365 Project: Photo 216

I went for my first jolly around the newly opened Olympic Park today. There still seems to be lots of sections that are closed, there are still significant building works going on, but some of the green spaces are available which is good news as this is something that Stratford is severely lacking. I was a little underwhelmed by the park. The section I was in consisted of a pleasant enough river with some good reed beds that local wildlife will, presumably, love. A couple of footpaths corkscrew their way up a little artificial hillock that I suspect the designer wanted to look like Hobbiton but actually looks more like Teletubbyland.

Having said this I am aware that I am, in general, fairly biased against the Olympics and anything to do with it, except the sport. I've no problem with people having running and jumping contests, long may they continue, but the Olympics is little more than an expensive, bloated, corrupt cartel of tax dodging business opportunities. This probably tints my view a bit. To be fair it probably just needs a year or two to bed in; it wasn't that long ago that this was a heavily polluted industrial area so ultimately it has to be a good thing that it is now a potential haven for wildlife. One definite positive that only occurred to me later on was that it is possibly a good dark sky site; there didn't appear to be any street lights in the area and no fences to keep people out so stargazing options may have just significantly improved. Obviously it's not the mountains of Paranal but as far as Stratford goes it's as good as it gets. Hopefully. 

Mystic River

About a year ago I went on a little expedition to photograph the deer in Richmond Park, one of my favourite parks in all of London. Depending on your viewpoint the weather was awful. It was bitterly cold and and a heavy fog hung over the entire area throughout the day. This made the deer more difficult to spot, as visibility was below 50 yards, and any chance of nice bright landscapes non-existant. On the upside, it gave the Thames an ethereal quality that was quite magical. Another positive was the way that the branches of trees were highlighted due to the contrast with the overcast sky. I have always been fascinated by the intricacies of how branches grow; the journey, both physical and temporal, from green bud to mighty trunk. I did a module at uni on plant developmental genetics and it was one of the most interesting courses I've ever had the pleasure to do. For those interested, it's all to do with shoot apical meristems.

It was a touch on the foggy side

As you can see, the fog was substantial.

Richmond Bridge

Richmond bridge is rapidly approaching a quarter of a millennium in age and is still going strong. Thanks in part to a solid original design and partly to a sensitive widening project carried out in the 1930s so that it could cope with the increase in traffic. The upstream half of the bridge was completely dismantled, each brick being saved and labelled, the centre portion extended and then the original facing rebuilt. A single lane on the downstream side was kept open throughout the project.

I could edit these photos to make them clearer, increase saturation and contrast and remove some of the smothering effects of the fog but I've decided to leave them as is. As they are they do a much better job of conveying the scene as I saw it that day; cold, dank and quite beautiful.

An artist I met on the riverbank

This is a chap who will be known to anyone that regularly walks along this portion of the river. Say hello if you see him, he's very friendly and an excellent painter.

The war memorial had recently been adorned with its sombre wreaths of remembrance and I took the opportunity to emphasise the colour of the iconic poppies. To be honest, this didn't take much in the way of editing, it was a dark day indeed.

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

Regent's Canal

Reflection of a gas holder in the frozen surface of the canal

Another week brings me to another one of London's canals. Last Saturday saw me up and out in the biting cold to join in on my first ever London Photo Walk. What they seem to do is meet up every six weeks or so and wander along a predetermined picturesque route somewhere in the capital. There's no fee or dues to be paid, it's just a group of like minded people out and about with their cameras - it was great.

The route started at London Fields, went down through Broadway market and then out along Regent's canal before returning back to London Fields. At first I felt pretty self-conscious, I get nervous about street photography at the best of times nevermind when there's scores of strangers around and it's your first time at a new event. This wasn't helped by the fact that I was feeling a bit tender from the night before. The jitters quickly disappeared though as being in such a large group was actually a big help, everywhere I looked there was someone with a camera in front of their face snapping away.

Not only did this large group help give me a bit of a safety-in-numbers style boost in confidence but they also gave me lots of good ideas. If I saw someone near me take a shot then I wanted to know what it was of, sneaking a peak over their shoulder to see what they had captured. This gave me a fresh perspective on scenes that I might otherwise have passed over unnoticed.

The Regent's Canal is linked to the Lea Navigation canal that I blogged about a few weeks ago near the Olympic Park via the Hertford Union Canal. The canal itself was probably a little less pleasant than the Lea, perhaps not benefiting from an Olympic inspired clean up. One similarity between the two though was an array of excellent graffiti; I know many consider this nothing more than vandalism but, in the right setting, it's rapidly becoming one of my favourite art forms. I suspect that, as I and numerous others on the walk were photographing the big bird motif, we may well have caught the artist in the act. It looked a lot brighter than everything else in the area and the man standing furtively next to it with a carrier bag of what could well have been spray cans was behaving very strangely. He clearly didn't look comfortable having people paying close attention to what he was doing, but at the same time he didn't leave, he must have had more work to do.

The only draw back to this excellent event was the biting cold. Those that know me will know that I love the cold, it's very much my sort of weather; this was a different matter however. To be able to use my camera properly I can't be wearing gloves, they're too clunky and I can't feel my way around the camera. No gloves and two hours at sub zero temperatures left my hands a little worse for wear. For the last half hour I couldn't feel the shutter button and often actually had to watch what my fingers were doing to know what I was up to. When I text my wife once it was over it took me nearly five minutes to write a simple message because I couldn't really move my fingers. Making a fist as quickly as I could took me nearly five seconds and my little finger wouldn't move at all. My hands were in not inconsiderable amounts of pain into the next day and holding anything with them was particularly painful.

I now own a lovely pair of fingerless gloves.

Snow What?

Well, it finally happened. We've had a very temperate winter so far here in the UK, one of the warmest on record, but this week Europe has been gripped by particularly cold Siberian weather fronts and some snow has finally made it to the majority of Britain, even the south east. So for those of us that have been out and about in the white stuff here is a post that's as fresh as the snow depicted. These images were hand reared on Hampstead Heath, they have been fed only the choicest, natural, organic feeds and were humanely dispatched in a low stress environment. They were rapidly blogged and are to be consumed with 48 hours for the freshest flavour.

My favourites are the panoramas (click them to enamazingify) and this first one. As soon as I saw everyone sledging down the hill I was put in mind of this classic painting by L.S. Lowry.

Deer, Oh Dear...

I'm going to take a break from the series of posts I've been doing on Vietnam recently to show you some work from closer to home; Richmond in south west London to be precise. Those of you that follow me on Twitter will know that I spent most of last Sunday tramping around hunting for deer. I had set off early as it takes a good 90 minutes to get there from my home in the east of the city. On Saturday the weather had been glorious, sunny blue skies and unseasonably warm, but Sunday was a different proposition entirely. What used to be known as a "pea souper" had set in.

My first glimpse of the deer

Visibility was approximately 50 metres, the temperature had plummeted and along with it so had my chances of improving on my collection of deer photos. I had been to Richmond Park once before, again, with the sole purpose of snapping one of 650 or so Red and Fallow deer that roam free in the 2,500 acre park. I had had some moderate success that time; I had found a herd of 80 head or so but wasn't able to get very close without making the deer skittish and so had to settle for hanging back and taking some longer range shots. This time, I wanted to try and get closer for some more intimate shots of these beautiful animals. Unfortunately, the thick fog meant that even if I got within 20 yards I was going to struggle to get a clear shot.

All was not lost though, these dull, overcast conditions are actually ideal for close up work and the fine detailing that that can reveal. They also lend themselves to getting some good shots of the woodland in the area and also the section of the Thames that I walk along to get to the park. I'm going to put the river and woodland shots in a future post but I'll show you a couple of other ones as I rather like them. All the leaves and grass in the area were catching the mist and forming little droplets that highlighted the fragility of the structures. Cobwebs in particular stood out, you could spot them from several yards away. After taking a few of these sorts of photos I noticed that my beard was catching the dew in the same way: I decided that this needn't be documented.

I should have found a more intact cobweb but I was keen to press on and find the deer

Even with 650 deer at hand that meant that there was only one per four acres of park on average which, with the weather the way it was, meant that there was no guarantee of striking lucky. My first sighting came after more than an hour of hunting but I had heard them long before I saw them. The great roaring of dominant bulls carries a long way even through the mist. Frustratingly, the weather made it more difficult to actually pin point where the noise was coming from as it was rapidly muffled. Not long before I finally found them I started to here the clash of antlers, now this got me really excited; the main reason I had came was to get some photos of rutting behaviour. Eventually I saw what I had come for; 80 yards away I saw a small group of hinds and, at this time of year, there was unlikely to be a group of females without a stag nearby. And so it came to pass. This actually turned out to be a pretty big group with three or four mature stags, I don't know exactly how many were there as the far side was shrouded in mist but there were at least 50 or more.

The hinds kept their distance

There was no way I was going to sneak up on them unnoticed so I went for the slow-and-steady technique and over the course of a further 90 minutes or so I slowly worked my way towards them; sometimes moving forwards, sometimes taking a few steps away again and always trying to pre-empt the direction the herd was moving in. I would also randomly fire off my camera even when there was nothing in particular to see to get them used to the sound of it; I now have quite the portfolio of my right foot. Most of the hinds had retreated but several stags had stood their ground to fight each other and I used this to my advantage. As they lowered their heads and clashed I edged closer until I was about 20 yards away. On a clear day this would have given me the chance to get some crystal clear shots, today it got me some more ethereal looking ones with the fog providing a plain backdrop. Importantly, though, I got the shots I had wanted of stags clashing.

These two stags appeared to be more junior and merely fighting for the practice. There was a larger stag, below, who remained unchallenged. Even though these deer were smaller and their antlers not as well developed they still made an awesome noise as they brought their heads together. There's something quite primal about the sound of lengths of bone being smashed against each other. They didn't appear to be injured at all, as can apparently happen when they really go at it. I've also learnt that a dominant stag that has control of a harem will normally not eat during the mating season as he's too busy fending off rivals and, well, mating. They can expect to lose 20% of their body weight during this period and if they haven't put on enough bulk before the season starts they can actually struggle to make it through at all. There are worse ways to go, though, I suppose.

Below I have the best photo I managed to get of the dominant bull in this group, a beautiful creature. It is in no way surprising that in Britain they have been associated with royalty and majesty for over 1,000 years. You'll notice that I have the same photo again underneath that but more crappy looking. This is just to show how foggy it really was last Sunday. I had got pretty close by now as they were far more interested in each other than they were in me but even at 30 feet it was damned murky so all my photos ended up looking rather flat and dull. That being the case I worked them over a bit in Photoshop with what's known as a 'Levels' adjustment to liven them up a bit and tease out some of the detail. I'm mainly telling you this because, as a general rule, I don't like to mess about with my photos if I can help it (not just for artistic reasons but because it's tedious in the extreme to do) and also as a continuation of my policy of telling you when I have altered photos so that you know what is real and what has been fiddled. The top most photo in this post of the group of hinds is unaltered, the others have been adjusted.

In all I spent about 5 hours following these deer around and I had a great time doing it. Even though it takes several hours of travelling I think I'm going to have to get down to Richmond more often, these are amazing animals and it's genuinely exciting spending time near them. Stalking these wild creatures is probably the closest we can get in this country to going on safari, I certainly got that same sense of excitement. I'd like to get some pictures of them in the snow this winter, that'll depend on the trains being able to cope with the weather, of course.

Scafell Pike: Take Two

As the name of this post suggests, this wasn't my first attempt at the summit of Englands highest mountain. I had gone there a few years earlier with a big group of friends with the sole purpose of getting to the top. We were camping in nearby Wasdale Head and the weather was against us from the start. Torrential rain that never stopped ensured that not only did not all the group make it to the top but that there was nothing to see in exchange for the labours of those that did. Knowing I would be a regular visitor to the Lake District, on that occasion I was happy to return having gone halfway up.

The view back down to Wasdale Head

This time I was more confident. It was a cloudy start to the day but there was a strong wind coming in from the coast that was due to blow all that away by lunchtime. My only worry was that at nearly a kilometre of height the clouds might be a bit more stubborn. I needn't have worried, however, there was still bits and pieces of cloud here and there but more often than not they served more to give the sky depth than to obscure the view.

Our lunch spot

We planned to do a circular route from Wasdale Head essentially walking clockwise around Lingmell, a total distance of about 15km and an estimated time of 6 hours or so, which turned out to be about right. For most of the journey it was t-shirts only weather with waterproofs firmly stowed away at the bottom of the bag. Only in the last couple of hundred metres of ascent did it get uncomfortably cold as we became less and less protected from the Atlantic wind; there were still a few patches of snow dotted around on the leeward slopes. The summit itself was very changeable. For thirty seconds you would have a glimpse to the north of Derwent water and then find yourself shrouded in cloud only for it to quickly break and reveal a beautiful vista of the coast of the Irish Sea away to the east. I didn't get a full 360 degree panorama but was very pleased with what I did get and, of course, it still leaves me something to aim for on my next visit.

Snowdon and Scafell Pike down; Ben Nevis and Slieve Donard to do.

Lingmell from thr final ascent to Scafell Pike

Wast water

Lake District

I'll be in the Lake District this week, unfortunately just as the wonderful weather we've had over the last week or two begins to turn to cloud and rain. No matter! I've plans to climb at least 3 of England highest mountains while I'm there and I'll always have the camera to hand in case there's a break in the cloud. I'd even settle for clear skies at night, I've been keen to get a few pictures of star shapes ever since watching the BBC's Star Gazing Live show earlier on this year and, more recently, the excellent Wonders of the Universe. The light of London makes this pretty much impossible at home so fingers crossed. Failing that, I've several good looking pubs lined up.

Weather Woes

So, it's been a pretty dull start to the year all things considered, at least in the south. The last three times I've gone out with my camera I haven't even got it out of the bag; the cloud has been unrelenting. Some digging reveals that this has been the second dullest start to a year on record in the south, not ideal for getting great landscape shots. It's not like this everywhere, though; Northern Ireland is currently enjoying its brightest, most sunny year since records began. So either they only bothered to start keeping records this year or they're not doing too badly.

Hopes remain high of getting some decent shots soon, though. Tomorrow I'll be spending the day walking on the South Downs and next week I'll be spending a week in the Lake District. Opportunities abound.