looking at the stats on my flickr bit the daily views over the past couple of days have been nearly three times higher than usual. usually when there is a large hike in views it's because a particular photo has been picked up on another site and become popular. this this the individual photo views have been fairly average which probably means one or two people have stopped to browse thru the photos. which is nice... :)
i call this photo 'faith' and it was yesterday's most viewed photo on my little corner of flickr. it is, i suggest, my most successful photo, by which i mean at least three people (go on and count 'em ;) three people have paid good money for a print of this photo. indeed one of them, a photographers* wife no less, told me just last tuesday that it's on display in a prominent place in their house. it wasn't even for sale when she and the canadian woman saw it.

i didn't really have anything more exciting than that to say when i started this post and i lost my way a bit as the tv was on. actually it was youtube, i was side tracked by the amazing atheist debunking someone talking of his love for jesus and hate for religion... which even to me sounds odd. anyway, that's all for now.

except it's not quite- i would like you to ask me some questions about anything you would like answer to. i'm hoping to get twenty-nine questions which i shall answer one a day thru february**. on video.
maybe.
;)



*he's just a wedding snapper, not an artiste like us... ;)
**ask. if all who read this put one question we should get at least twenty-nine questions by the end of the month. thanks.

recently faved photo on my flickr bit.
i took this with my pentax espio mini, a camera i've had for nearly twenty years. it's never failed me, indeed the only problem i had with it was when my sister borrowed it an then dropped it in the sea. the flash failed but everything else worked and so i sent it to pentax who repaired it (for free!) .
if there's a moral to this story it's that don't lend your cameras to you kid sister... ;)

so the Ilkley christmas lights were turned on last saturday by Matthew Lewis, some of you will know him as the actor who played Neville Longbottom in the HP movies.
He's a very nice fellow and he came to do this in place of Jimmy Saville who died about a month before the event. Matthew's fans were out in force and it got a bit hectic, so much so that the police offered to give him a lift in a van to his car after the event. happily the police station is right next door to the church where the event took place.
here's the vid i made of it.

i met Miranda at the 1in12 club a couple os fridays ago. we had a little chat. :)

i made a video!
last week i spoke to the manager of the loafer, ilkley's oldest bakery. this is the result.



this is (hopefully) the first of a series of conversations with various small businesses in ilkley, a project i've had in mind for a while now.
any constructive criticism would be appreciated.
:)

i

random photo

rondom photo-
this was taken at Entebbe airport in Uganda in january of 2006. it's an Egypt Air Aribus A319 and is one of the two planes dad and i flew in on the flight back to blighty. being Egypt Air we had to change at Cairo and this plane was half empty, the few of us on the plane pretty much spread out and most of the others slept for the four hours or so it took to get to Cairo. after that leisurely flight the Cairo to Heathrow leg of the journey was a different story altogether. we flew in a Boeing 777 and the plane was packed to the gills! if they allowed standing room there would be people standing in the aisles! i'd say that over 90% of the passengers were middle eastern, a good proportion of whom were probably the faithful returning from Mecca. there was also a lot of unnecessarily large 'hand' luggage getting in the way, and by large i mean suitcases, stuff just a little too big for the overhead panniers. but this didn't matter because what really bothered me was the rather alarming coughing from a lot of the faithful. this was when the initial worry over bird flu was dying down so i'm sure you can understand my apprehension...

on a side note, this photo was taken with the first digital camera i bought, a Casio Exilim EX-S3 'card' camera. cos it's very slim. it's a 3 megapixel camera and i still have it somewhere. it's quite the little gem and while the image quality won't knock you out it never let me down. i have made some pretty decent 10x8 prints from it's photos. maybe i'll make a little gallery showing the best of this camera, what do you think? certainly a set for it on flickr, at least...
:)

2010 pummelvision (youtube)

2010 in pummelvision

fluffy clouds*. close up and ultra wide views.


this is a close up- or more accurately, i zoomed the camera as far as it would go to catch the detail on the top of the cloud in the pic below-


this is the same cloud but in panorama form, that is, it's a composite of four photos stitched together in pse's panorama maker.
this- these photos were taken a few minutes before this photo (which was in a previous post) and is of the opposite side of the sky, facing east while with this one i was facing west. where the sun was setting.



*had to be done ;)

oh fuckityfuckfuck!

it seems i've killed the camera :(
i was giving it a once over before going down to london tomorrow (sunday), checked the batteries, put in the 2gig card to check- "kliklikliklik-" goes the camera and then dies.

damn!
... and i think it's the card that fucked up the camera...

lost...

i used to have this comic/magazine, wish i still did.

if anyone knows where i can get hold of it (cheap, preferably ;) let me know.

xposted @

musings

... on an incomplete...

... i was going to say life, but that may be a touch overly dramatic...
i was gonna do a quick review of the year 2008 but that hasn't happened. and other things too, but...

still, this week has been positive so far. yesterday (tuesday) my 30d finally came back, repaired and fully working. i also ordered a new lens for it, a sigma 17-70mm 2.8-4.5 and that came yesterday too. that cheered me up :)
so... time to take some photos, i think. hmm...


this afternoon at work i had one of those... moments that demonstrated to me just how much things are changing between the generations. i took a passport photo of a little boy, probably about five years old. he was polite and well behaved and avoided smiling when put in front of the camera*.
eventually :)
anyway- the point: his mum decided they would wait while i printed the photos and when i handed her the photos she was trying to explain to him what those things in the little yellow boxes in the metal basket were. i am of course talking about kodak film (the fuji was gone...)
it seems odd to me that there's a whole new generation of kids growing up who may never know what photographic film is, indeed may never need to know...
it reminded me of an article i read in... i can't remember where, but the writer was telling of how his daughter was baffled by her inability to navigate through the photos on the screen of his digital camera. because on the iphone she'd just touch the screen, slide her fingers about and stuff happened! but with the camera... you gotta press buttons? god, that is sooo last century!!!
and seriously, iphone or not, i really do believe that the nippers do think that way. while we got really excited about one hour photos they are disappointed with that new mobile phone because, you know, you gave them the wrong one...

... and the camera's only vga...




*children almost always seem perplexed when told not to smile when photographed for their passport photos. unsurprising really, as up to this point every time a camera was pointed at them they were instructed to "smile!"

about half an hour ago (as i type) Barack Obama became 44th president of america.
apparently they were a little bit late and Barack fluffed his lines a little but hey- probably a bit nervous- it is a big job he's taking on... and proof to me that like most of us he is human.
:)

i must say tho, Aretha Franklin's national anthem was a bit odd... if only Jimi Hendrix was still around...

reverend Joseph Lowery- that dude's cool ;)

... and i was reminded of Caitlin Moran's piece in yesterdays the times... made me laugh!, especially the moonwalking bit...

pin money

where i work (a camera shop) we have various photography type things on display...
anyway, we have a kodak digital frame on display in the shop (the 10" one) and show it of i put these photos on it. this morning a gentleman came in and offered to buy them. the photos, not the frames.
so i sold him the set. a cd of 27 dragonfly pics for £50 in my pocket! the week has started well...

fence in Ilkley

Ilkley

things i saw when walking along a public footpath in Ilkley.

Borg

Borg.

taken at Supernova '99, the 1999 Star Trek convention which was held at the Piccadilly hotel in Manchester, 1999.