Catherine and Joe

I went to Oxford Island, on Lough Neagh, with Catherine and her homme du jour, Joe, the day before christmas. An astonishing amount of merriment followed.

None of this was recorded on film, instead you'll have to make do with these snaps from the day. All were taken on Kodak Portra 160NC, a delightful film, though I prefer the 160VC. Mind you, it doesn't really matter, these days you can just whack up the saturation with the Gimp.

Joe (left) and Catherine (right) patiently tolerating an onslaught of photography. You'd better get used to that 'sun behind the hair' look, because that's almost all I took.

Catherine in a birdwatching hide. Apparently this particular hide was the scene of some scandal when a local councillor was busted for cottaging there. This was explained to us by an elderly Daily Mail wielding couple we encountered later on in the day, who warned us not to go in the 'gay' hide.

Catherine has either just sighted some kind of rare waterbird or a deviant councillor. She still won't say which it was.

Catherine outside the gay hide, contemplating her lucky escape.

Joe, deciding whether the noise he can hear is a rare warbler rustling in the bushes, or whether it's the sound of his car being burnt out by local hoodlums.

Joe (left) and Catherine (right) looking at something in a bush.

Everyone (except me) was looking at a god damn robin, tweeting away in a shrub. All was well until it decided to attack Bronach, probably because she didn't have any bread for it or something. The situation ended well for Bronach, because Catherine dispatched the robin with two shots to the back of the head, execution style. It's ok, she's a nature warden, and is trained for exactly this kind of thing.

Catherine getting her breath back after shouting "Freeze, sucker!" at the robin, while she pinned it to the ground.

We were lucky enough to see a thermonuclear test. Here Bronach and Catherine demonstrate how not to look directly at the blast.

While Joe shows us how to take a photo of the explosion.

Bronach keeping a lookout for more rogue birds.

Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted the mist in the background, advancing menacingly towards Catherine (l) and Joe (r) - it was like something out of a Stephen King novel. Even more eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that this was taken on a Canon 28-105mm USM Mk II lens, and is slightly less sharp than the nifty 50mm 1.8 Mk II lens. What I would like is a Canon 24-70mm 2.8L lens. So if I can get 775 of you to each pledge £1 towards it I'll set up a Paypal site to get the ball rolling.

All in all, it was a grand day out. Oxford Island has something for everyone, unless you like tanks or Romans.

Darren

I stayed round Darren's gaff last weekend when I went to London. Here are some pictures.

The light in the kitchen in the morning was awesome. It was coming in indirectly through a window on the right, and bouncing back on the left off some white tiles, wrapping round his face nicely. Then the back wall was lit through a glass door, giving a nice separation effect. Unfortunately Darren was eating a load of toast as if his life depended on it, so this is the shot I got. I bet this kind of thing happens to Annie Liebowitz all the time.

In the kitchen again. You can recreate this effect at home by stuffing a flash in a mug of tea, or by waiting for the sun to backlight the steam.

Darren plays guitar like Tiger Woods plays golf. With a club, har har. Anyway, here are some photos with an off camera flash. Not much to say, really.





Clay has rather selfishly taken his digital SLR back. This means that I have to wait 4 months to finish a film and process it, so you'll be damn lucky to see anything on this blog in a hurry. In the meantime, go and read Pertinax.

The Chronicles of Pertinax

Some say it is the greatest work of literature ever conceived.


Some say it doesn't actually exist, that something of such power and awesomeness could never be written.


It has caused grown men to weep, and babies to detonate.


It will never be published as an audio book, because not even James Earl Jones has the vocal power to carry it.


All I can say is.....

Judge for yourself.

Edinburgh


Bronach and I spent a week in Edinburgh looking for a flat. Here are some pictures. If you want a funny blog, go to Alex's, if you want an intellectual post go to John's.

Clay was good enough to lend me his Canon EOS300D, in return we let him stay at ours for a few days. That was a mistake because the place was trashed when we got back. I can't believe one person could have smeared that much excrement; he must have had teams of illegal immigrants working round the clock while we were gone.

It was autumn when we arrived, and ball-freezingly cold. If Scotland could export bitter weather they'd make a fortune.

Bronach in black and white

Here are some pictures of Bronach on they way to Dean village, as we walked along the Water of Leith. It's possibly the most scenic part of Edinburgh, helped by the fact that you're down in a valley, out of the wind so your eyelids haven't frozen shut. Photo fans will note that these pictures were taken with the awesome Canon 50mm 1.8 MkII, truly the Razor's edge when it comes to sharpness.





Back at the flat I tried using a flash to artistically light the background. I asked Bronach to sit there and ignore me, so she did.



We bumped into Steve, who recommended a Mexican restaurant to us. Steve was heading to York to see his fiancé Kate, another Phd student and a friend of Bronach's. We were starving by the time we got to the Mexican restaurant, and salivating at the prospect of fajitas and quesadillas. But it was shut. Nice going, Steve.



Easyjet internet café was our only link to civilisation. But it came at a price. The place was generally rammed with farting, swearing Scots and swearing, farting exchange students, who were either trying to make contact with their relatives on the other side of the world, or huddling in the warmth and trying to coax circulation into their frost bitten extremities.


Stelios is watching.....

-FIN-

Yorkshire Air Museum

Today I went to Elvington Airfield with Gav and Lisa:


Gav has a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens, which he was good enough to let me use. Clay was good enough to let me borrow his Canon 300D, so I have both of them to thank for these pictures.

Some kind of Canadian jet, it looked like it went out of service in the 60's, but the Canadian Air Force probably still use it, to control rogue moose or something. Bronach said this picture looks "very Top Gun", needless to say none of the legions of planespotters milling around with their mouths open and guts hanging over their belts looked much like Tom Cruise.

[update: I put a trés better version of this picture on flickr, ici]

Here's that Canadian jet again, if I ran the museum I'd paint little moose heads along the fuselage to designate kills.

A Tornado, this is the kind of hardware that helps Britain win wars.

Another shot with Gav's superwide fisheye lens. It's a cool effect, and you can focus the damn thing from a couple of centimetres away, but I think it's got quite limited applications. I'm no expert on lenses, but it seemed to cause some fringing and chromatic aberration - and the colours it produced were a bit off. Anyway, I took this from about a foot away from the nose of this plane. And still fitted the whole thing in frame!

Some off camera flash, Gav and Lisa acting like they just bought this Buccaneer. They didn't. I did. It's going in my front yard.

A tiny planespotter. Either that or a midget aircraft controller. He didn't have the ping pong bats, so I think he was just an imposter.

More fisheye lens japes.

Gav and Lisa, prior to checking out some high tech aviation weaponry.

Gav, in the cockpit. He spent ages in there, shouting "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhnnnnnyyyyoooooooooowww" and doing the machine guns ("Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh!" etc) while a queue of miserable looking Cub Scouts built up and the scoutmaster shot angry looks at us.

Gav in the pub, looking dazed after getting hands on with a Canberra.

Gav again. In the pub again. Cha'mone.

Backlog

Belfast murals

Paul took me up the Falls Road in Belfast to see the Republican murals.

Paul, showing me the 'Solidarity wall', which is covered in paintings reflecting Republican sympathies with other freedom fighters around the world, many of whom have been dispossessed by the Americans. Not to get political or anything. One of the murals is an advert for a taxi company, which just goes to show that American imperialism is felt everywhere.


Next up was the Bobby Sands mural on the side of the Sinn Fein office. This one is proper famous, it's even on Wikipedia. In the picture here is another Belfast landmark, a taxi - very similar to a London cab, with the subtle difference being that this one is in Belfast, and not London.

Beechmount Avenue, colloquially known as RPG Avenue, because apparently the street offered a line of sight for IRA RPG attacks on a security base in Springfield Road. Incidentally, RPG stands for "Reaktivniy Protivotankoviy Granatomyot" (from the Russian: реактивный противотанковый гранатомёт), or "Reactive anti-tank launcher", war fans!

We then drove across the Peace Line to the Shankhill Road, a Protestant heartland. The Peace Line is a massive wall topped by a giant mesh fence, segregating Catholic and Protestant areas of Belfast. It was designed to stop people chucking things like bottles and mortars over to the other side. Nowadays, you can drive from one area to the other with no hindrance, and the murals and propaganda are tourist attractions as much as political statements.

I don't know what James Buchanan ever did for Ireland, but this mural made a change from the Union flags and AK's up the rest of the Shankhill Road.

Paul is a Liverpool fan.

After looking at the murals we drove north. I didn't take any photos because it was bucketing down in true Irish style. We stopped in Carnlough for fish and chips, and for a treat, Paul bought me a bag of dulce, a delicacy in these parts. Dulce is dried seaweed, harvested in the dead of night by salty sea dogs. It's possibly the most revolting thing that has ever passed my lips. You need to drink about a gallon of water to wash it down because it's so salty. It has the texture of thin rubber, and tastes like something that has been sloshing around in rancid seawater for a couple of years. Much as you'd expect, really - I can't imagine why anyone would think of eating it. Presumably that's got something to do with the Potato Famine.

Here's a little piece I call...

Giant's Causeway



I finally got some film developed from a trip to Northern Ireland. We went to the Giant's Causeway which, geology fans, is part of the Thulean Plateau. Word is that it's going to sink soon, due to sea level rises caused by global warming, so get there quick if you want to see it and keep your feet dry.

Some hexagonal basaltic columns. Clearly man made, possibly by the Phoenicians.

As is standard at World Heritage sites, we spent the majority of our time in the gift shop and the queue for the bogs, and paid scant regard to the actual rocks. This is partly due to the fact that they were a) largely obscured by packs of rabid foreigners, who seemed intent on breaking pieces off, and b) it's a bloody long walk down the hill from the car park to the Causeway. There is a bus, but it's only for the weak - hence was rammed with jabbering Italians and wide-eyed Americans.

Bronach, giving the Causeway a glamorous edge.

The film I used was Velvia 50, which I would like to say publicly is a damn fine film. Sharp as razors and über vivid colours. And to my surprise, Peak Imaging have done a passable job of scanning it. It's not the best film for skin tones, making them a tad reddish, but selective editing with the GIMP makes a bit of a difference. The picture of Bronach above used the onboard flash of my EOS 5 to provide a bit of fill and underexpose the background. When I say it like that it almost sounds as if that's what I meant to do.

Immigrants battling their way into Europe. There was an armed standoff, but after a tense gunfight the interlopers were sent packing.


Apparently this bloke's idea of a hot date is to drag his girlfriend to some 65 million year old rocks and spend the whole time checking the football results on his phone.

Another close up. Ooh, hexagonal.

Not on the Giant's Causeway. A flower in Bronach's garden. An illustration of the awesome colours you get from Velvia.

Next time I'll show you another side of Northern Ireland; some war murals from Belfast. I bet you can't wait.