Another early morning photo trip with UKCodeMonkey. After the mist had burned off a little, there was a lovely soft orange sun casting a beautiful quality of light on us…

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UKCM spotted some frogspawn, so I set the 10mm lens to work. I think some passers-by though I was a bit odd down in the hollow, dunking my camera in the water (almost)…

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A nice clear blue sky was visible one way, for one of those grand Bradgate vistas which we all know and love…

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I had fun, again with the 10mm lens, kneeling on wobbly stones with my tripod in the water. I think if I can obtain some neutral density filters to allow a nice long shutter speed, it’ll be well worth revisiting and working on this shot…

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Twice we saw ducks in trees. I never knew ducks sat in trees. But they do. I have to warn you that displacedanimals.com may be coming soon to document ducks in trees, goats on buckets tubs and all other such phenomena…

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And finally, since it’s a deer park, some deer. Something weird happened with the light here - we were shooting straight into the sun, so I think the contrast went horrible. But it’s the first time I’ve caught them crossing the river, so in it goes for now until I manage a better shot…

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Ok, I finally thought… hey, that YouTube thing… I can do that. So I dug out one of my old videos from May ‘05, and uploaded it. The process was dead easy… I might start filming more…

Thanks to Matt for the link… beware… this is pretty intense…

Are you scared yet?

Happy Birthday (0th) to Adam’s Tiny, new son of Simon’s Tall and Fran’s Not Hiding A Space Hopper Under Her Jumper Any More.

Born at 6pm yesterday in the shadow of Big Ben (I’m not sure what they were doing sitting on Wesminster Bridge at the time, but there you go). 8lb 1oz. All doing well.

And can I be amongst the first to say… Oh my god! What have they done! I bet his first word is “Indigo”. Can the world really take another ‘S Tall and the bad jokes which are sure to come?

From yahoogroups:

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At no point does it explain which other country, and when following the ‘privacy policies’ link, it merely goes to a generic help page. So I guess I’ll just click one of the buttons and take full responsibility for my actions without actually having been given any useful information.

I don’t really like yahoo.

A question was posed on 43Things which I actually found quite interesting to answer… especially when you begin thinking around all the facets of the problem.

The question runs thus:

One half of your body is going to be turned into a sausage. Would you like your top half or bottom half to be made of sausage? Why?

I had a look at the referers to my blog, and along with the usual searches like girls pooping in spandex and bondage deep heat and pussycat dolls identity, I found one which particularly amused me. It was:

hanging gardens of babyliss

I would absolutely love it if this was a slang term for erm… an excessively untrimmed, erm… bikini line, shall we say?

Anyone come across it before? It only showed up because the words were separated in the search. A search for the whole phrase shows no hits unfortunately, so I can’t confirm.

Or do you think it was just an innocent error?

As the proclaimers said…

I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to be the man who walked 1,000 miles
To fall down at your door

And that’s just what I did today. Except it was divided by 100. And I didn’t fall down at anyone’s door, but I did have a basket of chips. Let me explain…

This plan to climb Snowdon has slowly been happening, and I thought before I agree to go… oh no, dammit, I already agreed to go; try again… before I let someone book the hotel and end up owing them money… on no, dammit again, I already did that too. Erm…

This plan to climb Snowdon has slowly been happening, and I thought that since I’d already agreed to go and had a hotel booked for which I will owe money, I’d better check that I actually have a fighting chance of managing the trip. So this morning, I woke up pottered around a bit with brekkie and suchlike, then made an emergency lunch just in case, and set off to a pub five miles down the river for the lunch that I could have if the pub was doing lunch (which it was) and didn’t have to rely on my emergency lunch which I had made in case the pub I went to for lunch wasn’t doing lunch.

Part-way there, I realised I’d probably want a hot bubbly bath on my return, so when I reached Barrow-upon-Soar, I took a detour up the steep slope onto the high street and into Somerfield for a bottle of bubbly radox. I also picked up some of the groceries I wouldn’t be able to buy since I was out on a ten mile walk instead of buying my groceries like I should have been doing. I realise that doing this on the outward journey is silly, but there we go.

Well, what a delightful walk. I’d forgotten what an underrated and pleasurable mode of transport walking is. You can cover distance surprisingly rapidly - ok, not as fast as a car or bike, but to reach a pub which I always considered was driving distance in a little under two hours on foot was most satisfying. Plus, sections of the river and navigations were absolutely gorgeous! Peaceful too. I saw a fascinating living arrangement whereby the liver lived on a boat, but had their living room under a large archway which was supporting houses above on the steep bank. There was a sofa, and table, and even a clock on the wall. Strange.

So, anyway, on reaching the pub, a basket of chips and pint of diet coke was munched on, and I set out on the return journey some 20 minutes after arriving. A few paces in, I realised the error of the diet coke. Not good for walking on. The chips probably didn’t help either. But after the first twenty minutes or so, I was back in the swing. The return journey took only 1 hour and 32 minutes.

On arriving home, I jumped in the hot bubbly bath and now feel tired, but not dead. So that’s nice. It seems that the “ten miles” part of Snowdon won’t be too bad. Now we just have to see if the 2378 feet of climb will affect that in any way. I’m sure it won’t be too significant *cough*.

Stats:

Distance: Just over 10 miles
Time Walking: 3h 25m
Calories Burned: 1999 (yes, that’s what the HRM said)

The trip has also made me realise that I would probably be more than capable of long-distance walking, which is one of the Favourite Things I’d like to try doing this year.

So, after the early morning and a hot bath and some shopping and a bit of sleep, we headed out to a football match. I’d received a challenge from Jenny’s Chris (actually I daresay he’s Chris’s Chris, but you know what I mean) to visit a football match. Despite the fact he still hasn’t watched Eraserhead, the only challenge I have set him, I decided to go ahead with this, the approximately 5 millionth challenge of his that I have achieved.

The match was Loughborough Dynamo vs. Stratford Town. What a great thing to do! We stood in Chris’s recommended location right by the dugouts so you can hear what the managers are shouting, and boy did they say some rude swears. The match was exciting and enthralling, with five goals (three to them unfortunately). Cup of hot chocolate in the clubhouse during half time to thaw out. You know what, I think I might even do it again some time.

I took the camera and discovered it to be rather harder than I thought to take photos of such a quick-paced sport. The low light of the miserable weather didn’t help because I was compromising between graininess and blur the whole time. But I’ve made a small gallery of some of the shots, and a couple appear below:

Click for gallery and full size pics

Click for gallery and full size pics

It took me a while to realise that shooting from the side of the pitch put a yellow stripe through everyone (the fence on the opposite side of the pitch), so after a while I tried a few shots from the grass bank behind me. This resulted in much cleaner backgrounds, as you can tell from the second shot above.

Up at the crack of sparrows this morning for a wander and photoshoot with UKCodeMonkey. Not great weather for it - if the sun had just burned through the mist a little, there could have been some really atmospheric shots, but as it was it remained rather dull and grey. Still - we were there early enough to see lots of dears.

I was playing with the wide-angle lens - I love taking the ‘wrong’ lens out with me sometimes… I was telling UKCM how I’d once spent a day in beautiful wide-angle landscape country and purposefully taken a fixed 135mm lens to see what would happen. Today it was the opposite… no chance of capturing wildlife, so I had to look at the bigger picture.

The first one which struck me as worthy of processing was this one:

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But it’s not really about the photography… a 2-hour walk and chat in peaceful surroundings does wonders for the spirit!