Our friend Matti is not one for doing things by halves – this is Daymo trying to control one of his kites.
Lets go fly a kite
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
All the songs we know
I learned to skim stones on a lake in the Canadian Rockies. We went with some friends of my parents and their family, including their children and Gramps, their grandfather.
It took hours but with the endless supply of skimming stones and patience I can only dream of, I got there in the end. And once we were done it was time for marshmallows by the campfire, again Gramps showed us how to whittle a stick to spear a marshmallow and roast it on the fire.
Like butterflies on a wheel
The Laxey Wheel is the biggest waterwheel in the world and one of the iconic images of the Isle of Man. We visited and went down the mine associated with it.
Quad Squad
We went on a mountain tour on quad bikes while we were on the Isle of Man. I didn’t really get the hang of driving – and drove into poor Mikey when I applied the accelerator instead of the brake. No major damage done. And, fortunately, the picture was taken beforehand, so we were all still smiling.
A different time, a different place
Three of us went to visit one of our number who moved to the Isle of Man. This was a far cry from the urban life I was leading at the time, and my first (and thus far my only) experience of flying from London City airport. We were met at the airport after we landed, outside which was the only dual carriageway on the island.
Darth Maul and a hula hoop
Understanding how light works is a very important part of photography – a flash can bring out colours that would otherwise fade into the dusk, or freeze a nearby object while capturing movement in the background. These days I hardly use the flash, I see it as kind-of vulgar, it makes the photography intrusive. “Look at me, I’m taking a photograph”. Sure, there is a time and a place, but it is to be used sparingly.
An end to the web of lies
At last, I have now gone through all of the unpublished comments that have built up on this blog over the last few years and marked most of them as spam. The automatic filters got a lot of them but they left me with quite a collection of verbose comments to sift through – these appeared to be autogenerated ‘medical-ish’ language scattered with links to comments on other peoples blogs. While I didn’t follow any such links, I am guessing that they were similarly constructed. This appears to be an attempt to game the Google relevance algorithms by creating a web of pages that link to each other.
Anyway, this means that any comments you might leave from now on will get a bit more attention as they won’t get lost in the morass of spam.
Goths in a tree
There used to be a tradition of taking pictures of everyone in the tree at the annual picnic. What you never see is the view from the tree.
In the frame
This shot, from one of the Hampstead Park picnics, started me thinking about how photography could be an art under my control. Completely by accident the hoop framed a number of people – something I have since gotten an eye for and deliberately tried to capture.
Waltham Forest Nights
I never really got the hang of taking pictures of people. They are too unpredictable, and don’t stay still long enough to line up the shot. This particular party, poor James (not pictured) got the raw end of my inability, with constant flashes from my repeated pointing and shooting. None of those pictures came out well, but maybe that wasn’t the point. As we entered an age where photography became more-or-less free, you didn’t worry so much about wasting film and could take entertainment from the mere taking of the pictures without thought for the photographs produced.