Driftwood

Descent

Celtic Dragon

Moray

Rescue

Here are driftwood photos I've been editing.

Push Up

On to week 3 of 100pushups (see http://hundredpushups.com/) with sore shoulders.

Whispers of Shakespeare

Last night I was asked to photograph a local production at the Eastgate theatre, titled So Long Lives This. It was a collection of songs, sonnets, pieces of drama and dance all connected by a loose narrative about Queen Elizabeth, Will Shakespeare, The Earl of Southampton and various other of the usual suspects. It was a gentle, occasionally dramatic piece performed in the round in an intimate atmosphere with minimal staging and rich costuming.

I've missed this; subtle and imaginative theatre woven around the life and work of Shakespeare. In Auckland I worked with a fine group of young people and dedicated parents to produce an abridged and minimal Julius Caesar, and with various groups in school holidays on some of my own Shakespearean pieces. It's one of things I like best in theatre, and I'm looking forward to doing more of it.

More info here:
http://www.shakespeare-at-traquair.co.uk/

A life in pictures

This week a friend passed on to me a collection of several hundred slides taken by a distant uncle of his over forty-odd years. When the man died his slides and old camera gear ended up in my friend's attic, emerging this week as bin-fodder and intercepted by me.

The slides, mostly taken in Edinburgh, divide into distinct categories. Many are up-close images of flowers, leaves, and a few of trees, clouds etc, all taken in the Botanical Gardens. There's a collection of monochromes of pavements, snow, shadows and various textured surfaces, and the other set is of dressed mannequins in fashionable shop windows on Princes Street.

This last set is what caught my eye; striking and complex images involving the dressed models, the lettering on the window's surface, the reflections in the shop window of Edinburgh Castle and of people passing by. He used high quality lenses so the light and the depth of field is superb, the models are shot to seem animated or engaged in conversation with each other. The reflections show the different layers existing simultaneously, overlaid on to a single static image. The older ones depict 1950s fashions, green Edinburgh omnibuses, people in hats and overcoats.

Looking through them on an old slide projector I tried to picture this man, this distant uncle seeing the finished picture in his head, finding the right angles and setting up all the manual controls of his Contax camera. What was he seeing in these images, what were they for ?

I read an article this week titled 'Don't Die With Your Music Still In You' and I've been thinking about how creativity flows through us. I wonder what he did with his slides, beyond selecting and arranging them in carousels, storing them meticulously in archive boxes. I felt privileged to have seen something of his creativity.

RSS

I'm enjoying RSS feeds. The Mac's Mail programme can subscribe to these via the little orange RSS icon on many websites. Every time the website is updated with new material a descriptive headline (or sometimes the whole article) is downloaded to my RSS reader. I check to see what might be of interest before looking at the website.

Currently I'm subcribed to Curious Read, Lifehacker, Indexed, BBC PM programme, and Zen Habits, amongst others.

You can even subscribe to this blog, and get a note downloaded when I post new stuff. Then again, why would you ?

My, How You've Grown

Bringing the significant changes of the past four years back to old haunts sets the challenge of reinvention. Good old T S Eliot described it in Journey Of The Magi:
"We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,"

The discomfort is in the shifted expectations I have of myself, work, other people. Before we left New Zealand I read some books about repatriation in which a common theme was one of finding a new space to occupy in an old familiar place. Don't get me wrong; it's an exciting and natural process, a confirmation of growth over stagnation, but the four-year gap has had a jarring effect on re-entry. I consciously resist the temptation to say 'my, how you've grown' to friends' children and former students who have doubled in height during our absence, though it is said to me in subtle ways.

My shifted space includes new and interesting friends, changed expectations of old friendships, more enjoyment of the countryside, daily cooking and baking, grappling with procrastination born of autonomy, a stripping back of material things. I wouldn't have predicted some of these.

Lomo

I have an old lomo camera which I picked up in a charity shop years ago. Never used it, but they seemingly have a cult following for the particular look they produce. It was unintended, apparently, a design fault but gained a following. Photoshop, of course, can be made to reproduce this effect, so here's my first attempts:

the last day of winter

Officially that is; St David's day tomorrow celebrates leeks and daffs but there's only the early green shoots of crocus bulbs in the garden at the moment. It helps to have these symbolic landmarks. I noticed the passing of the three-month line at the beginning of Feb (3 months since we arrived back in Peebles) and a shift of gear for us all. Those first 100 days of anything are a trial run, I find, a time to bed in new things. We've dropped below the 'welcome back' radar now and are part of the wider landscape (can you keep up with these metaphors ?). Habits and routines are revealing themselves, new connections and patterns.

Meanwhile the media continues to apply its blowtorch to our understanding of the economy and how much is true is anybody's guess. Bankers are the new witches, taking over temporarily from old Nazis and those with an unhealthy interest in children, and old-school socialists are cashing in on the interview circuits, sagely nodding and saying they told us it would all end in tears. Chocolate is the industry to be in just now, apparently.

A report came out last week condemning the myopic and monolithic education system that has grown out of the 'basics and testing' reforms of the Thatcher years, so more 'I told you so' quotes from former voices in the wilderness (including mine, if anyone was listening !). Apparently we shouldn't have thrown out all that dance and drama and sport and social studies.

At the start of the next hundred days comes my fitness regime, and it's going well so far. Check out http://hundredpushups.com/ to see my project for the six weeks of Lent. Anyone care to join me ?

I'm on week 1.

let us build a tent

We met with an architect yesterday, chatting over our plans and ideas, walking over the site of The Build. He asked if I'd heard of a book called A Pattern Language. This was enough to commend him to me, and I did feel we were talking the same language about what we want in the house. There was also a sense of relief about sharing responsibility for this huge undertaking. Remind me of this six weeks into the build process...
For some I've talked with the undertaking of travelling half-way round the world twice and rebuilding a life in each place seems a much bigger project than overseeing a house-build and I guess it's about confidence and familiarity. Somehow the relocation seemed like a no-brainer to me, maybe because I'd done it once already when I was young and invincible and it seemed to go without a hitch. The hitches revealed themselves later and I've spent those years unravelling them.
I put together an online scrapbook of pictures that express aspects of what I want in the house. It's here:



Click on the slideshow to see it on Picasa

air traffic over 24 hours

on the hour

There's news everywhere all the time. At the moment it's 30-40% economy-themed stories; factories and shops closing, unemployment, bank bailouts, political arguments about the 'right' approach. Radio news every hour, analysis inbetween, 24-hour news on TV, any amount of it on the interweb, all for the choosing - and I do. For me there's a fine line between finding it compelling and finding it compulsive, but there's something else. It's a culture's stream of consciousness, the prevailing wind of preoccupations and anxieties masquerading as information. In New Zealand the news was about injustice, race, road death, crime and local celebrities. Here in Scotland it's about money, class, far-away places, hierarchies. I couldn't get enough of it to begin with; the wall of sound in front of the speakers, where in New Zealand I heard the news through a glass pressed against the wall, sifting through endless individuals bitten by dogs. It's a phase of course. I'm used to those, and already I'm getting bored of it. The interweb at least allows a view into the way different cultures report events; New York Times, al-jazeera, the Onion, Arts and Letters. I checked out the New Zealand 'Stuff' website for, well, stuff on the recession over there. Top of the headlines were John Key getting the plaster off his broken arm, and a dog dying.

I've got new shoes

Drove to Edinburgh today in thickening snow, reaching virtual white-out on Leadburn Moor. Still, got some trainers and some walking boots for a fraction of their original price thanks to the credit crunch. Edinburgh was festive in its white blanket, with rooftops fringed with frosting and streets piled with ploughed snow. I shouldn't have had that piece of lemon cake though.

Mundane I know, but this is the extent of it some days !

More tilt-shifts

 
 
 

Here's more of those pictures (see below). At the top is a jetty in the Lake District, in the middle is Devonport from North Head, and at the bottom the bush railway in the Waitakeres.

Tilt Shift

 
 
 
 

I've been experimenting with an editing technique that produces these tilt-shifted pictures. Anyone recognise the places ?  All actual photos (taken by me) and edited to give the look of model-train style landscapes. It's quite compulsive, though slightly tricky to find appropriate pix. 

In other news, it's still snowing.

The Experiential Learning Curve

Crocs don't work in the snow.

Local walk

Harry Lauder's walking stick

Postcard

Sleeping Beauty's perhaps

Bright van

Wedding Cake snow

Snow Odyssey

Squirrel verandah

auditioning for Mr Tumnus

winter blossom

Pix of today's snowfall !

Listening to..

Drunkard's Prayer and Stateless.

Black Ice

I'm aiming to walk up the hill by our house every day. This morning the road up was thick with grit and salt ploughed into ruts by cars and farm machines, then frozen over in the sub-zero night. I picked my way up the hill, slipping a couple of times on the frictionless black ice and doing one of those Tintin flailings; a windmill of arms and legs that doesn't quite hit the ground nor spill a drop of tea. More photos of course and a dose of dazzling sunshine glancing off the white fields.

I didn't get the job, just a rejection letter. The certainty of it is a whole lot better than the waiting, though, and I'm over it already. Not sure what's next, but something will turn up. I was reading an article this morning about the 11:11 phenomenon, and while the actual numeral 11 thing doesn't work for me I get the principle of seemingly recurrent trivial events pointing to some underlying direction or 'prompting' or 'flow'. Not sure if there's my own personal Morpheus out there hinting obsurely at the matrix, but I enjoy the idea. It's a call to tune in to the subtleties, the ebb and flow.

More snow pix