry speed, and with the clack clack clack of a Ray Harryhausen skeleton.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Happy Birthday Michael Powell, here seen performing a magic trick with a single sheet of paper. I only planned to post that one shot of the paper drifting down, but then I was reminded of the miraculous sound of it all! The unearthly choir! The footsteps! The echoes! And half the set is a painting!

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Evening walk. Tawny owls with their rusty hinge call. Shining my torch into the top of the trees to see if the light finds an owl, and if you stare long enough the underneath of the tree tops become the reeds at the bottom of a river, and you’re looking down rather than up.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Just poured whiskey over some dried fruit, to soak them for a cake. Mixed with a few fingers, and the hard liquor scent took me straight back to....a pub in Todmorden, which our German photography lecturer took us to in about 1992. I've never given that pub a moment's thought, until this Wednesday.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

BlogMyWiki @blogmywiki.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I know there’s so much competing for your attention, but I’m very proud of Listen with Other and I’d be delighted if you gave it a try. Each series is standalone so you can start anywhere. If you like it, tell your friends. If you don’t, tell your enemies. I’m not fussy.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Rain on horizon. I open my backpack and move the Polaroid camera, film, and notebooks to the safety of a plastic bag, like a spy preparing to swim stolen blueprints across the Danube.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Moving some of my furniture into my partner’s house. Finally our favourite chairs can sit by side.

A wooden reading chair, all faux leather, and arms as wide as the sea, sitting alongside a plush red chair the shape of space age punctuation.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Local village steam fair. They have steam pump which simply draws water from the river and shoots it back out again - the waterfall behind this black labrador. Plus a miniature locomotive and this nice scene of symmetry and hobbyist joy.

A black labrador happily alert against a rainfall of warm steam and pumped water.

A shiny miniature railway on anarrow track, with a gentleman in a plaid shirt and baseball cap sitting on the coal wagon in order to man the controls.

Going the opposite way a gentleman in a mobility scooter.

They are crossing paths.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The abandoned spur to the factory - the way in and the way out via Polaroid.

Polaroid of an overgrown railway track. A little overexposed on the shrubbery the hot and loud sun is hitting.

Polaroid of further down the abandoned line - now the line is seriously overgrown. Nothing is using this track except trespassing photographers and deer.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Reporting back from just one of many possible futures.

A small tree growing between the tracks of an abandoned railway line. It’s just catching the sun, while half the line is bathed in shadow.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

Kate Carpenter @katecarpenter.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Kirlian printing at @photofusionuk.bsky.social last weekend. We applied high voltage electricity to objects on photographic paper; the corona discharge, resulting from ionisation of the air, is recorded on the paper. This is dill and rosemary from my garden. So much fun!

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

3 dogs have barked at me on this evening’s walk. This is very unusual and has made feel quite lonely and useless. It’s like having somebody you admire laugh at your sketchbook.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

An adaptation of Dracula where he has to move castle, and he has so many books and BluRays, and everything is so dusty and there's so much hair left by The Children of the Night. Plus he has a hernia and asthma.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The tree at the end of the world.

The crack in a mirror form of a tall skeleton tree, in front of a spectacular sunset sky that appears to be a disco ball on fire.

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An enormous spider just ran across the floor with the speed and excitement of a spider with 4 pairs of new shoes to try out.

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This is a wonderful museum. I visited just before last Christmas, when it had been forgotten a little in the rush of later afternoon shoppers. In each room a light came on as I entered, like it was eager to show me the marvels on display.

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The Ghost Train. That shine of earth across the field, that looks like moonlight on plough marks - it’s the route of the cutting that once took the London train through the hill and to Suffolk. I don’t quite know why the field still, decades after filling, dries to reveal the ghost of railway.

A ploughed field at late duck. The moon is near full; a house is lit like beacon atop
the hill.

The field of ploughed earth is dark, bar a strip of oddly dreamy and pale soil

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This is below a lighting rig the height of Godzilla. It’s an artificial moon for a night shoot. And for some reasons there’s a spotlight on this ladder. It’s as if a small one-act play has been happening away from the film shoot

At the bottom of a hill there is a movie lightning rig, at the feet of which is the A frame of a ladder. It sits within the circle of a spotlight. There are no people present

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On my evening walk and the whole of the front lawn of Audley End house is lit up with movie lights for a night scene; a great lighting rig over trees like a Brachiosaurus wearing mirrored shades. And over it all is a nearly full moon: a parent who’s walked in to find children trying on its clothes

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tempted by a first mince pie, all shiny on the supermarket shelves - but mince pies in September should have fallen leaf on their pastry lid. In October, the lid has a ghost; November has the symbol for a storm; December, the holly leaf. Then January a little pastry representation of a tax return...

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Last month (and a bit) of other people’s cats. This morning - a cat for every point of the compass.

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On my evening walk I happened across four teenagers - still in school uniform black - menacingly walking up to a boy on the ground. This looks like a fight….oh, the boy on the ground is filming his mates. A low angle to get them against the street light. “It’s media studies” one boy muttered.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Sheltering under an oak tree from the rain. There should be a chance you could emerge into any period of history that oak has been used to shelter from the rain. (I have my Polaroid with me, so anytime before its invention I’d be wizard - for the 8 photos I have loaded)

The oak tree above me as I type this. Old and cantankerous, and then there’s the oak tree to consider.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Dog shows are lovely in the warm leaf litter of early autumn. I met Cleia (winner - cutest dog) and Dotty (“she just wants to go home” apologised her owner - and as soon as they wrapped up “dog the judges would like to take home” Dotty marched her way out of the arena and over the bridge out)

An adorable fluffy black dog. Very friendly.

A sausage dog looking at me through the red plastic fence that kept us fans away from the celebrities.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

For 12 years I’ve been lucky enough to live next to the town green, and have had neighbours of visiting fetes, dance music festivals, the same circus every year, vintage motor shows, football practise, bouncy castles, and craft stall. Today, the last event before I move, it’s the delayed dog show.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The cat walks by. He’s had his second dinner already, and gives my kitchen door the cursory glance of a Saturday shopper who has already checked that charity shop for good used books and records.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

A great late summer bumble bee Falstaffs its way into my home office. "the King has forgotten me" he buzzed, bumping into the door.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This is like two forms of punctuation meeting outside the usual confines of a sentence.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Virginia Woolf’s foreword to the catalogue of Vanessa Bell’s solo painting exhibition of 1930.

Virginia toyed with the issues of gender that had plagued her own career as well as her sister's:

One says, Anyhow Mrs Bell is a woman; and then half way round the room one says, But she may be a man. One says, She is interested in children; one has to add, But she is equally interested in rocks. One asks, Does she show any special knowledge of clothes? One replies, Stark nakedness seems to please her as well... Is she - for our patience is becoming exhausted - not a woman at all, but a mixture of Goddess and peasant, treading the clouds with her feet and with her hands shelling peas

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Waiting a whole week for video footage for a single urgent edit because my client refuses to learn how to use WeTransfer and I have to wait for them to drive this way again. I wish the people who hired me also feared me a little more. Not fear I’d get angry, but that I’d stop working for them.

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What scene makes you emotional no matter how many times you've seen it? (alt text - A Canterbury Tale, in particular the barely even whispered “why?” when Alison Smith finds out her late fiancé’s father is asking for her. Just the right balance of hope and fear)

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YouTube video by Kate Bush - Topic

Everything I have done in my life since 1985 has probably been an attempt to be this song. To dress like it, to walk like it, to see like it, and to sound like it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI5_...

youtube.com

Watching You Without Me

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Fresh passport photos taken. All in all I’ve luckily aged well, though at some point my eyes have been replaced by haunted cathedrals either side of my nose.

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The Essex coast has had the SS Richard Montgomery for too long! It’s time for another part of the country to host the wreckage. Hoist it out and helicopter it elsewhere. Job creation as tourism will bloom around it. Communities will thrive.

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Got a birthday card design, though it’s only good for one particular celebration.

A very fluffy orange and white cat (not my cat) standing glumly in front of of a wheelie bin with the number 23 on it.

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Surprised to find the atmospheric St John’s in Duxford still open as the sun went down. A few photos of its light filled, empty as a trap, interior, with a prism under the lens. But I’ve done this before… So I photographed some cows on the cycle home, and I’ve added those.

The west window of a small church. The setting sun is throwing itself through in a rugby tackle of light. The only shadows hide in the wooden beam roof.

A prism under the lens reflects the top half of the window back on itself, so the window sits in a pool of floorless light.

The interior of the church, which is kept uncultured and austere: Pale walls, arched into shadows, glorious east and south windows, beams of light.

Again a prism under the lens reflects the top half of the photo back onto itself, a little like the church has been emptied of pews and filled with water.

A cow, added in photoshop on my phone, is grazing the light filled east end of the nave.

Again, a cow, this time just standing, is in an otherwise empty church interior. A prism
Reflects the top of the photo.

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Back home just before all the land is gone.

An Essex village church against the sunset, photographed with a prism right below the lens, so the church is barely present, a sinking presence of tower and half a nave, reflected as if in deep water. The sky is last minute blue and feathery and flirtatious cloud.

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Vanessa Bell goes to the ballet. Picasso! Satie! Cocteau! This is like the end of the avengers film when all the heroes come out of the portals.

She (Vanessa Bell) attended the London premiere of the ballet Parade in November 1919 and when she wrote to Clive, enthusiastically describing it, he read her letter aloud to Picasso, Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau with whom he was having lunch in Paris: 'It had an immense success; & Picasso showed himself a good deal touched.

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