The purpose of the trip was to catch up with a couple of friends (check);get away from normal life for a weekend (check) and to see some random stuff (check)

list of activities partaken in includes:

Chistlehurst caves — it’s actually an old mine with 20 milesish or tunnel (apparently), not a cave at all, it’s in london, and has a lot of history, including use as an air raid shelter, ghost stories, part of an old doc who episode was filmend there, etc.

Brick lane — it’s a street with many curry houses on it, we had some very nice food there indeed, would happilly go back.

Had a good rake around some electronics shops — I was disapointed to find out that one of the purcheses that I’ve been saving up for is actually not up to the job I had in mind. I did however have a good gogle at the available options in the sony style shop. would you believe that they still have cassette take recorders for sale?

The tube — I’m getting the hang of this actually, it’s insanelly complex, but the oystercard makes the money situation really easy to cope with at least.

Got rediculusly drunk — twice, which is impressive, because I only had 2 bottles of cider the entire time I was there.

Had a very odd encounter on a train — in runcorn on the way back up. I changed train in crewe, and when it pulled up, I was surpised to find that it had more first class than it had anything else, I thought little of this, and moved down the train to the standard class bit. on pulling into runcorn, I saw a large group of stuffed suits walking past the train, and half the carrage started to speak to each other. One of the last of the stuffed suits cought my eye, because he was slinging a pair of canon dslrs and a 70-200f2.8. It turned out ther non other than Gordon Brown (who I don’t like very much) had just gotten off my train.

Took very few photos — this wasn’t really an aim of the trip, I did take the camera and took a load in the caves, but I doubt many of them really came out too good. They make the intermitents later.

some of my results are here:

http://www.thingomy.co.uk/gallery/main.php/v/BFS/Beltane09/

others can be found on gallery.beltane.org

I had a more sucsessfull shoot that i’ve ever had at an event, and am really pleased.

On other matters, I have moved to Liverpool. 2 very good friends of mine (Engel and Rochelle) were moving down, and had spare space, at the same time as my flat lease was running out, so it seemed just as sensible as moving locally. Coupled with better employment prospects, and a fresh start, it’s all good.

there are some pics of the house here

In hind sight, even after a couple of weeks, Edinburgh didn’t really seem to have a lot going for it.

If anyone want’s to come visit, we have a spare bed, give me a buzz — I’m in L25 — Hunts Cross.

There appears to be a bloke in america with the same name as me who has started up a fairly active blog. He seems to have only one topic, and our views differ substantially on it:

http://jrpeterson.vox.com/library/post/right-church-right-time-right-message.html?_c=feed-atom

It’s odd the kind of things you find lingering around on the intermitenets at times.

I was lying down in my bunk in a 4 person shared cabin on the boat, thinking about putting down my sudoku and going to sleep; every 5 seconds everything was going mostly weightless for a couple of seconds.

One of the other blokes from the cabin came in and rummaged about with his stuff for a minute or so, I siad hi, then he went to the bathroom. There was a short delay, then some unpleasant gurgly sloshing sounds. “oh here we go” I say to my self. I was pleased to find I’d just solved all the 5s.

There was another sequence of gurgles, then he oaged out and muttered something about seasickness, not using the bathroom for a bit and getting something form somewhere; he wandered out. By now I was having a great deal of trouble with a 7 and a 9 in the top right block, owing at least in part to the distractions.

5 minutes later a bloke in a uniform wanders in and takes a look in the bathroom; wanders out an comes back with an empty bucket. I was as bemused by his antics as the 7s and 4s in the bottom row. There was some clacking and fidgeting for a bit, and another bloke in a uniform joined him. “If we take that bit off, we may be able to get at it from there” one said to the other, followed by “nah, that’ll have to be done by the engineers in the morning”. I found a 3 in the bottom corner.

In the end it was announced that the guy had thrown up in the sink, and managed to block it, I fail to understand how, anyway, we were moved to another cabin with functional sink. The soduku was finished the next day.

Walking around a boat like that is really fun, as the environment drops to nearly zeroG, and then moves sideways, traction is really quite tricky to maintain let alone balance.

I will have no access to anything internet in the meantime. my mobile should work just fine, but it wouldn’t rely on it. It should be good to get away from everything for 2 days.

Packing is done and took about a couple of hours — i’m getting good at that. However packing my data took significantly longer. it seems that they just don’t write software to be portable, even well designed software seems to have considerable issues with you trying to move data from one machine to another.

As for the ferry tonight, it lasts 14 hours, and it’s going to be rather rough, although it should not bee horrific.

I advanced the boat trip was advanced by a day at the last minute because of the weather forcast, and was quite sensible, the day before I went and the day after I went were both canceled. As it happens I got a pretty good trip.

My computer has been fried by lightning up here, so if anyone is emailing you will get a very slow response. I’m using my mother’s somewhat elderly laptop, it has a duff E key, so typing is intermitently a problem. There are bits on order, with any kind of luck, I should be back up by new yearish.

Don’t even think about texting me, the coverage is patchy up here to the point that they frequently fail to get here: if you don’t get a reply within a day, send another one, keep going until you get somthing back. Oh and there are only 2 rooms in the house that I get any reception at all, so I won’t even have the thing on me.

Other than that, all good here.

For those unaware, stobism is the idea of creating studio quality lighting using portable camera strobes; it’s about learning their strengths and weaknesses and working with them.

The results were spectacular, I have a lot of information, I don’t fully know how to use it until I’ve practice a great deal though… If anyone is willing to stand in front of a camera while a I blind them for couple of hours taking pics, I would be really grateful of the practice.

There were some really interesting conversations going on about photographers working for free. It turns out there are a great deal of pitfalls to this, some of which I’ve already fallen into, mainly in 3 camps:
taking work away from professional photographers that are already struggling (this can be debated, and I’m still not sure about it);
becoming known as a free photographer, to the point that no one is willing to pay money for anything you do;
issues to do with self confidence and self worth.

I’m in the process of rethinking my stance on this area of photography (money, copyright, terms and conditions etc) to produce a policy that’s workable and sustainable, it’s all really heavy stuff that I wish wasn’t necessary, but sadly it is.

One thing is quite clear though, it’s much better to work for non-monetary value: goods or even better, favours. So if anyone wants a photographer and is willing to repay me in the form of money or anything else that’s useful to me, I’m interested.

The trains on the way down were a bit of a joke, our train was scheduled for 1700, but due to an overhead lines fault was canceled, we only got to bed at 3am (with a 7am start…). I won’t go into details, but it was not fun, I’m just glad we weren’t the poor buggers that had to stand all the way to London.

I have also solved (i think) my geotagging problems for once and for all — unless some small details stops me.

(If you don’t know what a geotag is, you can stop reading now btw)

The tool that does it is found here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/

It’s a lightroom plugin, stores the data with the images as they are being developed, and without undue stress adds the data to all jpeg exports. it’s not fully polished yet, but it has few enough wrinkles that it seems to be up to the job.

The same bloke that does it also does a flickr upload plugin that seems to work really well. There are other goodies in there too.

Unfortunatly I have yet to find a solution that I can get working that will export to ftp, the irony being that the functionality is already in lightroom only I can get it to not upload a bunch of html stuff with the images.

http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1078738/Loo-view-The-worlds-toilets-best-vistas.html

I would normally take little notice of such a page after taking a quick look through it’s content. It did however catch my eye due to the fact that I have been exceedingly close to 3 of the mentioned depositories.

I was within a few miles of the NZ one. I was on Alcatraz island, and it really isn’t that large an island. I have a photo of a fountain right in front of the HK one.

This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.

Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.

It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.

project homepage

Photos:

The first of the 2 camping trips was … interesting.

It was a little badly organised form the start — they decided on a venue 2 days before leaving, hired a minibus and arainged for another car to go and 5 people to go on a train. I was on the train, and I was told what time to be at the station. Only when I got to the station did I ifnd out that the venue (knockongoroch farm) was a little outside Aire — IE the middle of fricken nowhere.

We were to be picked up by said minibus at the station.

After changing trains in glasgow, we got to Aire station at about 2200, black dark, pouring with rain. We got a phone call:

“ah sorry guys you’ll have ot catch a taxi … the car broke down, and the minibus is upside down in a river”

10 minutes later realisation set in that this infact was not a prank, and it was actually real.

We found a taxi rank, and persuided a taxi driver it was worthwhile. �40 he said, fair enough, it’s a bit of a tight situation we’re in, and there are 5 of us.

We drove for a long time, then pulled up at the end of a road “It’s a bit rough, so I won’t go up, but it’s a couple of hundred yards up there round the corner” he said.

So (2300 now BTW) we walked round the corner and found a bunch of houses, no camp site, so we scratched out heads for a bit, called the folks at the camp who told us to look for a wooden bridge… the hell? We also heard from the folks in the car, they were in a tow truck heading * towards * the camp site — nutters.

We eventually went ot a house, and knocked on the door, a very nice lady came to the door and siad “knockenwhere? … oh there… you’re a long way from there… … that’s about 16 miles…” she game us tea, and offered for us to camp in the garden over night. slight problem, we had a 3 man tent, and 5 people.

As near as I could work out, the back wheel of the minibus had missed a bridge after a corner, and went over sideways, noone was significantly hurt, unless you consider a �750 insurance excess hurt.

The people in the car spent 6 hours in the middle of the night walking in the “200 yard” road to the camp site, with no torch. They arrived at 5AM.

From there it improves very little, but that’s most of the noteworthy stuff. I had always used the polacy of having a plan B, but will be taking it more seriusly form now on.

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The second camping trip was much more boring, involving lots of water, and a fire that wouldn’t burn.

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Beltane happened eventually It was very wet — we lost significant quantities of kit to water damage, all of mine was ok, but it wasn’t good.

The rain caused significant issues with actually filming too, rain spots, foged and rained up glasses/viewfinders were a running theme, many shots were lost due to this.

Due to the above distractions a lack of time practicing before hand and some bad decisions, my results were moderate at best, 24ish “good” images, only one of which I’m really proud of. see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingomy/sets/72157604867745859/

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I’ve been suckered into shooting some marathon/walk thing up the west highland way — it also involves the middle of nowhere, running theem here eh? It should be good, but if I do the bit I think I will be doing, it’s going to involve a 13 mile walk with camera gear, and camping gear for 2 nights, I’m not sure whether I’m up to it, but I’m willing to give it a stab.

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Final point, and the reaosn I started this somewhat long post — I assembled a panoramic from NZ.

It’s taken from the top of Sky Tower Auckland:

This along with some other stuff I;ve done recently has shown me that I have lost all of my photoshop abilites.

A couple of years ago I switched from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop, on the understanding that Photoshop was better, in doing this switch, I lost all of my PSP abilities, and never actually gained any with Photoshop. I havent used any of these skills since then so have been lacking in practice.

I am now unable to do simple tasks like correct white balance, or deforming a selection. That is without a vast quantity of arsing around, googling, frustrating experiments, and very sub standard results. The worst bit is, I normally can’t remember which tools exist for a given job, and even then I don’t understand why it didn’t do what I wanted it to do the first time, and when it does work it seem to be a complete unexplainable accedent; so I’m not even learning while working.

The panoramic above was built using 84 images of 2.5MP each. I was only able to get the software I use (Hugin) to do part of the job, so it’s really rough, with hard image borders everywhere. with any kind of luck I can perfect the technequedo some more interesting stuff with it in future.