iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I recall this being the film where Stanley Baker attempt to romance Jeanne Moreau whilst wearing fluffy slippers.

Sorry, missed this reply. Thank you very much. The stones are such gossips.

Face, probably of one of the locust Martians from Quatermass and the Pit, on the side of a 15th Century pew.

A deep wood of a 500 year old pew. A knot of harder wood has, through time and the direction of the afternoon sun in October, taken on the shape of skull like grey alien.

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ah, the music track is McCrimmon Will Never Return, adapted by Gavin Bryars Ensemble. One of the recordings on Eno's Obscure Records Label.

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This is St Botolph in Hadstock, which is impossibly ancient and storied - the oldest working door in England lets you in; It is possible this church, in 1020, is the minster King Cnut requested to honour those who fell in the battle of Assandun. It is one of the anchors holding Essex in place.

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This year I've been aiming to make more tiny films from my wanderings - sketchbooks films that I can't spend too long on. I can't cycle back and shoot pick-up shots. He has found us / The stories we have heard / The lies we have been told / The Kings that we have crowned / The Sun that we have felt

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

sorry, nothing at all that professional. The Polaroid Flip model simply has a setting which permits double exposures. But I am still getting the hang of what works best with that trick.

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St John’s, Duxford - empty, preserved, and a theatre of shadows. Double exposure Polaroids, with a single exosure playing gooseberry in the middle. The grand west window shadow, overlapped with close ups of red flowers left on a window sill. They work, but composition lessons to be learnt here.

The aisle of an empty, light filled church, superimposed with a small bouquet of flowers in a glass vase.

(There is too much north window in the flowers composition - the criss cross of the leading is too distracting, and takes the eyes away from the photo’s strength - the aisle of pews sitting underneath the flowers)

The Nave of an empty church. The shadow of the west window sits exactly - a great sun of window - between the pillars leading into the chancel. The rest of the church is shadow and memory of the shape of all churches.

Another double exposure. This time the thin stone door to the (long missing) roof screen is overlapped with the flowers.

(But it’s a confusing image - and not overly interesting in its confusion. I turned the camera upside down, so the stone door is upside down, and the flowers are too close to the camera - so they are blurred, and once again that damn north window is there, a bully of focused perfection, dominating the image)

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The splinter of light at 4.30pm, St John’s, Duxford.

Back of the chancel of an empty church, looking towards the light through the west window, which is splitting the church in two - a shadowed half and a half of complete darkness.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Hadstock Church, and the shadows of the hanging lights cast across the north wall - finding their shape from west to east.

The shadow of a hanging lamp, cast across a whitewashed wall. It is ill-formed and not quite present.

The next lamp along, again in shadow form. Now it is strongly a lamp, and the shape of the window bringing the light into the church may also be made out.

The third shadow, nearest the chancel. It is a sharp black, and the underlying shadow of the narrow South window sits underneath it like a tablecloth.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

Fiona McLees @mclees-fiona.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

“every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.” The Brown Tea Pot, Gwen John, 1915-16 (YCBA)

A painting of a corner of a room, with stool, table, and part of a fireplace surround. A teapot and cups stand on the table, a book on the stool, a pot of brushes on the mantelpiece

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

That owl kept close enough that I could have talked to it about work. But did I keep stupidly sliding my phone camera into timelapse mode - yes.

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

The daytime owl. Poking my nose into an old barn just off a footpath; a screech, and a barn owl soars out, looking like somebody has drawn the word OWL into the blue sky. Then it proceeds to buzz me. Irritated at being disturbed, annoyed at my nosiness. Too excited, I can’t get my phone to focus.

An owl flying away from the debris of a barn a farmer has forgotten.

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

Lovely cross section of Cavlo Nero at the market today. “Come and see a lovely cross section of Cavlo Nero!” bellowed the market trader. “Wonder at how the calm reservoir of the root makes the fractal entanglements of the leaf!”

A long plant Cavlo Nero stood upright on a market stall, cut lengthways to reveal the complex interior structure.

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I am genuinely about to move house BUT I now realise I stupidly told them this (we were discussing less wooded areas East Anglia)

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They'd murdered Bunce, covering their tracks with the fake "we're thinning the deer herd" story they told the lone cyclist they met. But they didn't count on that cyclist having a social media account he has to keep busy with pleasing tales of people he'd met.

So I sent this Anne Carson poem to my mother, who replied with this anecdote from only this morning. About my father and his shelves and shelves of books.

Bottom half of a text message:

Also I became wrapped up in the many manor houses that were lost between 1930 1960, The Wars changed the Country, anyway I was babbling away to your father about them when he got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. "Just a minute he said " After a few minutes he came back and plopped a large book in front of me
"Requisition of the Country Houses by the Goverment during WW2. "

It was amazing .. perfect .. it brought tears to my eyes. He has always been there with his library. Like " There you were kneeling by the roadside

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The Vampire Manager, sitting in his cinema watching - Cinema Paradiso style - a compilation reel of people in cinema kissing.... their lover's necks.

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remake The Smallest Show on Earth, but the owner of the fleapit cinema is a vampire, who took on the business because of the delicious late night customers, but becomes enamoured with the magic of cinema, and fights to keep his movie palace open. (this actually seems a decent idea for a story)

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Ticket's bought for tonight's town hall pop up cinema screening of Murnau's Nosferatu, with live cello score. If I was a vampire, newly moved into the area, I'd harvest fresh, but healthy aged, blood by pretending to host a pop up cinema screening of Murnau's Nosferatu, with live cello score.

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The line “your little toolkit” - the familiarity and security of that - reminded me of the moment in Klute when Jane Fonda’s hand gently clutches the back of Donald Sutherland’s jacket. Just marvellous, how you can turn a few words over and over in your mind, and they attract meanings like a magnet

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He was also small and squat, while his companion farmer was tall and thin, demonstrating that the countryside is still on the Roald Dahl operating system.

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The heart of this encounter gets lost a bit in ‘farmer with a gun’. I’m sure I’d disagree with this stranger on many things, but it was like an encounter with a different map of the countryside - he referred to the woods and paths by the families that kept them, or the animals that used them.

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Yes! I sent this to my partner last night, and it was the little toolkit line that moved me very much. For me it's like the Seamus Heaney line: Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig

Two trees flipped Polaroid double exposure of two trees - part of an avenue to an ancient house in a field. Took the photo, then turned the camera over for the same view, only now upside down and laid over the other like a memory. Not sure if the double exposure is what drains the chemical colour.

A field edge with two trees - one mature, the second almost a sapling. The image is duplicated over the top, only upside down.

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Double exposure Polaroids of the Apple Orchard near the Roman Road.

A Polaroid photo of an apple tree, with the branches and apples of another tree in the orchard exposed over the top.

The same - two apple trees cross over each over in a Polaroid double exposure.

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Final word - there’s either too many predators: Buzzards, Red Kites and Magpies outnumber the song birds. Or too few predators, so deer now wander in numbers that would flatter an army. And ivy! he exclaimed. “Ivy is rampant now, and nobody seems to have noticed”

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It must be my fleece jacket and sensible bike helmet, as I don’t have a face and hair that farmers warm to.

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Cycling; met a farmer with a gun. He’s thinning the deer, he explained. But then, fascinatingly, he broke down the villages and fields by the deer herds - the white herd at Henham and the brown deer of Dave’s wood. Then he explained the raven gangs - the Audley End flock you see here sometimes.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Gradually moving the bed away from the wall so the cat can stay in the sun. The cat is working up her theory on this mysterious continental drift.

A bed with a cat on it, already a foot and a half from the wall. The cat remains content in a sunbeam.

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aha, I am just holding my phone (on a small selfie stick tripod, which negates a little of my hand shaking) in one hand while steering my bike with the other. I was surprised it was so smooth considering it's a gravel farm track.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"...he's just a nervous system"

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Ah, that’ll be a poacher block.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Ah, I didn’t know Henham was also a St Mary. I was keeping it a little vague, so people could explore on a map if they wanted to. :)

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

St Mary’s is fairly remote (for the corner of Essex near the M11). I filmed my cycle to it to for my partner (she doesn’t cycle, so rarely shares these experiences with me), and as I was cycling/filming I had Radio 3’s NightWaves on headphones - playing Jóhann Jóhannsson’s A Song for Europa.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

St Marys, tucked within the fields between Thaxted and Stansted Airport. One of the oldest churches in Essex; serves a population of about 40. Today the flights into Stansted came in low overhead. So I made a film about that - the near millennium of stone under the jet engines every three minutes.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

We build our churches one atop another. Double exposed Polaroid of St Mary the Virgin, a tiny and fairly remote Essex church.

The nave and east window of a small church, photographed close up and from thwe back of the chancel - one overlaid over the other.

The Polaroid Flip has a double exposure option, and aims surprised I got this composition to work. It’s a bit hit and miss as a technique, and I do struggle to settle my mind down enough to focus on the job at hand.

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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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Sorry, I don’t like the way that looks. Wascally Wabbit xx That’s better.

That rings a bell. Ah…I’m thinking of Nightmare Before Christmas!

Or enormous fans. It could be read as those are the only certainties in life. Darning and death.

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Oh, that’s wonderful. Quite brought me to a stop.

The fact that the remaining letters contain the word ‘wind’ is a small triumph in a grim world.

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