The Lomo Effect

Well it's been a few weeks so I thought I'd better come up with something for the blog and, so, I've investigated the Lomo style of photography and come up with a little guide on how to take a bog standard snap and give it a bit of the old Lomo magic. 

For those of you that haven't heard of it I should probably describe what the Lomo style, or Lomography, actually is. I guess it's actually two things; one of which is easy to define, the other of which isn't. The easy one is the physical look of the photos; there tends to be a vignette (darkening at the corners), the colours are very rich (due to the use of slide film and the common practice of cross processing the negatives) and the quality is generally low with blurriness, poor exposure and even light leaks frequently featuring. Most of these properties, normally avoided at all costs by most photographers but sought out by the lomographer, are down to the very low build quality of the lomo camera. Think 1980s, Russia, plastic.

The element that is more difficult to pin down is the style and composition. Perhaps a good place to start would be with the motto of the movement: Don't Think, Just Shoot. Although it could easily be confused with the motto of the American military it is actually a style encompassed by The Ten Golden Rules of Lomography as laid out on their website. These include such adages as Take Your Camera With You Everywhere You Go, and, Lomography Is Not An Interference In Your Life But A Part Of It. Basically, they try to encourage you to break every traditional rule of photography that ever existed. The Rule of Thirds would be anathema to a lomographer. I highly recommend a look at their site to get more of a feel for this unusual brand of photography; you'll probably either like it or you wont.

The question is: how did such an odd, counter-intuitive and niche movement even get started, nevermind become an international phenomenon? It all started as recently as 1992 when a group of Viennese art students came across an old Lomo camera whilst on a tour in Prague. They found it in an old camera shop and used it in a very casual kind of way, often not aiming, shooting from the hip and generally just mucking about. Upon returning home and developing the film they were charmed by the "unique, colourful and sometimes blurry images" that were produced. Interest amongst friends and family rapidly grew and the following year they founded a society in honour of the strange new camera. The camera in question was a Lomo LC-A Compact Automat, produced some ten years previous in the USSR. The build quality of the device was.... well, there was no build quality; but this leant itself perfectly to the students shooting style.

There was a problem, however; with the fall if the USSR also came the end of the production of the camera and the prospect of a ready supply of the student's new favourite toy. Undaunted, the students flew to St. Petersburg, where the Lomo factory was located, to make a deal for tax breaks so as to make it economically viable to continue production. They successfully got the special permission required from the mayor of the city, a very amiable and friendly chap, one V. Putin. The rest, as they say, is Lomography. Production has since shifted to China and production continues to this day; the future of Lomography seems secure and Lomo cameras remain cheap and affordable for all to try. The film is now the increasingly expensive part.

But what if you don't want to faff about with film and developing and such like and just want to create the same effect using your existing DSLR and a bit of canny processing? Well, I'll show you how - so long as you intend to use Adobe Elements, although many applications are broadly similar these days. Those of you not interested in the technical parts can just skip to the pretty picture at the bottom.

The picture we're going to start with is no great shakes. The exposure isn't great, I should have got my neutral density filters out, the sky is overexposed and there's some lens flare; but as we're aiming for the Lomo style none of this should matter, if anything it'll help. So there are two main things we need to do here; create a vignette and achieve a cross-processing effect by increasing saturation and contrast. There is more than one way to do each of these steps including just clicking through the guided Lomo Camera Effect wizard, but where would the fun be in that?

There are two easy ways to create a vignette. The first is to simply go to Filter>Correct Camera Distortion and use the sliders in the vignette tool, which are normally used to remove a vignette, not to create one. I'd normally go for somewhere around -40 to -50 but it's totally up to you.

The second way is a little more involved but gives you more control. Take the Lasso tool and, having selected a feathering level of, shall we say, between 100-200 pixels, draw a vaguely circular shape in the middle of the photo. Again, we're not aiming for perfection here. We want to alter the outside of this circle not the inside and so you need to click Select>Inverse. Now create a Levels layer and slide both the shadows and the midpoint markers to the right a little, this will add to the vignette effect. I actually prefer to use a combination of these two methods to make my vignettes.

That's the vignette sorted but now we need to work on the distinctive colour palette of lomography; again, there are a couple of ways to go about this and I like to use a combination of each. First up: colour curves. Click on Enhance>Adjust Colour>Adjust Colour Curves... (yes, it really does have the three little dots after it). Here you are presented with a straight diagonal line on a grid. The left hand side of the grid represents dark colours, the left hand side highlights, and the middle is the midtones. There are several preset options available but you can also drag the points on the line to warp it. Moving any given point on the line either up or down will make the corresponding band of colour more or less intense. We want to make the curve look like an S; this will have the effect of making the highlights brighter and the dark parts darker, i.e. increasing contrast. If your line looks something like the one in my example below then you're on the right track. Press okay when you're happy with the effect achieved.

I would also recommend increasing the saturation, this will help to achieve the cross processing effect that is so synonymous with the Lomo style. To do this you can either click on Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation... or simply click on the button with the diagonally divided circle on it on the right hand side and select Hue/Saturation... Use the slider for Saturation to give your colours a bit of a boost. For a 'normal' photo I wouldn't want to push this much past the mid teens, but for the Lomo style you can probably get away with numbers in the 30s, 40s or even higher depending on the photo.

In the same way that you got your Hue/Saturation... layer you can now select a new Brightness/Contrast... layer. Here, I wouldn't say that the Brightness has to go one way or the other, this really depends on what look you want to achieve with any given individual photo, but I would recommend increasing the contrast a little.

Lastly, I would say it's worth while putting a Fill layer in. To do this, select Layer>New Fill Layer>Solid Colour... Call the new layer whatever you like or leave it as the default and click Ok. This should default to a layer of pure black and you will completely lose the picture you have so carefully created. Fortunately it is only hiding behind the black layer and we now have to blend the two together to reveal the finished product. Click Ok again. At the top right in the Layers panel you will have a drop down box with various different blending options; I would recommend Soft Light or Hue or Saturation and an Opacity of something like 30-50%. This should really help bring about that cross processing look. Cross processing, by the way, is where you develop film using non-standard chemicals. There are two main film types; standard 35mm and Colour Slide film. Each of these sets has their own chemicals used in their development, C41 for 35mm and E6 for Colour Slide film; however, lomographers noticed that you can get some really cool results if you swap these up. As I understand it the more common option is to use Colour Slide film and process it with 35mm chemicals.

That's about it. With any luck you should now have a photo worthy of the annals of Lomography, or at least something that looks a little old timey; you can see my effort below. None of the techniques I have mentioned here are set in stone; indeed, that would go against the whole freestyle notion that made Lomo popular in the first place. The idea is not to be constricted by the traditional norms, to break the rules and not to worry about the consequences. As Rule #10 of Lomography says: Don't worry about any rules.

Review of 2013....

Soooooooo, it has been rather a long time since my last post. This has been due to a number of reasons, partly laziness, partly lack of inspiration and frustration with the 365 Project, and partly because I have been in Romania for the last 3 weeks and internet connections there were few and far between. I will finish off the 365 Project, I have a bunch of photos on the back burner that I need to process and get written up and I will try to have that done by the end of the month. For now, I'm going to do one of those lazy Review of the Year posts with some of my favourite pictures from 2013. I won't include any from the period I haven't posted yet, you'll just have to be patient for those.

In 2014 I will be going back to my usual format of a post every fortnight or so. I think this gives me time to get some decent photos together and the words to go with them. I think the daily requirement of the 365 Project ultimately lowered the quality of what I do here, which was one of the reasons I became increasingly disenchanted with it. However, this does not foreshadow the year ahead, I am optimistic and enthusiastic about the blog for 2014. I have had 70,000 hits so far which is orders of magnitude more than I ever expected and so thank you to everyone who takes time out of their day to see what I've been up to. I'll try to raise the bar.

The last 12 months have been the most traumatic and difficult of my life, much of it self-inflicted, but there were certainly some good times too. Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me this far.

Gargoyle from inside the Natural History Museum, January.

View from Westminster Bridge, January.

Chain in Vienna, March.

St. Marco's piazza, Venice, March.

Venice, March. 

 

Parliament Square, London, May.

Pocketwatch, May.

Parliament Square, London, May.

 Dead flower, July.

 Olympic Park, September.

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.

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!!

365 Project: Photo 352

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

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...

The City of Arts and Science: A New Beginning

I have a confession, and a grave one at that.

There was a time, not all that many years ago, when I used to believe in conspiracy theories. You know, like the JFK assassination and that the moon landings were hoaxes, I also thought there might be something to astrology, bigfoot and alien abductions; there was even a brief period when I was a 9/11 Truther.

It's all very embarrassing for me to admit to this. Just thinking back to those times makes me physically cringe. It's mortifying. I mean, each one of those things on its own would be bad enough but to go in for them all? What was I thinking? Well; I wasn't thinking. I now think that the various beliefs I held stemmed from a combination of factors: a lack of confidence, lack of critical thinking skills, misplaced faith in charismatic people I admired, a hefty dose of anti-American sentiment, reluctance to take responsibility - it's so much easier to blame the universe if your life isn't working out how you want it to, so much easier than working hard and applying yourself. But the truth is that the universe doesn't give a shit about me and my life. It was getting along just fine before I turned up and it will continue to do so long after I'm gone.

The DNA molecules I analyse at work are somewhat smaller than this

Looking back, one of the things I find most curious about it is how I was able to compartmentalise my thoughts. I was an intelligent person with a degree in genetics and yet still I spouted all sorts of rubbish in my spare time. I wasn't a complete fool, though; there were areas of lazy, illogical thought processes that I managed to shrug off quite easily. Despite pressure to fit into the Catholic mould I found that religion never made any sense to me. The first time I read the bible was as a child, religion never made any sense to me. I would read about a miracle and just think: well, how could that have happened? Omnipotence isn't a good enough answer; if nothing else it's just plain intellectually lazy. The second time I read it through I just found myself getting increasingly disgusted with the level of self-contradiction and hypocrisy crammed onto every page. And it's not like it's even original, it's just a collection of poorly told myths and rip offs as brazen as the Bronze Age that spawned them.

L'Hemisferic

For the life of me I can't remember what it was that made me finally shake off these mental shackles; it wasn't any one thing, I think I must have just finally started using my brain. Of the myriad benefits of my awakening I think my favourite is that all the space in my brain that was taken up by the obscene mental gymnastics required for fallacious thought, such as thinking that the US government could conspire to blow up the twin towers when they couldn't even keep a Presidential blow job a secret, is now free to be filled with something altogether more exciting and useful: science.

I was always a science geek, even as a young child but, embarrassingly far into my twenties, I had allowed it to cohabit with too much groundless nonsense and ideology. In the years since I have consciously learnt as much as I can about the fallibility of human reasoning, about the ways our brain can fool us, the way confirmation bias influences us, logical fallacies and the importance of the scientific method as the only tool we have to actually know anything for certain. All through my childhood, and even in the depths of my youthful intellectual transgressions, science has always been the topic that has got me most excited. Any and all science, I'll read anything I can get my hands on; not just the stuff I'm really into like genetics, astronomy and particle physics. The other day I lost an entire evening reading about the geology of spherules. I'd never even seen the word spherule before but as soon as I did I had to know as much as I could about it.

The opera house; a cross between the heads of Megatron and the Stig

When I first set up this blog, nearly two years ago now, I had to come up with a name for it. Travel, Photos and Thoughts is what I came up with. I deliberately left the word thoughts in there knowing that there may well come a time when I wanted to talk about more than the places I have gone to with my camera. To an extent, that time may be arriving. Due to a damaged foot I'm not currently able to get about all that much and I have taken very few photos in the last few months. As I write this I'm supposed to be going out with The London Photowalk group that I have written about previously but I am unable to do so and it could be many months before that changes. Whilst I do have a bit of an archive that I can draw on it won't last forever and so I need a strategy. My plan is two fold; to try and explore my local area more so that I can keep taking photos, but also to expand my remit, if only temporarily. I don't know exactly how it will work yet but it'll definitely still involve pictures although they may be taken by the Hubble space telescope, the Mars Curiosity rover or a fancy electron microscope instead of me. Let's just see how it goes.

Giant space alien carcass?

Everything we know about the physical world - everything - we know through science. Combine that with our culture and the joy we find in the beauty of aesthetics and we have gone some way to identifying what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals, Art and Science. Which brings me, rather circuitously I grant you, to what was supposed to be the main thrust of this article: Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias. For nearly our entire history as a species we have been willing to move heaven and earth to move earth closer to heaven. For millennia, the pinnacle of human scientific achievement were the shrines we built to religion. The cathedrals of Europe, the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the temples of south east Asia; all required a massive amount time, effort, resources and scientific knowledge that was rarely applied to other fields of endeavour, excepting, perhaps, war. A century long building program would be embarked upon at a time when life expectancy was about 40 and no one would think this a strange thing to do. Although it all seems a bit mental now I, for one, am very pleased that they did because many of these structures remain to this day and are a long lasting testament to human creativity and ingenuity. But something I'm also very pleased about is that it is now not considered unusual to put a similar amount of effort and resources into the celebration of science and the arts; this is what has happened in Valencia.

For the 2,000 years that Valencia has existed the river Turia ran through it's heart, but the river was prone to frequent flooding and one particularly bad incident in 1957 left the Valencianos knowing that something had to change. They weren't messing about either, their solution was to move the river. The Turia now spills out on a flood plain to the south of the city and the long, wide, snaking riverbed was turned into a sunken 9km municipal garden filled with acres of parkland, athletics facilities, sculpture, children's play areas and fountains. At the far eastern end of this complex, just before it meets the Mediterranean Sea, is the City of Arts and Sciences. This comprises of many buildings, the highlights of which are the The Palace of Arts, which is primarily an opera house and incorporates one of the most amazing feats of architecture I have ever seen; L'Hemisferic, which is an enormous IMAX style cinema that envelops the viewers with a screen that seems to surround you; L'Oceanografic, home to the largest aquarium in Europe and some truly ridiculous fish tanks; and, my favourite, the Museum of the Sciences, an astonishing building with 40,000 square metres of space in which to demonstrate the diversity, joy and excitement of the world of science.

The building is remarkable, it looks like something between a giant, pre-historic whale skeleton and the corpse of a gargantuan, alien insect. But all in white. I did my best to get a picture of this in all its monstrous glory but the temperature was in the high 40s. I'm not kidding, this was Valencia in August, we would go out for breakfast of a morning and be grateful it was a chilly 27 Celsius. In this sort of weather I burn in ten minutes, if I'm not careful, so I would slink from shade to shade like some sort of anti-lizard desperately eking out what little protection from the onslaught of the sun my Irish heritage could afford me.

Architecture on this scale tends to lend itself to the abstract

Inside, the exhibits are heavily weighted towards the interactive end of the scale and children certainly seemed happy to conduct their own experiments like good little empiricists. One large section contains a huge forest of the chromosomes 30 feet high as if it were an altar to the gods of karyotyping; there are the obligatory sections on space exploration and electricity and even one on the science behind Marvel comic characters. One nice touch was a sawdust-filled incubator that had a ready supply of chicken eggs so that, for those willing to be patient, you could watch a chick's first efforts in life as it forces its way out of its shell-bound world. Simple, but both exciting and inspiring in equal measure.

I think I could have spent the entire holiday just exploring these buildings, they certainly need two full days to do them any sort of justice; yet this is just a small portion of the city. Valencia has a large and vibrant Old Town that, itself, needs at least another couple of days of exploration to seek out all the hidden gems on offer, something I will likely detail in a future post. Until then, enjoy the science.

Mekong and Markets

One of the larger branches of the mighty Mekong river

It's been a while but there has always been one last part of my trip through Vietnam that I wanted to write about. 

The final leg of our journey was in the south of the country, basing ourselves in Ho Chi Minh City we went on a two day trip to the Mekong Delta. Known as the rice bowl of Vietnam this is a very fertile region, as most deltas are, the river having brought rich soils and other detritus along for the ride from higher ground. After more than 3,000 miles of meandering from Tibet down through south east Asia this mighty river, the 10th longest on the planet, fans out over 15,000 sq miles of the country (see this image from NASA).

Once you stray into the tributaries this is how the Mekong looks. For miles. Endlessly.

This is one of those environments where the people that make it their home live almost semi-aquatic lives; there is no escaping the river. It impacts every aspect of their being. Pieces of actual solid ground are few and far between, especially nearer the coast. Raising your family, your livestock or your crops presents even more challenges than normal. People don't have cars here, they have boats; they don't go for a walk, they go for a swim. They say there is a period of the year when it doesn't rain quite so heavily as at others, but this river never dries. Picture vast islands of bamboo growing straight out of the water and you'll have a good idea of how much of this landscape looks.

If you look through the little windows you can see that this boat is stuffed to the gills with cabbages

What land there is has been aggressively cultivated in the last two decades as the Government sought to change Vietnam's status from a net importer to an exporter of rice, and it worked. Every bit of solid ground I saw either had a building on it or a paddy field thus highlighting the age old struggle between man and his environment. Less people in Vietnam now go hungry than they used to, but the Mekong has suffered and is not as large or diverse an ecosystem as it once was. Where the correct balance is on this scale of survival I couldn't say. It's easy to argue that this ecosystem should be protected from man at all costs but I'm pretty sure I'd strangle a panda with a tiger's tail if it meant my children wouldn't starve.

A slow day at the market

This aggressive agriculturalisation of the landscape has led to an influx of people from across the land. Historically the Greater Mekong region of South East Asia has been one of net emigration as a large population has had to do battle over very few jobs. In recent years though, the region has become one of net immigration as the demand for labour has increased. As the population has increased so the demand on local resources has seen a commensurate rise; in a land as fertile as the Mekong perhaps this doesn't seem like such a bad deal; the land is very fertile and can support many. But if there's one thing that we humans excel at it's finding ways to ruin a good thing. The laws of entropy are fairly unbending on this one, ultimately something will have to give.

Eels for dinner, anyone?

On the upside, one thing that all these people bring with them is their culture. Traditionally the hub of any town is it's market place in the town square. But what if the place you live doesn't have enough land to put a town square on? Easy, simply make your market float, of course. If you visit the Mekong then you won't have to wait long until you see one of their impressive floating markets; it seems that everyone just turns up with a boat load of produce, they tie a few examples of said produce to a big, vertical stick so that you can see what's being sold at a glance and then they just float around each other bargaining goods like traders the world over.

This woman pumps air into the bowl to keep her crayfish type creatures alive

Can Tho is one of the very few, what we would call, proper cities in the Mekong; it has a large freshwater port and is the major mercantile centre of the region. The large market that the town plays host to has been covered over in recent years to make it a bit more tourist friendly and it's well worth a look. Asides from all the exotic fruits like lychees (which I could do without) and dragon fruit (which is delicious) they have a good stock of live animals that you can buy fresh for a bit of home slaughtering.

That's a lot of lychees

It's difficult to imagine a river delta that just goes on for so long. I guess the closest thing we have to it in this country is the Fenlands; the unending flatness, the constantly waterlogged ground and ever present risk of flood. One of the things that I most remember the area for is that I finally got to eat some snake, snake curry to be precise. It was quite tasty, it sort of has the texture of pigs liver but a taste nearer to that of kidney. I recommend it.

My last photo here is one I have included because Sue really likes it. It's of her as she walks through the market of Can Tho. It has a nice simplicity to it but generally leaves me feeling sombre. Where is she walking? Why is she alone? As I took the photo I know that she was just trying to catch up to Eleanor and get out of the pissing rain but I guess that's the power of a photograph.

Land of Ice and Fire. And Rain.

The Land of Ice and Fire is how Iceland likes to brand itself, not entirely unreasonably either. It's home to many glaciers, including Europe's largest, and is the second most volcanic country in the world after Hawaii. But I would recommend, just for accuracy's sake you understand, the slight addendum of 'and rain'. In the days we were there it only stopped raining for 100 minutes; admittedly they were an amazing 100 minutes with some of the most crystal clear light and beautiful countryside I've ever seen but still. Now I know what you're thinking: the Welsh tourist board has already cornered that market, but I don't see why they couldn't come to some sort of mutual agreement.

When you live in a place where you're likely to spend a large portion of the year battling the elements it's always nice to know that at the end of the day you can have a nice hot bath and, thanks to another aspect of Iceland's extreme nature, Icelanders have a better deal than most. 14% of the surface of Iceland is covered by lakes, there are many underground reservoirs too and where these are found near to one of the many vents to the Earth's core that the country straddles the result is a vast aquifer of ready made bath water. You see, the mains water that gets pumped into Reykjavik isn't cold like ours but piping hot and so whereas we have to wait for the water to get hot they often have to wait for the water to get cold.

The reason Iceland is so geologically active is that it sits astride the mid-Atlantic ridge, in fact, worse than that, the fault line actually splits in two right in the middle of the country. This has resulted in there being more than 30 active volcanic systems in the country and one third of the total magma that has erupted to the Earth's surface in the last 500 years has been on this one island. In 1783 the Laki volcano erupted, and it was a real monster. The guy that told me about it said for me to look up the history of my country, or any country in the northern hemisphere, for that year and it would be mentioned; and he was right. That summer was known as the Sand Summer in the UK because the sky was changed to a pallid yellow from all the sulphur that was belched into the atmosphere. Ten thousand Britons were killed by the fallout from the eruption. One third of the population of Iceland were killed. Chilling statistics like that is probably why locals were all a bit nonplussed when their last major eruption was under way resulting in flights throughout northern Europe being grounded due to worries about the ash cloud. Apparently they found it genuinely amusing that people would get so worked up by such a small eruption and annoyed that the world seemed incapable of pronouncing a simple word like Eyjafjallajökull. 

A close up of the blow hole, so to speak, between eruptions. It smelt as bad as it looks.

All the poor weather we encountered meant that there was no chance of seeing the Northern Lights, which was a shame but not a surprise as I knew before we left that solar activity was low. Luckily, though, we did get to see the other main thing that I wanted to get out of the trip, whales. Minke whales, to be precise. These baleen whales are normally solitary but we managed to find two together that were presumably feeding on a ball of herring or some other such fishy goodness. The rolling of the waves and the lash of the wind and rain meant that the only vaguely in focus shot I managed to get was less than impressive but, for me, this particular encounter wasn't about photography, it was about seeing one of nature's wonders up close and personal. So although I didn't get a heap of shots of humpbacks breaching and fluking I was still more than pleased with my day.

When I'm away I now increasingly approach any new place with a view to how I'm going to represent it on this blog. What story am I going to tell? What are the key elements I need to photograph? What caption would fit here? And if I come up with a good turn of phrase I'll quickly note it down knowing that my awful memory will inevitably let it fall from it's grasp. But on this occasion I was content to just stand there trying to guess where they would surface next whilst simultaneously trying to dodge the increasing quantity of vomit puddles on deck and not fall into the briny deep. And there was a lot to dodge too, let me tell you; I hadn't seen that many people vomiting with wild abandon in one place since my last night out in Cardiff. Sue does not cope well on boats and, whilst she wasn't a contributor to the fish food being mopped overboard that day, she felt pretty rough the whole time we were out there but she manfully fought it all the way and coped extremely well. As we chugged back into the harbour she said that I have my 'roller coaster' face on. For those that haven't gone on a trip to Alton Towers with me this basically means I have a fixed grin on my face combined with a sort of wildness in the eyes that gives me an altogether unhinged appearance. This means I've had fun. The only slightly unsettling thing about the trip was that in the opposite berth to our whale spotting ship were two whale hunting ships; a stark reminder that these impressive creatures have no protection in Icelandic waters. The argument goes that they have been doing this for a thousand years, it's a part of their culture, why should they have to stop now?

Minke whales are known for the small size of their dorsal fin compared to their body size

More of a struggle was our next excursion where the plan was to spend the day going to Thingvellir, the seat of Iceland's ancient parliament the Althingi; a set of geysers, one of which is called geyser and is what every other geyser in the world is named after; and also the Gullfoss waterfall. The weather was absolutely appalling, incessantly, all day and it was particularly annoying for this last item on the agenda as it is one of the most impressive waterfalls I've ever had the good fortune to visit. I could have easily spent a whole day just photographing this one location but all that I could do was snatch a few hastily composed shots before my camera got saturated. The photo I've included here has rain drops on the lens and the sky looks miserable; it's a damned fine waterfall, though. I could probably say the same thing about the geyser; to really appreciate it you would need a nice blue sky to give some contrast to the vast, boiling jet of water that surges upwards every 4-8 minutes. As it was, in my photos, it just sort of blends into the background so that you can't really get a feel for the dynamism of the moment.

Before we set off on this trip there were several 'facts' about Iceland that I wanted to check out, like: Iceland has no trees; Iceland has no dogs; in any town there is only one shop where you can buy alcohol and it's run by the Government, and a few others. It turns out that only the last of these is true. Iceland does have trees but the rule of thumb is that if it is taller than a man then it is an imported species. The saying goes that if you ever get lost in an Icelandic forest then just stand up. And Iceland definitely has dogs, in fact it even has native dogs. When the first human settlers arrived the Arctic fox was the only mammal living on the island. That has now changed with the introduction of sheep, reindeer, rabbits and the inevitable rats and mice. A generation ago a farmer asked permission of the Government to import some mink so that he could farm them for their fur. The Government said no on the grounds that they might escape and overrun the country. The farmer continued to apply for years but the answer was always the same. Eventually the farmer died but then his son took up the cause and continued to apply. He commissioned specially built mink-proof cages from which there could be no escape and, eventually, the authorities relented and granted him a license. Within four days the mink had escaped and so they complete the list of mammals you can find in Iceland.

The lower section of the Gullfoss falls

I really enjoyed our time in Iceland. At times the weather had completely kicked our arse but it was always beautiful and always compelling. If it wasn't so damned expensive it would definitely be a regular haunt as it only takes three hours to get to and has lots to offer anyone that likes wild landscapes and a strong Arctic wind. At some point we were looking through our guidebook and it mentioned that Reykjavik is the northern-most capital in the world; I love this sort of thing. I like having things that I can tick off of a list, especially things of a geographical nature such as this. It can go on the list right under the other places I've gone like southern-most town, northern-most town, highest altitude town. As we were discussing this, and as we rapidly approach our tenth anniversary of travelling the world together, we decided to tot up all the different countries we had visited as a pair, ignoring ones we had gone to the one without the other. We were somewhat startled to come to a total of 25 countries, an eighth of the world's total. That's good going; but then we realised that at that pace it'd take 80 years to get them all done - the Ultimate List. Must up the pace.

Reykjavik

The reflection underneath is a bit spidery for my liking.....

Takk. That's how you say thanks in Icelandic; nice and easy. Every other word in the language, every single other word, is completely unpronounceable. You might be forgiven for thinking that there would be some slight similarities between Icelandic and English, they both have a solid Norwegian base to them from when  our two islands were colonised by the vikings in the last half of the first millennium; but you would be wrong. Very wrong. Icelandic is actually more like ancient Norse than modern day Norse is; due to centuries of isolation and a policy of actively coming up with words with an Icelandic root instead of borrowing from other languages it has evolved very little. As examples of the way they police their language: their word for computer translates as number prophetess; telephone is long thread; mobile phone is travelling long thread; and, rather worryingly, they have no word for interesting. To hear Icelandic spoken is, however, quite interesting. It has a fairly quiet and reserved tone to it, as do the people in general, but every now and then, out of no where, they throw in an exaggerated ook sort of a noise as if they're trying to out honk one of the local geese that populate the area in place of the pigeons you normally find in most cities. Imagine a drunk Welshman doing a Monty Python impression and you might be half way there.

Names, of people, are also a little unusual. Similarly to Russian they have a patronymic and matronymic system; basically you come up with a forename for your new son but his surname is already decided - it's his mother's name with son added onto it. Concordantly, the surname for a girl is her father's name followed by the Icelandic for daughter, dottir. To clarify, I would be called Jason Pearlsson, my wife would be called Susan Davidsdottir and SKY news correspondent Kay Burley would be Kay Satansdottir. Simple.

So it was that Sue Davidsdottir and I set off into this alien culture with aspirations of whale watching and a good view of the aurora borealis; sadly, we would only achieve one of these.

Reykjavik was first settled by Norse colonists in the year 870 and was called such because you can just about make out steam from nearby hot springs (Reykjavik means Smokey Harbour); the city, indeed the country, was mostly just a fishing and sheep farming outpost for the next several centuries and when the city received its charter from their Danish rulers in 1752 the population had grown to a colossal 167 individuals. The charter wasn't granted to the people themselves or some sort of mayor or ruler but to a corporation that was tasked with developing native industries with a view to improving living conditions of the indigenous population. Today there are 120,000 people in the city and 320,000 in the country as a whole and they are free to enjoy what is widely acknowledged to be amongst the best healthcare and educational systems in the world. This is probably in no small part due to the fact that 80% of the tax collected in Iceland is spent on those two areas alone. This, combined with the fact that they have no standing army, 100% of their power comes from geothermal or hydroelectric sources and a few other key indicators, has led to Iceland being rated the most peaceful country on Earth.

The most built up area in all Iceland; some of those buildings are as many as four storeys high!

Despite being the largest city in Iceland by quite some distance Reykjavik has maintained the feel of a sleepy fishing town. The picture above is from the top of the Hallgrimskirkja cathedral looking west towards the harbour over the most developed part of the city but it looks more like a leafy suburb. As they have chosen not to build upwards it does mean that the urban sprawl continues for some miles east and south and is beginning to swallow up what used to be smaller satellite towns in the same way that Copenhagen and Oslo have done.

The panorama below is of the far side of lake Tjomin which nuzzles up against the side of the Icelandic parliament the Alþingi, pronounced AL-thing, the oldest parliament in the world at well over 1,000 years old. I like the contrast in the leaves of the trees as they begin their journey from green to brown through yellow and red. It also nicely highlights the degree of variation that is to be found in Icelandic architecture; it's quite unusual to find two buildings next to each other that are the same and this makes walking the streets of the capital all the more interesting. This is in stark contrast to the unrelenting tedium of new, suburban developments in the UK where conformity seems to be the order of the day.

I really liked Iceland. As soon as I stepped off of the plane and saw the bleak, rugged landscape and felt the icy wind bite I knew that I was going to enjoy this rough, harsh country. When I go on holiday I prefer to see mountains and ice over sun and sand; I like to feel that at any moment the weather could turn and you'll be hit with a storm that makes even getting something to eat an ordeal. This is just as well, because this is what we got. Our first day was wet, cold and blustery; pretty bad weather-wise. From bad it turned to brutal as winds reached gale force and the rain got heavier and heavier so whilst I enjoyed doing battle with Iceland and its weather it did mean that photography opportunities were few and far between, not if I wanted my camera to avoid a soaking in any case.

In my next post I'll describe the trials and tribulations of sightseeing in a country that is the second most volcanic in the world and sat between two of the roughest oceans we have. For now I'll say that there was a brief moment of respite; for two hours on our final morning in Reykjavik the rain stopped, the wind dropped  and the clouds parted. For two hours the sun shone through and gave me some of the most beautiful, crystal clear light I have ever seen. When I saw how things had improved I instigated a desperate rush around the city revisiting the key landmarks that we had been perusing under much less favourable conditions for the last few days. Even though it was almost noon the sun was still very low in the sky as we were only a degree or so from the Arctic circle. For the shots of Mount Esja and the Sun Voyager sculpture the light also happened to be coming in from the side and so was perfect for giving depth to the mountains. I am very happy with the panorama below, it is well worth looking at on a big screen and I foresee a canvas print of it on my living room wall in the not too distant future.

Click to enpanaramatudinate

The Biggest Tree In The World!! Sort of.

I know what you're thinking. It's a big tree, but, I've seen bigger. Well, you're right in a sense; you've almost certainly seen taller but as most women will tell you it's girth that really counts and the locals of the small town of Santa Maria del Tule certainly wouldn't disagree. This is, apparently, the tree with the largest trunk circumference in the world but having said that there are a few things to bear in mind.

1. Any fact that contains the word "apparently" is likely to not be a fact.

2. Small towns in the middle of no where all over the world make claims about having the biggest Something Or Other; this is normally because there is bugger all else going on in town.

3. It's possible that this is actually 2-3 trees that have sort of morphed into one space.

So, bearing all that in mind, let's take a closer look....

So, as you can see, this is a weird looking tree, it's a sort of Joseph Merrick of the tree world. It looks like about twenty trees that have been crudely glued together but, in fairness, it actually is all one organism; DNA tests have proven this, but this doesn't rule out the possibility of one tree having multiple trunks. Where the real controversy lies is how you measure a tree's girth. Do you just walk around the tree with a tape, pull it tight and see what you get or do you tuck the tape into all the nooks and crannies? Or should it actually be based on diameter? In any case, most independent observers seem to agree that it is indeed larger than its nearest competitor, a sequoia.

At the base of this tree can be found this plaque with the vital stats, most of which are wrong. The height is nearer 35 metres and the age is closer to 1,500 years, still very impressive though. The tree is in the churchyard of the small town which is about 9km down the road to Mitla east out of Oaxaca in central Mexico. Sadly, all is not well; the tree is dying. A rapid increase in the local population has severely affected the water table and a busy highway just a few hundred yards away is polluting the air. John Paddock, a US archaeologist specialising in the history of the region has warned local government that if drastic action isn't taken the tree could be dead within fifty years. A sad end to a long life.