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Interesting facts about Conkers

Britain is believed to be the only country in the world where the game of conkers is traditionally played with horse chestnuts in the autumn.

Horse chestnut trees were first introduced to England in the late 16th century from Eastern Europe.

Horse chestnut conkers, unlike many other kinds of chestnut seed, are unfit for human consumption.

Conkers are edible by deer, cattle and not surprisingly, horses.

The first recorded game of conkers was on the Isle of Wight in 1848 and was modelled on a 15th century game played with hazelnuts, also known as cobnuts.

The origin of the name 'conker' is unclear, but one popular explanation is that it stems from the French word cogner, meaning to "hit" or "biff".

Extracts from horse chestnuts have been used to treat malaria, varicose veins, diarrhoea, frostbite and ringworm, as well as being a component of sunscreen products.

Conkers

A conker is the seed of the horse chestnut tree, it is a hard brown nut which is found in a prickly casing. They fall from the tree when they are ripe during the autumn months. Conkers is the name given to a game played between two people at a time.

This was a simple still life set up, in which I positioned a load of 'conkers' on top of horse chestnut leaves. The set up illuminated with daylight coming through my conservatory. After carefully arranging the conkers, some in their shells some removed, I then used a small plant sprayer to add water droplets to the waxy surfaces.

The image was converted to monochrome in photoshop, using a channel mixture adjustment layer. By sliding the values of the Red Green and Blue channels different tones of grey are obtained, which are similar to using coloured filters with conventional black and white film.

Pentax *ist D Sigma 105mm lens.