| The Andrew Johnston Iceland Camouflage Masterclass | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 26-08-2011 15:19 | ISO: 100 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/125s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 28.0mm (~45.4mm) | Location: Kirkjufell | State/Province: South | See map | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
The trouble is, there’s a recurring theme here…
| The Andrew Johnston Namib Desert camouflage masterclass |
| Shooting with twin Canons | |
| Camera: Panasonic DC-G9 | Date: 28-11-2018 08:52 | Resolution: 5184 x 2920 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -33/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/800s | Aperture: 5.0 | Focal Length: 16.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8 | |
I noticed while gathering for the bushman walk that five of our group were "packing" a pair of Canons. This shot was inevitable.
Thanks to John B for the title – excellent photographer’s joke. I am happy to explain if required.
| Poly-tickle commentary | |
| Camera: Panasonic DC-G9 | Date: 24-11-2018 09:49 | Resolution: 2409 x 3213 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/500s | Aperture: 4.9 | Focal Length: 193.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 100-300/F4.0-5.6II | |
Sorry it’s a bit fuzzy and not properly focused, but that’s nothing to do with my photography!
My old mum has recently moved from her house to a smaller retirement flat, and is still in the process of sorting out some of the accumulated lifetime’s possessions. On this visit, I was presented with a large carrier bag of old cameras.
I have to say, I wasn’t expecting miracles. Mum and Dad never spent a vast amount on photographic equipment, usually buying a mid-range "point and click", using it till it stopped working and then buying another.
First out, an ancient Canon Powershot, for 35mm film. It probably works, but I tried explaining to Mum that there’s no longer any real market for such items.
"No-one really wants the bother of getting films developed. You don’t – you have a digital camera yourself now, you were using it last night."
"But surely there are people who love old cameras."
"Yes there are, but they have to be a bit special. If this was a Leica, with a little red dot on it, it would probably be worth some money, but not an ancient cheap Canon."
To settle it, I opened up my laptop and had a look on eBay. There were a couple, for about £15 and about £12, both with no bids.
Next up, a similar Panasonic. This still had a film in it, which was suspicious as it probably meant that the camera had died mid-holiday and been abandoned. eBay suggested an asking price somewhere in the range £8 to £11.99. Getting worse.
"I could offer it to the charity shop" said Mum, hopefully.
"Well you could, but don’t be surprised if they are underwhelmed." I told her about my recent experience of having a perfectly good 32" flatscreen TV rejected by our local charity shop, which didn’t encourage her.
"But surely if things still work?"
"I keep on saying, Mum, things have to be a bit special. You know, a Leica or something, with a nice red dot."
Next out of the bag was a Konica. This was a slightly different shape and had the rather ominous indicator "110" in the model number. That’s definitely not a good sign, I mean can you actually still get and process 110 film? (That’s assuming that you can see any point in shooting a format which is distinctly inferior to 35mm in the first place.) Amazingly enough there is one on eBay. £2.99, no bids…
"OK", says Mum, deciding that there’s no point in arguing that one. "There’s one box left in the bag."
What? Hoist by my own petard! I mean, what were the chances??
Sadly it’s actually only a slide box, and eBay suggests that it’s going to get £20 at best, but I am now honour-bound to do my best to find it a good home.
Be careful what you wish for…
| The Hut of Alleged Towels, The Crane, Barbados | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX8 | Date: 10-11-2017 13:34 | Resolution: 5184 x 2920 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -33/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/500s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 27.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8 | |
The Crane Hotel, Barbados has a hut whose purpose is to take in used beach towels, and dispense fresh ones. It has no other purpose. It is staffed during daylight hours by a helpful young chap, but on our recent visit he seemed to rarely, if ever, have any towels to dispense. Now if I was the manager and paying that chap’s salary, I would make sure enough laundry was being done to provide a reasonable supply, but then I’m weird…
We took to calling it "The Alleged Towel Hut", but then decided that was unfair. The hut itself satisfies reasonable standards of proof of its existence. The towels do not. Hence we have decided on a better term. This is now officially "The Hut of Alleged Towels". 🙂
| Country singer at the Listening Room, Nashville, providing important routeing information! | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 24-09-2014 18:14 | Resolution: 3424 x 3424 | ISO: 3200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/25s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 46.0mm | Location: The District | State/Province: Tennessee | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 35-100/F2.8 | |
How do you remember the waypoints and landmarks on a journey? What are the key features by which you can replay in your mind, or to someone else, where you went and what you did?
Like any good Englishman, I can navigate substantial sections of our sceptred isle by drinking establishment. This is, of course, a long tradition and officially recognised mechanism – it’s why British pubs have recognisable iconic signs, so that even if you were illiterate you could get yourself from inn to inn. It’s a bit more difficult today thanks to pub closures and the rise of pub chains with less distinguishable names, but it still works. Ask me to navigate you around Surrey, and there will be a lot of such landmarks in the discussion.
When I look back at other trips, especially to foreign parts, the mechanisms change. I can usually remember where I took favourite photographs, even without the GPS tagging, and I could immediately point to the locations of traumatic events whether in motion ("the Italian motorway with the big steel fences either side") or at rest ("the hotel with the sticky bathroom floor"). I also tend to hold in my head a sort of "moving map" picture of the journey’s flow, which might not be terribly accurate, but could be rendered more so quite quickly by studying a real map.
Frances, despite appearances to the contrary, navigates largely using food. Yesterday we had a typical example: "do you remember that lovely town square where we had breakfast in front of the town hall and we had to ask them whether they had real eggs because the powdered eggs were disagreeing with me? I think it was on the Washington trip." This was a challenge. "Breakfast" was probably right, so that narrowed things down a bit. "The Washington trip" was probably correct, but I have learned to treat such information with an element of caution.
At this point we had therefore to marry up two different reference systems, and try and work out where they overlapped. My first pass was to run the moving map of the Washington trip in my head, and call out the towns where we stayed. That eliminated a couple of stops, where we could both remember the breakfast arrangements (the very good restaurant at the Peaks of Otter Lodge, and a nice diner in Gatlinburg), but we were still missing an obvious match.
Then Frances said "I think we had to drive out of town for a bit because we’d had to change our route". Bingo! This now triggered the "traumatic event" register in my mind, specifically listening to a charming young lady in Nashville singing a song about the journey of a bottle of Jack Daniels, and suddenly realising I had put the wrong bloody Lynchburg on our route! Over dinner I had to do a quick replan and include Lynchburg Tennessee as well as Lynchburg Virginia in our itinerary. That meant an early start from Nashville next morning, heading south rather than directly east, and half-way to Lynchburg (the one with the Jack Daniels distillery) we stopped for breakfast because the offering at the hotel had looked very grim. Got there in the end.
(If you’re wondering, I do actually have a photographic record of this event. The young lady above is the one who sang the song with the critical routeing information.)
We’ve also had "that restaurant where we were the only white faces and the manager kept asking if we were OK" (Memphis, near Gracelands), and "that little store where they did the pulled pork sandwiches and the woman’s daughter lived in Birmingham" (Vesuvius, Virginia). In fairness to my wife, she can also accurately recall details of most of our retail transactions on each trip, including the unsuccessful ones. ("That town where we bought my Kokopeli material, and the old lady had to run across the street although there was no traffic"). Again there’s the challenge of marrying these up with my frame of reference, but the poor old lady in Cortez, Colorado, desperately trying to beat the count down timer on the pedestrian crossing, despite a traffic level of about 1 vehicle a minute, sticks in my mind as well, so that one was easy. Admittedly, I remember Cortez as "that nice town just outside Mesa Verde", but that’s me.
What’s your frame of reference?
When I was a lad, there was a joke. It went:
"It must have been tough in the old days."
"Why?"
"They had to watch TV by candlelight."
Last night we were just sitting down to dinner and our evening’s viewing, and the power went off, for almost two hours. In lieu of candles we lit the gas fire and an oil lamp. Not happy to abandon our entertainment, we powered up the older MacBook, popped in our X Files DVD, and got on with our watching.
That’s right – we watched TV by candlelight.
But there’s a twist. It worked, because of late-noughties technology. DVDs and a laptop with a large screen and disk player slot. If we were reliant on 2017 technology, we would have been scrod: no disc player in the newer laptops, no access to streaming services (mains powered internet router and so on), no access to the mains-powered server which holds our recorded TV.
Normal service will therefore be resumed imminently.
Regular readers may remember that I classify films and plays according to whether they are about talking about getting on a train (i.e. deep and meaningful journeys into the soul), or actually getting on the train (/boat, /plane, /nuclear power station etc.). It should not surprise you that my own collection has rather more of the latter.
I recently updated the list, which may amuse you.
| Market Traders, Marrakech | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX7 | Date: 10-11-2013 17:20 | Resolution: 3067 x 3067 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -66/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/400s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 77.0mm | Location: Djemaa el Fna | State/Province: Marrakech-Tensift-Al Haouz | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO PZ 45-175/F4.0-5.6 | |
I suspect we all have something which can attract our attention, like a missile locking onto a homing beacon, even against significant background noise. With Frances, it’s shoes. With me, it’s bread!
There was a scene in the excellent, but very complicated, Belgian conspiracy thriller, Salamander which demonstrated this. Set in a Belgian monastery, in the foreground the central character is discussing the case with his brother, formerly a policeman but now a monk. They are trying to work out who has covered up doing what to whom, and how. In Flemish, so we’re getting this through subtitles. Even by the standards of the rest of the series it’s very, very complicated.
A monk wheels a trolley through the background, destined for the refectory. I go, "Ooh, that’s nice bread"! That breaks our chain of thought and we have to go back about a minute…
I can’t remember, but I think the same happened here. This was taken across the big square in the Marrakesh Medina, through a lot of cooking smoke and dust. The original has almost no contrast, and is quite indistinct. However Capture One has worked its magic and I think it now works. What attracted my eyes in the first place? Guess…
LinkedIn is full of useful little articles about mistakes not to make in the world of work. However here’s one I’ve never seen mentioned. I’ve just had a kick-off meeting with a new client. In order to appear friendly and unthreatening I dressed in a dark green suit, with a brighter green shirt. Unbeknown to me, the brighter green is not only quite similar to one of the company’s logo colours, it’s also the colour they have chosen for many of the walls and much of the furniture at their offices. Take off my jacket, and I was approaching sniper levels of camouflage. There’s a lesson here somewhere…
| Mercedes-Benz E Class Cabriolet E 350 CDI Blue Efficiency AMG Sport 125. Phew! | |
| Camera: Panasonic DMC-GH4 | Date: 14-05-2015 20:09 | Resolution: 4367 x 2457 | ISO: 500 | Exp. bias: -66/100 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 2.8 | Focal Length: 12.0mm | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8 | |
It has been said that the ideal car for Darth Vader would be an original Mercedes CLS, in black. I think I have discovered the ideal car for Dr. Henry Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde!
Mercedes themselves acknowledge the dual personality of the beast with the space-filling full title of “Mercedes-Benz E Class Cabriolet E 350 CDI Blue Efficiency AMG Sport 125”. Now I may be wrong, but shouldn’t “Blue Efficiency” and “AMG Sport” sort of cancel each other out? Apparently not…
In normal use this is a typical, refined, Mercedes soft-top, very reminiscent of the old 129-series SLs. I was a bit worried before I took delivery that the suspension might be firmer than ideal, but it’s absolutely fine. It’s smooth, stable and quiet, the big Diesel engine hardly audible top up or down.It’s very quick, but doesn’t feel “fast”(even though on main roads you can maintain high speeds very easily), because the throttle response is fairly muted. And, the “Blue Efficiency” bit kicking in, on a long run as long as you keep it under about 85mph you can get around 40mpg, not bad for a heavy car with a 3l engine. Ideal for mild mannered Henry Jekyll.
And then you press the little button marked “SPORT”.
Now I’ve had cars with sport settings before. On the Mercedes SLs and the old Porsche 993 it supposedly made the gearbox a bit more responsive, but I never noticed much difference. On the VW EOS, with its petrol turbo engine there was a noticeable effect if you wanted to drive hard because the different profile meant that the turbo was always spun up and there was no lag, whereas that could occasionally catch you out in normal mode.
This is different. The button should probably be labelled “Dr. Henry Jekyll’s Patent Elixir”, but unfortunately that wouldn’t fit. It seems to signal someone to release a snarling, snorting monster from its cage. In practical terms the car sharpens its steering, firms up the suspension, changes the gearbox profile and dramatically modifies both the throttle response and engine behaviour. I’m not sure whether there’s also a change to the exhaust note, or whether that’s just a side-effect of the engine working harder. The net effect is a bit like having a large, powerful dog pulling you along on its lead – you go from nudging it gently in the rear end in ECO mode to desperately trying to reign it in in SPORT. 0-60 takes just over 6s, but the most noticeable effect is mid-range acceleration, which distinctly betters my last Porsche. Mr. Hyde would approve.
Some cars are soulless, and some have a distinct personality. This has two, and I’m enjoying both of them!
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