Thursday 19 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 354

The journey continues....

Germany whizzed by at a great rate of knots but unfortunately we had a little more trouble once we got into Austria. It turns out the driver didn't know how to use the sat nav properly and he had merely plugged in the final destination and let the device do the rest. This is one of my major bug bears with sat navs, they stop people thinking. The mistake he made was to say that he wanted to avoid toll roads, this meant that instead of cruising along the E60 motorway avoiding the mountains we ended up snaking our way through mountainous back roads in the middle of the night. Along with the fog and the constant blind turns you might be forgiven for thinking that what you shouldn't do is drive in the middle of the road. This, apparently, is the safest way to negotiate such a route but having had to swerve back onto our own side of the road a few times I found myself strongly disagreeing with this philosophy.

After a couple of hours of this meandering at 20-30mph we eventually stopped for fuel at which point I leapt out of the car and bought an atlas. I eventually managed to pin down where we were and led us back to the E60 but the whole time the sat nav was forever telling us to get off the road. I insisted on being given the wretched thing and reprogrammed it, properly this time, and we soon made good progress through the rest of the country. Dawn brought Hungary which whizzed passed without mishap.


Since getting off the ferry in France the borders between each country have been non-existent. If you didn't keep an eye out for the sign announcing the frontier then you would never know you had passed into another country. There were no barriers or gates, no tolls or customs and no need for anything as archaic as a passport.

All that changed when we got to Romania, however. All of a sudden everything ground to a halt. Perhaps because they only get one car all day to look over the border guards decided that they would make the event last as long as possible. I wouldn't have expected three Romanians and an Englishman to have too much difficulty getting into Romania, but there were questions aplenty and the need to go to the little hut off to one side to pay the 'tax'. Once we were finally on our way again the going was a lot slower than it had been previously. Beautiful, slick, black tarmac gave way to pitted, gravelly tracks. As we crossed a wide, flat plateaux dotted with villages and farmsteads the difference in  affluence between the people of Hungary and Romania was stark.

As I look back the main images I have of that area are of a dead dog in the middle of the road, frozen stiff and entrails being picked at by crows; and an old man (I almost want to say 'peasant') sat on a crate at the roadside selling some home grown vegetables on a blanket. It's fair to say none of the produce at hand would have passed the QC of a British supermarket. The people here were dirt poor and I feared that all of the worst stereotypes that many of us will have of Romania were true after all. As we progressed, slowly, we got to the city of Timsoara which, happily, looked like any other city; although the undercurrent of poverty never completely faded.

This picture was taken by Georgiana as I slept. We had eventually come across a good road that should have shuttled us down to the capital, Bucurest, but it appeared to be closed. The third and final fuck up of the journey was when it was decided that instead of following alongside the main road on smaller roads for a while and then joining it later, we started ascending the Transalpine road. This felt a lot like climbing into Narnia. The road was frozen, the trees were frozen, waterfalls were frozen; everything was white, cold and hard. After nearly thirty hours of non-stop driving I didn't feel that this was the best way forward; the road was single track, the tyres we had were completely unsuitable, the driver was exhausted, and the place was completely deserted. It could have gone very badly wrong. I was, however, overruled. I was so pissed off about this that I decided to try to sleep my way through it.

Wednesday 18 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 353

Finally! We're back on the road! This was sunset as seen from a German autobahn. Our unplanned and lengthy stay in Brussels ended at lunchtime today when we picked the car up from the garage. Unfortunately/stupidly we had a bit of a run in on Saturday night on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. Our driver hadn't noticed that the turn at the top of the slip road we were leaving the motorway by was a right angle. He valiantly tried to make the turn anyway, at 60mph, but failed. We mounted the curb destroying the tyre and the wheel and damaging the suspension. This was at about 2am and, would you believe it, there wasn't a local garage just waiting to fix it for us. I won't go into details here but two and a half days later we're back on the road. Only 30 hours of driving to go!!


Tuesday 17 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 352

Georgiana looks most unimpressed with the Pissing Manequin; and, yes, another photo from Brussels. Don't ask....


Monday 16 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 351

What's that you say? Why have you posted a picture of the Hotel de Ville from the Grand Place of Brussels when you're supposed to be barrelling through Hungary by now? It's a complicated and frustrating story which will have to wait for another day...


Saturday 14 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 349

Tonight I set off for Romania. We're going by car. Yup, driving the full width of Europe. It's about 2,700 miles and we're expecting it to take about 36 hours of actual driving time; about 40 hours in total. We don't intend to stop but for comfort breaks. This was my last view of Blighty as we chugged out of Dover headed for Calais. The rough route is France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania; the final destination being the town of Mangalia on the Black Sea Coast.

The sea was not exactly smooth as we pulled out and quite a few people were struggling to find their sea legs, Georgiana included. Even though it was raining and very windy I was very excited and insisted on spending as much time as possible up on deck. 




Friday 13 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 348

It was decreed that today we have to wear awful Christmas jumpers to work. Luckily I have a really good one.


Thursday 12 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 347

It's time for the work Christmas Party. These two ladies have helped make 2013 a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been. Thank you Tina and Anastasia.


Monday 9 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 344

I'm not going to go into details but this lady has been a big help to me this year. Thank you Renata; I'll miss our chats.


Sunday 8 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 343

Real Mandela has died and so people lay flowers at the feet of Zombie Mandela. Strange.


Saturday 7 December 2013

354 Project: Photo 342

Another trip up to High Barnet to visit friends, another carriage all to myself on the Northern Line.


Thursday 5 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 340

My fifth and final blood donation of 2013. I got assigned to the 10 week arm of the Interval study which means I get to donate more frequently than most people. More often the better as far as I'm concerned. You get more info on donating blood here.


Tuesday 3 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 338

The theme today is Prepare. In a couple of weeks I will be going to Romania for a few weeks so now I am on an intensive, self-imposed crash course to try and get my spoken Romanian up to scratch. Here are a couple of pages of my notes.


Sunday 1 December 2013

365 Project: Photo 336

The view from the train back down to London. I love the flat landscapes of east Anglia.


Saturday 30 November 2013

365 Project: Photo 334

Today is my youngest sister's 15th birthday. This is the card I got her. Happy birthday Shannon! Or Shanagolden, as she insists on being called.


Monday 25 November 2013

365 Project: Photo 329

I'm not going to try to come up with an explanation to fit this into the theme of Relationships, I just like the lines, the shadows and the simple colours.


Saturday 23 November 2013

365 Project: Photo 327

The theme was Imperfect Moments, the moment here was fine but the photo is certainly far from perfect. This was taken at about 3am in a club in north London. I think the orange light just caught my drunken eye.


Tuesday 12 November 2013

365 Project: Photo 316

The theme today is Simple Pleasures. This is one of the gateways into Russell Square where I come to sit and read my book every lunchtime. A simple pleasure.


Wednesday 30 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 303

Not an especially dazzling photo here but I like the contrast between the necessary regularity of the tiles and the different ways that they have weathered and been patterned by the lichens.


Tuesday 29 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 302

It's pretty much Halloween, that most awful of made up nonsense 'holidays', and so it's time to get the pumpkins out. This was my best effort, which wasn't great, but did the job. As you can probably tell I have darkened this somewhat and grunged it up.


Monday 28 October 2013

Sunday 27 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 300

Tonight was the local fireworks display in Newham. The weather was pretty good so I took the camera and tried to get some decent pictures, this was one of my better attempts. This is a 4 second exposure and I rather liked the blue colours.


Saturday 26 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 300

Tonight I took my girlfriend, Georgiana, to a John Mayer concert at Wembley arena. We had pretty good seats, only about ten rows from the front, which afforded us a good view of the proceedings. I thought it was mostly quite tedious and bland. There was one exciting bit when he banged on about the Blues for five minutes, saying how great it was, I thought that here was something I could finally get behind; but then did a song that was in now way bluesy. Anyway, Georgiana thought it was awesome and I guess that's what counts. This picture is of the stage crew setting up between acts.


Tuesday 22 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 295

A night out with workmates inevitably ends with me going for a walk along the river. Conveniently, the theme was Dark. This was taken on my phone, when drunk, from the Millennium bridge. The bright star above the moon is, in fact, Jupiter.


Monday 21 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 294

Here's one where I actually deliberately set out to match the prompt for the day, a rarity these days. Blades and Bokeh was what I was aiming for. Most people seem to have gone the way of grass but I gravitated towards my magnetic knife rack on the kitchen wall. Blades on the left, bokeh on the right.


Sunday 20 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 293

This reflection caught my eye as I entered Stratford underground station today. The theme today, which I generally ignore, was Something Beginning With P; well, there are clearly some pigeons at the bottom of the picture there.


Saturday 19 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 292

As I was walking to work today I looked back the way I had come and saw the sunlight behind this tree. I've done a poor job of capturing it but I remember rather liking the look of it in the flesh.


Thursday 17 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 290

I went to see my joint favourite comedian, Micky Flanagan, tonight at the O2. He, as always, was excellent. The first time I saw him was maybe five years ago. I'd never heard of him and was with a group of friends at a local comedy club in Mile End, just a few hundred yards from where Mickey grew up. Our table was butted up against the stage and there was probably less than 200 people there, half of whom were just there to drink and yell abuse at the stage. The second time was about two years ago at the Hammersmith Apollo with a crowd of 3,000 or so; we definitely weren't too near the stage that time. Tonight, there must have been 20,000 people all straining to hear him.

I think he finally made it.


Wednesday 16 October 2013

Tuesday 15 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 288

A pleasant sunset stroll along Hampstead Heath, my first visit there in a very long time. Taken on my phone and cropped, hence the graininess.


Monday 14 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 287

I took this on my phone at about 4am whilst walking down to Angel from Highbury after a good night out with friends. I fear I may have overdone the grunge effect but my judgement was somewhat rum-impaired.


Sunday 13 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 286

I was back in my home town visiting family and staying at my youngest brother's place. Both he and his girlfriend are big Beatles fans and so what better way to start off a hungover morning?


Saturday 12 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 285

It's been a while since I pretended my photo is on topic so here goes....

The theme today is Close and, indeed, this is quite a close up picture of a rapidly rotting rose. What I was actually interested in, however, when I put this together was the idea of a triptych. I've had a few ideas for triptychs and over mosaic type images for a long time now but I didn't actually have the expertise required to pull them off - and so I thought I had better educate myself. The web is positively bubbling over with video tutorials that make this sort of thing fairly foolproof and it proved to be none too difficult. Having said that, whenever I use the word foolproof I'm reminded of the witticism: show me a foolproof plan and I'll show you a bigger fool. Still, this wasn't too bad for a first attempt.


Friday 11 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 284

Yesterday I played around with the tilt shift effect on SnapSeed and today I've been using the new HDR effect they have recently added to it. I'm still undecided about HDR. I think that, in general, people over do it; although I have seen some fantastic examples of the genre I suspect the amount of effort that needs to be put in to do it 'properly' makes it not worth the hassle. Here, I've tried not to overcook it too much. If anything, though, there is a more distracting element to the picture that I can't get passed. To me it looks like the left side is the near side of the Eye and the right one is furthest away, which isn't the case. I find it incredibly distracting.


Thursday 10 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 283

I was waiting about on the steps in front of Stratford Station and remembered that I had been on the look out for somewhere with a bit of height to try out some tilt shift shots. Sadly, I don't actually have a tilt shift lens to properly achieve the effect but most apps these days seem to be able to apply a blur filter in such a way as to give the miniaturising effect for which tilt shift is famous. I did this using SnapSeed, my phone editing app of choice.


Wednesday 9 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 282

Not an awful lot to say about this one. I was walking passed Cardiff City Hall and took a snap.


Sunday 6 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 279

I don't often do HDR photos as they can look quite artificial, but every now and then I get a bit curious and give it a shot. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, dynamic range being the breadth of light and dark that an image contains. The human eye is fairly good at being able to simultaneously make out detail in both light and dark areas in any given scene, good but not perfect; sensors in cameras are improving all the time but not as good as us. Yet. A standard photo here would have the strip of girders in the top right as just plain black because, to have the majority of the image properly exposed this area would have to be very dark, but the HDR technique is able to bring out the detail in these otherwise featureless zones. This is normally done by blending two or more separate images together; one that is slightly over exposed and one slightly under exposed. You then take the dark parts from the over exposed image and the light sections from the under exposed image to create one unified picture with more detail (a higher dynamic range). This photo was taken and processed on my phone, which is why it looks a little grainy in places. Still, it's not bad and it's been suggested that, as this is an entirely artificial, man made  scene anyway, it works; which is just as well because I had to hang about on the platform for quarter of an hour to have suitably few people clogging up the platform.


Saturday 5 October 2013

365 Project: Photo(s) 278

A bit of a cheat today; two photos. A few days ago I made a little mobius strip out of paper and mentioned that I was going to try to make two interlocking, double twist mobius strips out of a bagel using one single, continuous cut. Well, here it is. I didn't really have a clue what I was doing to start with so I drew on where I would need to cut. My first attempt was a bit of a mess and ended up in several pieces. This was my second try and worked much better. I would say the two key requirements to pull this off are a sharp knife and lots of patience.


The theme today was Two Become One, which is sort of the opposite of what I've done here where I made one bagel into two; still, I'm pleased with the result. As a reminder, a mobius strip is generally a surface with only one side and one boundary component (edge). This isn't what I've made here as these strips have a double twist. For anyone feeling adventurous there is a handy guide here on how to make your own. And if you really want a challenge then I recommend something like a Klein Flask - that should keep you busy.


Friday 4 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 277

This is my first attempt at a composition I suspect I will be coming back to several times. I'm not happy with it in its current form; the walkway and the staircase make it feel cluttered and busy. Needs work....


Wednesday 2 October 2013

365 Project: Photo 275

Hopefully this won't be one of the last clear days of the year. Westminster as seen from Lambeth Bridge.