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Toby Miller

@tobytram.bsky.social

1.3K followers 870 following 1.9K posts

Freelance video editor. Nebraskan/East Anglian, so possibly inclined towards flat lands. Once hosted a radio show about cinema, but now mainly take photos using prisms or pinholes. Being kept for my decorative seed head. A stones throw from Cambridge.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

Bridget B @bugshaw.bsky.social · 8h

CFF time is approaching! Oct 23-Nov 2. Usually this is Cambridge Film Festival, but current health and mobility limitations mean complications/risks/discomfort outweigh the fun.
Instead - Craft Fabric Finish, 11 days of projects. I'm nearly improved enough to manage sewing and a little ironing.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 10h

thank you. very kind to say.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 10h

A neighbour’s garden* table this morning. The colours - all those shades of yellow on yellow - caught my eye, but now I realise it looks like a NASA photo of heavy sunspot activity.

*our gardens blur together with a common path. I walk through two gardens to reach the gate to the street.

A round metal garden table. Pale yellow. Lots of fallen garden leaves have rested on top, all in different shades of yellow and light green.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 10h

If you’d told me this earlier I could have shown your reply to the doctors as a sort of voucher. :)

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11h

This may come back to bite me, but all recent tests have shown excellent health, which I can only put down to the constant grinding of my teeth through stress creating a ‘purring’ like vibration which helps me self heal.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11h

An ultrasound today (I’ve had a few tests for aches that may come down to ‘not enough water’).

“What a lovely kidney”, said the nurse, looking at the screen.

Prone on the table, focusing on an air vent “You could have used a less Hannibal Lecter voice”

“Always excited to see a good kidney”

-

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 11h

Knowing that storks carry new born infants to their parents, this raises the possibility that babies come from behind the eye of a central
godhead.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 1d

The tigers of North Essex we call them. Never walk alone in the long grass at dusk.

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Reposted by Toby Miller

Darren Riley @panchoballard.bsky.social · 1d

I find myself in Japan and on an unintended Perfect Days tour. One of the toilets and the record shop (no cassettes!). The record shop owner thought that I was a famous painter and asked me to autograph his wall. I obliged.

A public toilet whose walls are made from opaque coloured glass.

The entrance to Flash Disc Ranch record shop.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 1d

'Sleep' and 'Passion' sending mixed messages there.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 1d

looking over a bike ride on google maps. The slight eeriness of people gathered in a circle. This is the edge of a cricket pitch, and the low sun is in the south, so I think it's autumn mid day - this year!

Maybe it's it's not people, but I'm reminded of the scientists in Thing from Another World

A screenshot from Google Maps's satellite image. In the corner of a cricket pitch are at least 21 pixels of white, with 21 elongated, human shaped shadows stretching across the grass. It's a stone circle of shadows. There are parked cars nearby. Unseen in this image, but there's a pub just to the right.

BRB - gonna make a fortune writing a fantasy trilogy starting with 'A Stone Circle of Shadows'

A still from the scene in Howard Hawks' 'The Thing from Another World' where the foolish American scientists measure out the buried and frozen alien spacecraft by gathering in a circle.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 1d

Yesterday in signs:

A local field for local people.

Autumn colours in leaf and stock car metal.

A sign on the fence of a field
!
CAUTION
Farm Livestock
with their young

Just out of focus in the background - a single sheep staring at me.

Corner of a road. A triangular sign alerts any passing motorist that:

BANGER RACING
HOT RODS ETC.
TODAY SUNDAY in
HENHAM
STANSTED RACEWAY

In the background, in a hollow of autumn shaded trees, a pink and blue beaten up car is being taken away on the back of a truck - like a prize striker being stretchered off after a fierce tackle.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 2d

Thank you. I think he was pleased he could be excited aloud, even if it was to a total stranger who had cycled up.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 2d

Continuing my occasional series of Panavision views with a black cat hiding just off to the side.

A line Pylons lining up with the sunset. A sky of orange, pink and purple. The nearest pylon stands in tall grass, and off to the side, paying no heed to either the electric giants or the vanishing sun, is the distinctive shape of a black cat. It is watching the night approaching.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 2d

Saw a man towing a pumpkin. Too many shapes and colours to ignore, so I asked if I could take photos.
“Ignore me. Just keep towing; it’s the shape of the pumpkin in the wagon I like” I explained.

He has just won first prize at the village show.
- Congratulations
- Thank you. I am very happy

Seen from behind- an enormous emergency red pumpkin sat in a metal wagon. It has a sticker with Kit Kat written on it. A man is towing the wagon down a narrow village pavement.

He had been using two hands behind him to pull, which is the composition I really wanted. But I didn’t want to get all David Hemmings and start posing him.

A photo from the side of the man - big broad smile, like he’d won the lottery - pulling his pumpkin in a trolley.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 2d

The new (and third this year) Brian Eno / Beatie Wolfe album ends on a high - which doesn’t quite go on long enough. I could listen to this as a whole album.

For the last decade Eno sounds like he’s chasing the treated Omnichord sound Daniel Lanois liked so much in the 1980’s.

youtu.be/_KjI605GOQI

Shudder Like Crows

YouTube video by Brian Eno - Topic

youtu.be

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 3d

The Autumn Listening Station - empty acorn cups hanging on a spider web, looking like a hovering alien radar keeping an ear out for disquiet and revolution. Quisling acorns.

A batch of three acorn cups, stalk still attached, hanging many many feet from its parent branch on an invisible web line. It hovers int he air, against a cold comforting autumn sky.

Closer on the acorns. They are dark and featurelsss against the cloud. Mysterious. Their little dishes listening.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 3d

A visit to a garden centre closing down. A melancholic place; picked as barren as a whale carcass; flowers faded, with a photo of their spring pomp; trees waving their pale bare branches in the hope to please,

An empty polytunnel which was like being under ice, the autumn leaves skating overhead.

An empty, near derelict polytunnel, with a laminated sign on the outside promising:

All labelled &
priced plants
in this poly-tunnel
are for sale

A photo of the polytunnel roof. Plastic, mottled with dirt and dust, dull bright with milky sunshine. A single leaf, a rusty red, stamped on the outside of the plastic - looking like the fossilised footprint of a dinosaur.

The same, only now there’s a cluster of leaves, in the anti-matter emptiness of the dirty polytunnel plastic.

One leaf again, adrift in the soft dull white of the plastic roof. Its shape is only just defined, as if it’s a memory of an autumn leaf.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 3d

Free chillis at the market veg stall this morning. “Too many to know what to do with”. The usual autumnal shapes and colour - a Mos Eisley of various monstrous squashes, a battalion of barrel-chested leeks - put me in such a good mood I wandered off with their wire basket and they had to chase me.

A white plastic bag, its maw open like giant cooking pot, filled with red and green chillis.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 3d

I believe so, but not by me. She’s one of my neighbour’s four cats, but lives with me about 80% of the time. She doesn’t like to share homes with other cats.

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 3d

Rula refuses to face the TV during any horror film.

A marmalade cat on my lap, looking away from a television showing:

BELA LUGOSI
in
The DARK EYES of
LONDON

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 4d

This image, this poor plastic
horse all out of place, keeps reminding me of the end of Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, when the battlefield is full of men screaming and the bewildered horses nearly upside down, their legs kicking at smoke.

Lego Lost At Sea @legolostatsea.bsky.social · 4d

Playmobil horse lost to the sea

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Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 4d

The BBC story about Prince William being 'visibly upset' as a widow discussed the loss of her husband. I've no interest in the prince, but these lines are remarkable. Has anyone bar family ever asked him this? And the poetic scale of the lines, from the heights of 'prince' to a simple gentle query.

a snippet from a much larger article on The BBC

The prince seemed too upset to speak.

"are you ok?" she asked

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 4d

brilliant. Absolutely that dog's running internal monologue.

Toby Miller @tobytram.bsky.social · 4d

I do like how, at 43 seconds, the cut to Jane Wyman leaving the tent allows for a flip of angle, moving Sim from the right to the left, and creating a slightly tighter background for their chat. a simple scene kept interesting.