More of the Louvre

Since blogger is grudgingly and slowly letting me upload some pics tonight, some more pics from Paris, still sticking with the Louvre theme:



I.M. Pei's glass pyramid which now functions as the entrance to the Louvre, descending down into the pyramid to a vast space with the ticket desks, information and entrances to the various wings of what is probably the world's most famous museum. Turn the other way and walk through the Jardin de Tuileries and you come out into a square leading your eyes up a line straight to the Champs Elysees and L'Arc de Triomphe.



heading into one of the wings with some of the Louvre's astonishing amount of Classical material



Which includes the world's original supermodel, The Venus de Milo. Who I believe is now romantically linked with Paul McCartney :-)



La Joconde - the Mona Lisa, smiling for the many tourists. While photography seemed to be fine in most of the Louvre they did ask - as is the usual case in any gallery - not to use cameras in the rooms with the paintings, probably because so many idiots don't know how to switch off their flash which damages them. Despite the fact I rarely use the flash I still kept my camera in my pocket for this wing, despite masses of tourists - especially the many Japanese - merrily ignoring the rule and firing camera flashes off right in front of the paintings which made me want to slap them round the head, bloody idiots. There were so many the curators didn't even try to stop them. I broke my rule and did take one painting pic for this (no flash so I don't feel to guilty) as people were standing right there in front of curators snapping away.

One of the things I really liked in the wings with the paintings was the fact that several artists had been allowed to set up their easels to paint their own versions of some of the works, something I found to be rather satisfying to see. Actually La Joconde wasn't the most impressive painting there, famous as she is - the best work I saw (and there were many we didn't have time to see properly, it is vast) was one that annoyingly I can't remember the name of, but it reminded me of one of the Venetian paintings I raved about on here a few years back when there was an exhibition on at the Royal Scottish Academy. I wish I could remember the name or artist, but like a couple of the works I saw there it leapt out the frame at me, the colours, especially the blues, so amazingly bright and vibrant it was like the artist had painted Mediterannean sunlight right into the canvas, still pouring out of the painting centuries later.



In the Richelieu wing there was this terrific open space, essentially a sculpture garden indoors, with this amazing glass and steel roof (like a smaller version of the brilliant one now on top of the British Museum in London) shielding us from the elements so it felt like being outside but sheltered. Natural light floods this space and its twin further along the wing (these are the ones in the video clips from the other day) and a lot of artists were making the most of the light to sketch some of the friezes and sculptures; I'd imagine the statues would afford a great class in how to portray human anatomy and form and what a terrific space to draw in. Or take pictures in.



I love this space, I think I could sit here for ages






Inside the glass pyramid - I love the spiral staircase with no visible means of support (not even thin suspended wires); the column it is wrapped round is actually a lift. Its open at the top and the entire column sinks down - it doesn't telescope down, the entire structure actually slides down into the floor, very cool!



As usual click the pics to see the larger version on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream (only 184 in the Paris set so far, still a ton to add; no doubt many more Paris pics and vids to come!)

On the BBC

The photograph I posted here last weekend of the new moon hanging over a twilight street of Victorian tenements has been put up by the BBC on their website in their weekly 'your pictures' section of the Scottish news part of the BBC site (it's the fourth one in). I was quite surprised this shot came out at all, actually, it was my usual gonzo photography, spur of the moment, see a scene, try and snap it - no kit, just my small compact digital that lives in my bag, a tiny 3-inch mini tripod meant for table top use that I sometimes have in the bag and a handy gatepost to sit it on - and a lot of luck. I'm pretty chuffed that it worked and even more chuffed that the Beeb picked it for this week's crop of images from round Scotland, especially given how good some of the pictures in that feature are each week (click to see the larger image on my Flickr).



Since I started posting digital photos I've had some borrowed for articles, for teaching guides and other uses (and that's not counting ones I've taken at comics conventions for the work blog) - doesn't pay anything but it does give a damned big feel-good factor. And being an old web-hand I still have that old-fashioned belief that the web is meant to allow us to share a bit ( a lot of us who started online in the early 90s still feel that, I think), so I kind of like the fact that a number of different folks have asked to use some of my pics on occasion.

New moon



Just after sunset a pale new moon hangs in the sky over the Victorian tenements of Edinburgh



The same section of canal as the earlier canoe photos, only a couple of hours later on (click for the bigger versions on Flickr)

And suddenly there were canoes in Edinburgh

Heading up to Mel's to take care of Dizzy, the incredibly pretty kitty, close to sunset I paused on the bridge which crosses the Union Canal. It's always worth stopping for a moment there because sometimes you see something nice sandwhiched in between the Victorian tenements; sometimes ducks, geese or swans, sometimes just the sun reflecting off the water or, as in today's case, a group of canoeists paddling past. I guess they were making the most of an unseasonably mild and very clear, sunny day which was more like very early spring rather than early February in Scotland. Isn't it nice the things you can just come across walking round your neighbourhood? (click the pics to see the bigger versions on the Woolamaloo Flickr)

Accordion by the beach



Down on Portobello beach this afternoon (a dry day!!! a day with no howling gales!!! Quick everyone outside!!!), my mate's dog happily running around sniffing interesting smells (most animals walk about with their heads held up to see around them, except dogs, who trot around with their head pointing downwards so they can sniff everything) and as we walked along the beach we could hear music. Walking up onto the nearby esplanade we saw this chap playing the accordion, while nearby a wee boy was dancing happily to the music. It sounded like a little bit of France in the middle of Edinburgh's seaside and put us in happy mind of our trip to Paris coming up in a few weeks. I imagine in Paris accordion players busking must be a bit like bagpipers in Edinburgh.

Surf's up!

Kite surfers taking advantage of the breeze at Longniddry Bents on the Forth for a bit of winter surfing across the waves and sometimes right into the air - so damned cool.





Take off time!

"Space, the final frontier... These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise; her five-year mission to seek out new life and new civilisations. To boldly go where no man has gone before..."

I've been cynical and wary about JJ Abrams' new Star Trek movie - if you haven't been following developments the Alias, MI-3 and Cloverfield creator is taking the series back to before the beginning, with the early days of the classic 60s Trek characters (Zachary Quinto - Sylar in the brilliant Heroes series - plays a young Spock). I have no problems with Abrams' storytelling abilities but I am wondering if I can possibly accept other actors in these roles, even essaying younger versions than we saw. After all I grew up on the original Trek - repeats of that and Pertwee then Baker era Doctor Who were my 1970s televisual SF fixes in those old, three-channel days - and I'm not sure I can take anyone else in those roles. Nonetheless this glimpse of the original, classic 60s style Enterprise under construction is pretty exciting to a geek like me; I especially like the way in the bigger version you can see inside the ship where the hull plates haven't been fixed yet; this looks like the original ship being 'born' and there's something romantic about the big ships, fictional or otherwise.



Trekmovie also had a link to this low quality YouTube someone uploaded of the teaser trailer being shown with the opening of Cloverfield in the US. Little to see except flares of light from welding torches as the camera pulls back to reveal the Starship Enterprise in drydock, being completed for her five year mission. The soundtrack is a mixture of speechs from the glory days of the Space Race, which again appeals strongly to my geek heart (I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up; I still do), from Kennedy's inspirational speech to Armstrong's "one small step", culminating in Leonard Nimoy (who returns to play the older Spock) uttering those immortal words, "space, the final frontier..." Despite my wariness the geek hairs on my neck stood up...

Quack quack

Walking along the Union Canal this weekend, ducks and other birds (sadly I do not know everything and bird types is one area I am weak in - anyone know what these black waterfowl with the white bills are?) swimming around. The ducks go past, the black birds swim past, their little red-orange webbed feet just visible through the greenish water, working away like the paddles on an old Mississippi steamboat. Then suddenly they start diving. Ploop! One minute they are there, next moment only concentric ripples spreading outwards on the surface of the water to show where they had been, then suddenly they pop up again elsewhere, like a WWII German U-Boat doing an emergency surface. I had a sudden urge to do my Jack Hawkins impression and call for the depth charges...

It was very hard to capture these sudden movements on the camera, so I switched to video mode instead. You can hear a voice at the start which is a tiny little girl with her dad shouting "quack quacks!" in delight. Nearby some narrowboats which are lived on the whole year long, the restored old Leamington Lift Bridge (I don't know why but it gives me such pleasure to see it raised and for holidaying folks to sail under it), the floating restaurant barge which cruises at the weekend, new waterfront cafes, offices and homes, the remains of the old Scottish and Newcastle brewery slowly being taken apart as the area is remade (Sean Connery lived just right round the corner from this spot as a boy and delivered milk in the area - now he comes back to the nearby cinema on a red carpet for the Film Festival every year). And this is all a short walk to my home in one direction and to Edinburgh Castle the other way. The little marvels we can see even in the middle of the city if we only stop and look for a moment and share that simple, childlike delight in these little surprises and presents the world offers us.



(apologies for the poor quality - my camera does very good video but that means big files so I need to reduce it so much to fit on YouTube it never looks right - oh well, it's free!)

snowy Saltire
Originally uploaded by byronv2

Wind whipping around a Saltire above the entrance to the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh as snow makes streaks across a leaden night sky

Whoo
Originally uploaded by Beckbecky

Courtesy of BeckyBecky, one of my Flickr and Fotolog chums, comes this scene from SantaCon which is both funny and disturbing at the same time! If this is Santa I hate to think what state Rudolf and his red nose are in...

Happy Saint Andrew's Day



And so one of the Scottish national emblems - the thistle - for the day of our patron saint who also gave us the form of our flag, the Saltire, the oldest national flag still in use, an insignia of Scottishness for over a thousand years. And since it is Saint Andrew's Day let's have some Scottish poetry - this one is by the poet and novelist Andrew Greig, who I've had the pleasure of sharing a drink and a natter with on a few occasions over the years:

As your lover on waking recounts her dreams,
unruly, striking, unfathomable as herself,
your attention wanders
to her moving lips, throat, those slim shoulders
draped in a shawl of light, and what's being christened here
is not what is said but who is saying it,
the overwhelming fact
she lives and breathes beside you another day.

Other folks' golf shots being even less interesting
than their dreams, I'll be brief:
as she spoke I thought of a putt yesterday at the 4th,
as many feet from the pin as I am years from my birth,
several more than I am from my death –
one stiff clip, it birled across the green,
curved up the rise, swung down the dip
like a miniature planet heading home,

and the strangest thing is not what's going to happen
but your dazed, incredulous knowing it will,
long before the ball reaches the cup then drops,
that it's turned out right after all,
like waking one morning to find yourself
unerringly in love with your wife.

"A Long Shot", by Andrew Greig, borrowed from the website of the Scottish Poetry Library (based here in Edinburgh), where you can enjoy a good browse at plenty of verse from Scottish writers.

Hunting werewolves

Full moon this weekend, good werewolf hunting weather (hey, everyone needs a hobby and it gives me some exercise and gets me out into the fresh air):



(all this scene needs now is Christopher Lee in his Dracula cape; click for the bigger version on my Flickr)



(the full moon reflecting on the Union Canal; fun to compare this to summer evening pic of this same location I took a while back on my Flickr)

No lycanthropes were harmed in the making of these photographs, although my fingers got sodding frozen.

(click to see the full size pic on my Flickr page)

The lovely Victorian merry-go-round in Princes Street Gardens as part of the Winter Wonderland; annoyingly I missed getting pics of the official switching on of the Christmas lights and opening of the Winter Wonderland and the craft fair and German market because I didn't know what time it started on Thursday, although I did see it all coming on and fireworks going off as I sat on the upper deck of the bus on the way home. Still, the evening before, on a wild, windy, wet winter's night I saw them testing out the lights and the colours through the rain-spattered caught my eye and since reflections on the bus window or camera shake didn't matter much for this kind of pic I thought I'd just snap it.

Bitesize

The BBC asked if they could borrow one of my photographs from my Flickr stream recently, to use as part of their Bitesize revision guides, in this case to be part of a audio-visual slideshow to accompany a reading of "The Field Mouse" by Gillian Clarke - my pic of a harvest-time field, taken just outside North Berwick near Tantallon Castle is the first one in the presentation. No money, sadly, but the feel-good factor is quite rewarding, especially since I'm so fond of poetry.

Greyfriar's Kirkyard 10
Originally uploaded by byronv2

Since it is Halloween, the night when the realms of the living, the dead and the supernatural intersect, I thought I'd stick up one of my more Gothic images from my Flickr set.

Ah broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll! — a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy De Vere, hast thou no tear? — weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read — the funeral song be sung! —
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young —
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
"And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her — that she died!
"How shall the ritual, then, be read? — the requiem how be sung

"By you — by yours, the evil eye, — by yours, the slanderous tongue
"That did to death the innocent that died, and died so young?"

Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel so wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride —
For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes —
The life still there, upon her hair — the death upon her eyes.

"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
"But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!
"Let no bell toll! — lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
"Should catch the note, as it doth float — up from the damned Earth.
"To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven —
"From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven —
"From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven."

"Lenore", Edgar Alan Poe, 1845

Tttttttthththt That's all folks!



This incredibly cool set of Looney Tunes characters such as Wil E Coyote and Bugs Bunny (one of my personal role models as a child, which might explain a lot) as skeletons is for the Day of the Dead and was snapped in a Hollywood cemetery where the great Mel Blanc (a saint in my Church of Seventh Day Cartoonists) is also buried - the item on the lower right is apparently a rubbing from his headstone. It comes from Superape's Flickr stream, via Boing Boing. Happy Halloween and a macabre Sahmain to you all.

Anatomical

Last weekend was the annual Doors Open Day, when buildings not normally open to the public let people into visit. I'm still sorting a stack of photographs I shot as we tramped all round town, from designer make-overs by local architectural practises in old mews buildings to places like the observatory on Calton Hill and the Royal College of Physicians in the New Town. I'll post a few more when I get time to sort them out, but I thought I'd kick off with these few shots taken in their two libraries; these are rare 17th century medical volumes, which the College Fellow on duty in the library was kind enough to let me photograph as long as I obviously refrained from using the flash (in stark contrast to the folks at Scottish Heritage who didn't allow any photography even of the Georgian rooms, which seems extremely backward to me if you are inviting in visitors, especially if you are a public body - bad marks to SH, big thumbs up to the RCP who really made an effort to make visitors welcome and encouraged photo-taking).


(click the pics to see the larger versions on the Woolamaloo Flickr stream)



Apologies for the reflections here, but as the books were under glass there wasn't really anyway round them - it was either reflections of the lights or stand right over it and get my camera in the reflections, but the quality of the draughtmanship here was far too good not to try taking a pic. These books pre-date the Act of Union between Scotland and England.



Just look at the detail in this anatomical study of the human skeleton and musculature; the cross hatching and shading is amazing. More so when you consider this is around three centuries old and an artist created this by hand and another artist would then have laboriously created a negative inscribed into a copper plate for printing. Books like this, being disseminated all over Europe by groups like the Royal College, are physical artefacts of the birth of the modern era, the move from superstition to reason and science, exploring the natural world and our own physiques to find new wonder even the greatest minds of Classical Antiquity could never have dreamed of. They are also gorgeous works of craftsmanship and art. A modern Gray's Anatomy (a standard text for most doing medical degrees) may be more informative and accurate, but it lacks the elegance and beauty of this work.

The turning of the seasons



Some leaves are clinging to their lush greenery, aided by the bursts of almost summer-like warmth, while some have already begun to dry and turn red and gold. In Mel's garden some late bloom roses have come out after we trimmed the plants back earlier in the year and some final insects are buzzing round the flowers in the sudden warmth before winter arrives, while the berries hang on the bushes. Walking home the long, red twilight stretches long, thin shadows, skies blue, wispy clouds tinged salmon pink. The wind rustles in the branches and with each little breath more leaves fall to join their cousins in little piles on the ground or to float along the canal alongside the ducks and swans. When the autumn moon rises it is a huge, harvest moon, glowing brightly in a purple-black sky, the stars changing their tempo to their winter configuration. Each warm day now is a gift; you wonder if it will be the last one before the inevitable slide into the long, dark winter.

Out with a bang

And thus Edinburgh's Festival season, the world's biggest arts festival, comes to an end for another year with mighty explosions echoing across the city like the pounding of the Castle's cannons as the traditional classical music and fireworks concert took place. I was lucky enough to be invited to my friend's workplace which has a good view out towards the front of the Castle rather than standing with the 250, 000 others in the streets and hills of the city watching it all. It was a lovely late summer evening as we walked into the city centre, the last glow of the sun washing the stones of the Castle in a copper glow before finally fading into darkness, the stars beginning to appear in the sky above the floodlit fortress. An air of expectation from thousands of people waiting in the dark... The orchestra in the Gardens begins to play and suddenly the dark night explodes in light, colour and sound, incredibly ephemeral sculptures and flowers of light in the air, lasting only seconds.













I love fireworks - there are some things you never grow out of an a huge fireworks show is one of them. But fireworks launching into the sky from an ancient fortress atop a volcanic rock is something else again. I love living here. You can view the full set at larger sizes on my Flickr stream.

Harvest time


(click for the larger image)

Driving down the east coast from Edinburgh, down past North Berwick and all the fields either full of swaying, full, ripe crops, rippling like the sea in the breeze or already harvested like this one, all stacked and ready, the farmers making hay while the sun shines. Considering I shot this almost blind because there was a tall hedgerow in the way and I had to stand on tip-toes with the camera over my head I'm pleased it came out at all.

Sunset song



The view from the top of Arthur's Seat last night as the sun set across the city, dipping down over the Forth towards the hills of Fife. My friend Gordon decided on a whim to take Bruce the dog for a walk since it was such a fine evening and I went along - and this was the view we found as Bruce ran around looking for rabbits. I'm surprised this came out - no tripod, handheld and looking right towards the setting sun, I thought it would come out blurred and glared out. At the very top were tourists as well as locals enjoying this sight, as the world turned copper in that magical transition zone between the light of day and the dark of night, that magical realm of twilight when the Fair Folks were believed to come out to play in our world. I wonder, did our distant ancestors stand on this spot after the retreat of the great glaciers had sculpted the land, looking out at this view, praying for the sun to return.



I shot this brief video from the summit to give a 360 panoramic view; just think, this is a view millions of years in the making. Continents moving, crashing into one another to raise the mountains that shape Scotland, volcanoes born and then dying, glaciers passing, carving the world, people arriving, building, changing. I love that we have an extinct volcano right here, in the middle of a Royal Park in the heart of the city (I don't love how I huff and puff going up it these days - in my 20s I cycled up and down this all the time easily). And Arthur's Seat itself is part of our history - from the mysterious small coffins found here with little, rudely carved dolls in them (some think they were left as memorials to to Hutton, standing there pondering the mystery of the rocks themselves and forming ideas that would give birth to the science of geology and our modern understanding of how our magnificent world formed.

Fringe time

Its Edinburgh, its August, its time for the first stirrings of the world's largest arts festival. The Fringe starts officially over the weekend, but already most shows are in town and running their (much cheaper tickets) previews. The husband and son of Mel's cousin are over from Norway and I met them all straight from work at the Pleasance, one of the main spots for Fringe life. Mel and I introduced the Fringe newbies to our laid back way of doing it, which is to park out bums on a seat in the cobbled courtyard of the Pleasance (a hub with dozens of shows going on all the time, from tiny rooms to proper theatre sized shows) and wait for the many people coming round giving out flyers and telling folks about shows until we saw one we liked and off we went to see Son of a Preacher man, a stand-up comedy with Markus Birdman, an aetheist son of a clergyman - it was brilliant and I highly recommend it if you're going Fringeing.



Afterwards we headed back down to the Royal Mile to get some food at Wannaburger and as we approached the Old College Building we heard a powerful beat and decided to have a quick look. We found Binari, a Korean musical group pounding drums in the old quadrangle, the sounds echoing around the space as they performed a sound check, that wonderful, almost frantic and kinetic drumming and singing. And its just so cool that walking past somewhere you just come across something like this, but that's what happens in Edinburgh at this time of year. Its a circus, its maddening, busy and crazy and at the same time brilliant.



Last time I was in this building was for the launch of a major Scottish history book in the gorgeous Neo-Classical space of the Playfair Library, this time it is Korean musicians in the quad filling the night with music. After we'd had a late meal we walked up the Royal Mile, even near 11pm still buzzing with people as the Fringe starts up then as we approached the top of the Mile we had another treat.



A rehearsal for the Royal Military Tattoo was finishing up at the Castle and the cavalry were leading their horses down towards the horse boxes to take them home. Imagine a warm summer night in the middle of the Old Town, lights from the Tattoo flickering across the Castle and bagpipes playing while the clip-clop, clip-clop of horse's hooves come down from the Castle, creak of leather and clink of metal as cavalry troops lead their immaculately groomed animals down the cobbled street then round past the hub to the waiting transports. Even in Edinburgh this isn't exactly an everyday sight.



How beautiful is this horse? Just think, this is all happening in the heart of a capital city at 11pm, with a huge castle right behind me as I took this while behind the horse you can see the floodlit Herriot's School which at night looks like where very young wizards get sent before they are old enough to go to Hogwarts.



Even at that time of night you can see the sky just doesn't get fully dark at this time of year. Shame I didn't have the tripod to take these properly but obviously I wasn't quite expecting this. A little bit on unexpected magic.

AP

The BBC has a short but excellent slideshow with audio celebrating the work of AP, Associated Press's photographers, focusing on those who have recorded combat areas. There are some remarkable shots on offer and no less than two Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalists sharing their insights. Even in a time of 24 hour rolling satellite news the power of a well composed single image like these is quite amazingly powerful, a single moment of time, frozen, captured; our brains see more detail, create meaning around the still image in a way that we simply don't with video news footage.

Supercute!



Dizzy, queen of all she surveys



I've taken a lot of pics of the petite puss (you'd be hard pushed to tell she is 13 years old here, wouldn't you? Still acts like a wee kitten too) but this one taken on Saturday afternoon as she decided some recently delivered packages were obviously there specifically for her to play with and lie on has to be one of my favourites.

Bird in flight



Seabirds wheeling, screeching overhead, noisy, loud and then suddenly grace personified; flight, the dream of humans since time began, so effortless to the bird, wind slipping over and under wings constantly adjusting to the flow by instinct, making the finest human pilot look like a clown by comparison, feathers that took millions of years to evolve insulating, guiding, hollow bones to give less weight but remain strong to hold the elegant curve of wing. How can something which moments ago was a noisy nuisance scavenging for food from parties on the beach be so utterly perfect. More than a dozen frames in rapid succession on the multi-shot function, most blurred, out of frame, empty sky but one, just one like this came out and I am happy. What would it be like, I wonder, to fly like this? No engines, no whirling propellors or screaming jets, just the wind and muscle and instinct, skimming across the face of the world...

Come into my parlour, said the spider...

One of my Fotolet chums was carrying his new camera with him, went to try for a flower close-up, heard a bee, looked closer and took this amazing picture of a bee and a white spider on a flower having a disagreement - go and look, it is a stunning capture.

Walking through time: Holyrood Palace



The Palace of Holyrood with Arthur's Seat in the background, viewed from Calton Hill in Edinburgh, by James Valentine, thought to date to around 1878.



The Palace of Holyrood, the ruined Abbey and Arthur's Seat from Calton Hill taken by me, spring 2007.

I found this online recently as I was sorting out some of my photographs to upload to my Fotolog and Flickr sites. Despite the history Edinburgh isn't changeless, but obviously it has more than its share of places which do remain almost the same than most cities and sometimes you find photographs of buildings and streets which are almost the same today.

Imagine both pictures as portals to two different spots in history; imagine you could use them as the travelling points between those periods, to walk from the picture from now to emerge from then, to find yourself standing on Victorian-era Calton Hill, caressed by the wind, local worthies enjoying a peramabulation past you, lots of smoke rising from buildings in those days, a mix of tall masted ships and new fangled steamships visible down on the Forth an at the Leith docks, and perhaps Hill and Adamson, the great pioneers of early photography setting up one of their experiments with this new camera device, using the 'pencil of nature'. How lovely would it be if you could do that? I suppose I will have to make do with living and working around the sites, which is, in its own way, walking through time every single day.

Photography then and now

In among all the ballyhoo about spoiled and talentless rich socialite tart Paris Hilton going to jail, getting out then being sent back in tears (in contrast to her earlier cockey attitude) I missed something - see this picture which went all over the news of the silly girl weeping?



Imagine my surprise to find out the photographer behind that snapped image is Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Nick Ut. If you don't recognise his name you will recognise this photograph Ut took of Kim Phuc, a tiny wee lassie running screaming down a road in Vietnam, her clothes burned off and her skin roasted by napalm dropped by US aircraft (yes, I know, hard to believe the Americans back then thought it was perfectly okay to invade countries thousands of miles away and didn't care too much about civilian casualties; thank goodness we live in a more enlightened time, eh?).



As if that isn't a surprise enough as this article points out Ut shot the photo of this dreadful scene - which became not only one of the defining images of the Vietnam War but one of the most influential photographs of the 20th century, a moment of humanity's inhumanity frozen in time - on June 8th 1972. He shot the picture of a wailing Paris on June 8th 2007. What are the odds? There is a strand of thought which holds that the Americans lost the Vietnam war partly in the livingrooms of America, as people were exposed to photographs and TV news film of the atrocities going on leading a huge slice of the population (and not just the Love Generation) to turn against the government and the war - this is one of the images which probably contributed to that.

Little surprise that in the first Gulf War and subsequent ill-advised military adventures overseas the US military (and UK and pretty much all others) have kept a very tight reign on what the journalists can see, bribing them with the offer of 'embedding' them with active units to get good shots but subject to military approval and control or else go freelance and have a good chance of getting shot up not just by insurgents but by allied forces as happened to the BBC's John Simpson among others (all accidental of course, just as US armour shelling the hotel where foreign journalists were in Baghdad was accidental...). Hell, the control and spin extends as far as trying to stop images of flag-draped coffins coming home - supposedly out of respect to the families but if you are cynical (and since authorities are reticent about exact casualty figures I think you'd be right to be cynical) you could be forgiven for thinking it is to stop the home front losing faith.

Look before you leap

I was trying to work out why the bus I was waiting on didn't come down to the stop but turned off up the wrong street. Then I think, hold on, it is rush hour and there are no buses, no-one else waiting at the stop - oh, what's the commotion just over the junction of the Royal Mile? Walk up a bit and find the approach to North Bridge is sealed off by the police, ambulance and fire engines sitting there too.



Hmmm, surely it must be a fire or bomb scare? Can't be another potential leaper, surely? We've already had one of those this week, shut down the area for hours. Take another route down to Princes Street and everywhere is a logjam of buses and cars, everything totally fubared. I look up and yup, it is indeed another person threatening to jump from North Bridge - sadly not an unknown act from that spot.



Luckily as with the woman earlier this week he didn't actually go through with it, although he was there for hours and really messed up the city's traffic. Since he was walking round the pillar with his hands in his pockets it looks like he was really doing a cry for help and attention (you can see a policeman's head just over the parapet trying to talk him down) - caused a lot of hassle but you have to feel sorry for the poor sod if he felt he had to go to this extreme.



Now there are folks calling for safety nets to be placed under the bridge because it has been used a number of times for suicides (there's a Samaritans sign on the bridge because of this) which seems pretty pointless to me (as well as ruining a landmark) since the city is built on several hills with plenty of tall spots. Heck, if someone wanted to leap they could go up Arthur's Seat and jump off Salisbury Crags, are we going to put a giant net all round the extinct volcano? Then again, I think anyone who was planning to jump off the Crags would probably be pretty serious about it and of course they wouldn't have the big audience they'd get on the bridge (yeah, I know, cynical, but also probably true since such a public act usually is more of a cry for help - still makes you feel sorry for the guy that he was driven to it though).

Since the traffic in the city was totally messed up by the bridge closure and diversions he caused for hours I looked at the jam of buses and gave up, buggered off to the pub with my friend who was just coming out of his work. Maybe a relaxing pint would have been better for this poor bloke too instead of standing around over a huge drop.

Birds a go go

The changing of the tides at Cramond just by the edge of the rivers Forth and Almond on the edge of Edinburgh, bringing out a huge number of birds from graceful swans to howling seagulls (ye gods, what a racket!) and some ducks.In the 2nd century AD you'd have seen Romans moored hereabouts on their way to the Antonine Wall.





To the right of this picture is a causeway which is submerged by high tide, leading out to an island which still