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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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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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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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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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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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 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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Up at 3.30am this morning, to have a go at that photograph!

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A few notes on dealing with weather while using a large format camera.

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The other day I came across a rather interesting blog post on sphagnum moss. I didn’t know there were 30 different kinds of sphagnum in the UK, nor that the plant had no roots, and just sort of floated on the top of the bog. As it happens, I should have paid a closer attention to that one!

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I was going to write another irate post on the wrong framing of the issues at the heart of the assisted dying bill, but I don’t have anything new to add to the previous post on the subject. So instead here are some enjoyable blogs dealing with Scottish nature.

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Beep! Beep! Beep! I flay about a bit, until my brain works out what is the meaning of the ruckus — my 4.50am alarm clock, a photograph in the making.

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My new Trailstar tarp has arrived, begging to be taken out, and this weekend is the only chance I’ll get till June. Alas, the forecast is for two days of steady rain. But then, what better weather to test a shelter in, right? 🙂

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Usually found in the late summer and autumn, this mushroom was first recorded in the UK only in 2000*, and is mostly found in the south of England. Well, this one appeared in my garden in the Central Belt of Scotland last Friday (11 April)! It popped out in an old abandoned flower pot.

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Time for another update on the OpenReach ‘Uber Complex Chief Engineer’ fail. I have now worked out why I am not getting emails from them: their email system is not compliant with email addressing standard, as set out by RFC 5332!

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A couple of weeks ago I stumbled on a reflection on the Caorach air crash site that I wrote the day after running the Assynt Traverse nine years ago.

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