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On Jungle Boots
To say I dislike Gore-Tex lined boots is an understatement; I loath those things. It is a product forced upon us as a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, resulting in boots with a significantly reduced service life, yet sold at a premium price. And I strongly suspect the manufacturing costs are actually lower compared to a good quality leather boot. All in all, what you might call an outdoor equipment brand’s wet dream.
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On the Speyside Way
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Why Not Rewilding
This is an excerpt from (the appendix of) a longer piece I have been working on for a while, but which I am unlikely to finish any time soon. But having touched on the rewilding subject briefly a couple of times in recent months, a more complete write up of my current perspective on the subject is, I think, desirable.
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The Pleasure of Printing
It’s good to be printing again, it’s been a while, not least because I haven’t produced anything worth printing for some months. But that changed in May, and I managed to carve out some time in the last two weeks to work on three 16x12 prints from our Lewis trip — just finished this morning with some spotting that one of the prints required. 🙂
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Model K
Produced by the Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, the K is a small car for the masses; the K designator (which stands for Kamchatka) marks its all around Siberian readiness (S was already taken).
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The Imitator in Chief
Starlings, who I have had a soft spot for ever since I got a closer look at their marital antics at the bird box by my office window, are superb imitators. I first became aware of this a couple of years ago on St Kilda, where the local population entertains itself by making fulmar calls, and been paying closer attention to that since.
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Uber Complex Chief Engineer Fail (cntd, no show)
We have reached a new low in this saga. Late on Monday, week after the last fail, OpenReach (in the form of some poor soul in a callcenter in a faraway land) phoned to make a new appointment to complete the work. And even though the work at the house has been completed, they insisted I have to be present for this … then never showed up.
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Of Telephoto Lenses
The term ‘telephoto lens’ is nowadays generally misapplied to longer focal length lenses, as opposed to wide angle lenses. In fact, ‘telephoto’ has nothing to do with focal length, but designates a particular lens design. But photographers generally don’t concern themselves with the intricacies of lens construction, yet in this case it makes a big practical difference when using a view camera.
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On View Camera Movements
The movements on a view camera are one of those things that once you get used to having, it’s hard to do without. I have a photograph from a recent trip to illustrate some of it, so here we go.
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Post-Holiday Blues
It’s been a week since we have been back from our two week summer holidays in Lewis, and, it already seems like it didn’t even happen (but the freshly developed negatives say otherwise).
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The Mystery of a Dirty Bird Bath
We have three bird baths in our garden. They are really just big plastic pots that came with Christmas trees past, sitting on a wall about meter apart; there are three of them because our resident blackbird is an antisocial sod chasing other birds off, but he can’t police all three.
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Uber Complex Chief Engineer Fail (contd, again)
Monday was the three months anniversary of the start of this ongoing saga. Yesterday, an external contractor turned up to install the ONT (the wee box inside the house). He was pleasant enough, got the work done, and then informed me there was a fault on the line 3km from the house that someone else would need to fix, adding that the paperwork shows that OpenReach have been aware of since their initial inspection on 22 March.
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Sonata for a Turd and Two Neolithic Stones
I have a yet to be developed negative in the works that I have great hopes for, with the above working title. It was taken at Callanish II, and I only spotted the turd when the camera was fully set up: fresh, large and well formed, tastefully decorated with toilet paper. I am pretty sure its author was on a Rabbies tour which stopped there only about 20min earlier while I was taking pictures at the nearby Callanish III. This is in a village, 100m from someone’s house. It would have required suitable tools to remove, which I didn’t have with me … what the fuck is wrong with people?!
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Of Bread
We never buy bread, it’s the one thing I never managed to get over in the Anglo-Saxon world. In the old country bread is a core part of the diet, and the quality of it, even of the run of the mill bread found in the supermarkets, is very high. In contrast the bread found in the English speaking world is, let’s not sugar coat this, generally atrocious; even the ‘artisan’ bread you might be able to buy at a premium price if you live in a big city rarely matches my expectations of a good loaf.
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I am done with the SNP
I have been a loyal SNP voter for over 25 years, and briefly a member post Brexit, but that membership came to an abrupt end when Nicola Sturgeon’s government rode roughshod over the local planning process and the recommendations of its own experts to push through the luxury housing development at the Park of Keir near Bridge of Allan — I could not, in good conscience, be a member of a party that showed so little concern for the environment, had so little grasp of the twin environmental crises. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, I held my nose and, overlooking the shallow CO2 reductionism of its environmental policies, continued to vote for the SNP in the interest of the Indy cause. No more.
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Nine Days Later …
Up at 3.30am this morning, to have a go at that photograph!
