I have migrated the blog to a new static setup using Jekyll. It was really pretty simple to do, should have done it long time ago. The main fallout is for anyone using the feed, you might have to re-subscribe.

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I am offering a set of four small silver gelatine prints of Scottish coastline scenes in exchange for a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières. If you are interested, the details are here.

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Greenwashing is the act of overstating the environmental gains and benefits of one’s actions. And one of my real gripes with the various greening projects is the (deliberately) misleading language that is being used to describe what is being done and what is being achieved.

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I am making most of the mild spell this weekend and spending some time in the darkroom again (in recent years electricity has become the single biggest cost of my darkroom time, so I tend to leave the printing to late spring and early autumn). Also, I have not done much photography since our June holiday, really produced just one worth-while photograph since, so have not been spending much time in the darkroom either. But I have been meaning to make some very small prints to use as cards for a while.

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I have just deleted my Flickr account, my last link to the corporate social media. It’s a sad moment in a way, as I have been using Flickr for a very, very long time, and so I have dithered much over doing this. But it’s been very long time since Flickr was worth while, the Yahoo takeover in 2008 pretty much killed it, from then on it was just hoping against hope, and since SmugMug took over in 2018 my departure was inevitable, as a previous customer of theirs I don’t have a great opinion of their business, and really just hang on by sheer momentum. For a long time it has been nothing more than a place to dump photos to share somewhere else, and there are better solutions for that nowadays. My more serious work can be found on tf.photography, while the sort of stuff I might have once posted to Flickr will be landing on aye.photos, though I don’t have much of that these days.

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The stainless steel thermos, that loyal companion of the winter hillwalker, suffers from a wee problem: whether it’s tea or coffee that is your poison, a dark coating will build up in the thermos over time. This stain stubbornly resists scrubbing with a brush, not helped by the limited access. Does that mean we are for ever doomed to the taste of stale tea and coffee with whatever we put in there? As it happens there is a simple solution (and, no, it’s not a new thermos).

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I have been doing a bit of mushroom microscopy in recent months, and this generally requires the use a 100x magnification oil immersion lens (the spores and related bits have sizes in the order of single micro meters, so 1000x overall magnification is needed to see them well enough and measure them). And getting most of the oil immersion lens requires keeping it clean, which I imagine is taught somewhere in the Microscopy 101 course, so nobody really talks about, and it took me a while to find a way that works reliably well. So in case this saves some other budding microscopist time …

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I have, over the years, become quite well attuned to the distress calls of birds in our garden, and in particular to the ‘watch out for the cat call’, which demands an immediate action on my behalf: for I do not tolerate cats in the garden. But the other day the ruckus had nothing to do with a cat.

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Given the forecast I could not just sit at home today. So I took the day off and headed into the Ochils. Over the years I have spent huge amounts of time walking, running, cycling and skiing in these rolling hills at the back of Stirling, but it’s been a while since my last visit.

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The State has no moral claim on a person’s life. Our lives are our own, no one else’s. The State has no right to decide who lives and who dies, and that cuts both ways. A law that criminalises suicide, as we have in the UK, is a feudal overreach, the ultimate codification of serfdom. That is the bottom line. The current ‘debate’ around assisted dying is little more than FUD, driven by religious self-righteousness that is neither capable of genuine compassion nor of the critical self-reflection necessary to understand the depth of its own immorality. Death, and hence suicide, is never a good thing, but no one can answer the question whether it is the worst thing on behalf of an another.

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I won’t be buying an EV anytime soon. I care deeply about the current state of the environment, and I am greatly frustrated by the way things are going, but I have come to the conclusion that most things that are happening in the name of Climate Change on any sort of an industrial scale are mostly greenwashing, and EVs are no exception.

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The sky was bright, 
    the sea was calm, the land was in sight, 
    and the man was happy,
rowing his little boat. 

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I have been on a look out for new backpack for use with a 4x5 camera for a while, and particularly since a strap on my trusted Ortlieb snapped while last year on St Kilda — while I repaired it once back home, it made it clear to me that particular bag was simply not meant for that such heavy loads. Plus, it’s too small for use in the winter, or for multi-day backpacking trips.

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I have been very fond of trees since being a wee laddie, and over the years have amassed lot of photographs of them. So I decided to do something with them: For the Love of Trees, a collection of B&W photographs of trees; it’s free to download, distributed under a Creative Commons license.

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Sauerkraut is an essential part of Czech cuisine, and one that’s nigh impossible to substitute for. It’s a pro-biotic, but perhaps more important historically, very rich in vitamin C, and it keeps for very long time without refrigeration. I had a first go a making sauerkraut some 25 years ago in my early days in Scotland, without understanding the process (and before one could readily find information on the internet), and it didn’t work. I have had another go last September, and we have eaten over 40kg of the stuff since. Turns out, it’s really simple to make if you know how.

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My father was a bibliophile. His passion for books started in his childhood, and I recall some of the early books he kept on his bookshelf: nearly complete works of Julius Verne, books by Jack London. Each of them neatly wrapped in either cream or blue packing paper, a handwritten label on the front, positioned with a millimetre precision, and inside an ex libris stamp in the shape of a pocket watch. The love of books remained with him all of his life, indeed during one of the last lucid conversations I had with him he was complaining about all the new books he acquired but didn’t have time to read yet.

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