Brrrsville!

Walking along the gorge of the River Almond by the weir and ruined old mill by Cramond, big chunks of ice floating in the river, large, flat sheets which the ducks were using to sit on, and huge rows of icicles hanging down from the overhanging rocks like enormous fangs. Couldn't resist taking some pics and shooting a brief video 360; the roar of water over the weir and the current in the river below it were both very strong, presumably with some of the snow and ice melting into it (going to be a lot more of that over the UK when the cold snap actually lifts properly). The temperature was actually slightly better during the daylight hours today than it's been recently, but on the banks of the nearby Forth the ferocious wind felt like it was straight from the Arctic. Still, at least it was good for the kite surfers who were having fun when we passed along the windswept and still icy prom.

4, 000 pictures

My Woolamaloo Flickr stream has just reached the 4, 000 images mark after uploading a few pics taken while out playing in the snow today, including these ones (below) as I enjoyed yomping across deep, almost unbroken snow on the rugby pitch at Meggetland sports centre - it was so nice and deep I could take big 'Moonwalk' steps (as in actual Apollo mission 'kangaroo' leaps, not Jacko style gyrations) as it cushioned each landing, it was great fun. Still wondering exactly how I managed to hit 4000 photographs and video clips and not sure if its something to be proud of or worried about. Although I am pleased that some have appeared on the BBC website and others have been shared to use on communal news sites by citizen bloggers, online galleries, various other sites and a handful even got borrowed, printed and framed for display at a community art project in Edinburgh. Which I have to say I really like - I'm old school internet, been online since 1991 and like many who started then still cling to at least a remnant of the ideals we had in the early days that it was a medium to empower ordinary folks to give them voice and share work and art online.






a pic from today, the sun settting behind the modern Meggetland sports centre as I was playing in deep snow on the rugger field.



The 4000 photos range from pictures of family and friends...











... to hundreds of photos and short video clips of Paris...



















...black and white work...
















...images of Scotland, city and country and wildlife...




















...cute kitty cat pics...








...even the occasional celebrity...




...and naturally lots and lots of pics of my beloved Edinburgh. In fact over 1500 of the city and over 600 of the Festival. Hmmm, guess it all does mount up!
































I make no pretense to be a proper photographer (sometimes I get very lucky with the odd shot though), I'm really more of a gonzo photographer - I just shoot anything that catches my eye from historic buildings to jugglers to everyday life to famous writers at the Book Festival; I don't rework them in PhotoShop so what you see is pretty much what I saw, not re-touched, shot purely for enjoyment from the compact camera I almsot always carry with me.

The Ukulele Lady

Amanda Palmer warming up in the basement of Forbidden Planet in Edinburgh this afternoon before a signing (and singing!) session for her and Neil Gaiman's book "Who Killed Amanda Palmer". Amanda has a music gig later this week as part of the Edinburgh Fringe (and is doing smaller gigs during the week as well), Neil is in town shortly for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, we're helping her sell the book while she's here and today was a nice chance for the fans to come and meet her - really good turnout, city centre buzzing with Festival goers plus a big line of fans waiting to meet Amanda adding to it all. This was Amanda getting into her zone before meeting the fans by performing a song for us all; I've videoed her performance (with her permission) and will add it here once I have time to sort it and upload it to YouTube.

Home, home on the range...

Among all the acres of tartan on display down by Holyrood today for The Gathering (even by Edinburgh standards there were a lot of kilts and plaid) a single, old cowpoke, taking the weight off his feet for a few moments, sitting outside the Parliament building and looking over to the Palace of Holyrood and the Queen's Gallery. The contrast between his cowboy hat and shirt and the Saltire and Union flags and the old buildings across from him appealed to me and I had to get a shot:

Pavement cafe

In recent years pavement cafes and bars have become much more common even in Scotland, partly being a bit more Continental but also, I suspect, fuelled by the smoking ban inside bars and restaurants (and what a difference that made, nice to be able to enjoy a pint without leaving smelling like an old ashtray from second hand smoke). For the most part its rather nice sitting outside to enjoy a beer or coffee though so its a change I like, except when some establishments put out chairs and tables in very innapropriate places (like fairly narrow pavements, there are some places they just shouldn't be) or when you get ignorant folks who keep dragging the chairs out further until they're blocking too much pavement and forget folks actually need to talk past them. But on the whole its quite nice we've got a lot more of this now. This was a quickly fired off snap in Edinburgh's New Town; I especially like the young guy sitting on the steps nearby looking over at the tables.

Caricature

Street caricaturist at work on the Royal Mile, spotted while walking home one evening; for some reason there's something I find interesting about taking a picture of someone who is in turn creating a picture:

Hopeful hound

I love the hopeful expression on this dog's face as it watches it owners eating away at a street market. You can almost hear the poor dog thinking "drop it, drop it, drop it..."

"Picture this"

Still on my rediscovering my love for black and white kick, took this shot in Edinburgh's West End yesterday on my way to speak to the Book Festival folks, the dome of West Register House which is the jewel in the crown of the Georgian New Town's beautiful and prestigious Charlotte Square. I took both a monochrome and a colour shot (mostly because the sky was such a lovely, clear blue) - which is better, do you think?








Personally I think this scene is better served in monochrome. And yes, I know I could shoot once in colour and then create a B&W version in PhotoShop, but as I've said before I prefer not to retouch my pictures other than a little cropping, alter contrast etc slightly, basically no more than I'd have done in my dark room film days, so if you see it in B&W here then I shot in B&W. I think grayscaling from colour in a photo package just seems a little flatter somehow, lacks the kind of silvery glow you get from proper black and white. Anyway, I took both to compare them.







and a slightly longer shot of the same scene taking in one of the gorgeous Georgian street in the West End with the dome rising above everything:

Brown is Watching. Apparently

Saw this stencilled onto the expensive wall of a Georgian building in Edinburgh's West End (tagging buildings is one thing, but really, street art wallahs could you not do it on listed, historic buildings, please?). I'd have thought Gordon was too busy watching his own Cabinet colleagues for sharpened daggers to watch us right now, but then he doesn't have to I suppose given the huge increase in surveillance and diminishing of civil liberties he and Blair have overseen during their corrupt regimes (for our protection, naturally).

let sleeping swans lie

If you should let sleeping dogs lie then I'd imagine you should certainly not disturb snoozing swans, given how grumpy and bad tempered they can be even when fully awake, let alone being roused from a pleasant nap. This was as close as I dared get to a couple of slumbering swans basking in the last golden rays of the setting sun by the Union Canal not far from my home, contentedly snoozing just a couple of feet from all the walkers, joggers, cyclists and canoeists. Lovely to have this so close by in the middle of a heavily populated part of a major city. If you click on the pic you can go to my Flickr stream and click the 'all sizes' buttons to see the much larger version; it was worth edging slowly closer to the animal as I managed to get some details of the feathers into the bigger version.

Home of Robert Louis Stevenson

Had dad through for the day over the weekend and we went wandering around some parts of the New Town taking pictures, including the home of one of my favourite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson:











In case you are wondering the old fashioned bell-pull on the bottom left, instead of stating the family name as usual simple says " private house, not a museum".

black and white cat in black and white

Cassie, my plump little black and white, soft-furred puss, in, well, black and white...



And yes, her fur is even softer than it looks here and having her belly scratched is one of her favourite pastimes; she is the Tummy Tickle Tiger and often manages to curl up next to me in such a manner as to make sure she's in position to have aforementioned portly tummy tickled, which is, of course, just a pure coincidence she tells me...

Three doors

And behind which door is the stunning Mystery Prize??? Wandering around the New Town in Edinburgh, camera in hand, just liked these three doors grouped together, dread to think just how much the Georgian town houses behind those doors actually are worth though...

Scottish mining museum

When I was off earlier this month I went down the coast a little outside Edinburgh to the Scottish Mining Museum, which I've been meaning to go to for ages (the 26 bus right from the city centre takes you to right to the entrance). Annoyingly the visitor centre and inside attractions and tours weren't up and running, even though I had checked the website before going down and it indicated everything was, but I did get to wander around all the surface remains and had the place largely to myself at the time too, quite atmospheric, so quiet now but once teeming with hundreds and hundreds of men working in the mine, the mighty boilers of the power house and the nearby brick kilns. Shot quite a lot of photos and only now uploading them - the first batch are on my Flickr page, with more to follow, and also a short video 360 panorama:

Dizzy auditions for a French arthouse movie

Continuing to play with black and white at the moment, realised I've never taken Dizzy in B&W and with her gorgeous soft gray and white fur she's perfect for some monochrome treatment; click the pics to see the larger versions on my Flickr:

Out and about

I've kept myself pretty busy over my week off, between the book group, movies, out catching up with folks and enjoying a drink, more movies and also a lot of wandering around enjoying the burst of good weather, ambling around the city and also down the coast, taking a shedload of photos as I did so (about 2.5 gigs worth of pics in a few days, I'll need another week off to sort them!), which has kept me occupied and active instead of sitting around brooding, so its been helpful. Walking past Edinburgh University the other day I decided to take some snaps of the skaters and skateboarders there - its a popular area for it in Bristo Square in front of the Uni. Before you think I am getting all arty with the move to black and white photography, I had been down in the Royal Mile earlier in the day taking some architecture pics and moved to B&W for those as I think it suits some buildings better and had taken several pics of the skaters before I realised I hadn't changed back to colour mode.





Yes, I could avoid that altogether by shooting in colour then greyscaling in Photoshop afterwards, but I think that's never as good as shooting in B&W to begin with. I'm not sure if that's just a subjective opinion because if I greyscale a colour pic I'll always know it started out colour, but anyway, if I want B&W then I'll shoot that way rather than change it on the computer later (besides I do very little modification of my pics, I'm a Gonzo photographer, I take pics of things I see and try to reproduce what caught my attention, not spend 6 hours filtering and altering it in Photoshop, not that I have anything against that, but its just not what I normally do, I like to keep my pics fairly honest as photographs and not overly manipulate them other than tweak contrast or cropping, things I'd do back in my dark room days at college).





So the upshot was I took several pics before I realised I was in B&W mode then looked at the images on the camera's screen and thought, you know what, I think this scene looks cooler in B&W, so I kept it that way. And ended up doing a bunch more B&W as well, not done much monochrome since my college years when I did my own prints (back in the days of actual film with my ancient but highly serviceable Praktica) and I suddenly found myself thinking, why haven't I done more B&W in the digital years? I used to love the way monochrome can bring a different light to some subjects and yet here I was doing hundreds of photos a year onto my Flickr and hardly any in B&W, like I had forgotten about it. I think I just revived my taste for it...

sunset in Edinburgh

Crossing North Bridge a few days ago after work, the setting spring sun splashed across these statues with a lovely, warm, copper light: