Tag Archives: black and white

Jul 19 2024
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Daily Post, Urban scene

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Thursday 18th July 2024, 9.35am (day 4,711)

Zappa ad, 18/7/24

This sits on my usual walking route to campus so I know it hasn’t been up for long. I wonder how many other artists who have been dead for 30 years might still receive such tribute. Or perhaps it is a political message. Perhaps the reference is to hidden subliminal messages in Bobby Brown. Perhaps all those 12 key changes in every track will assist in unlocking the secrets of the tellurian currents. But I’m probably not going to start listening to Zappa — I did try, a couple of times, but it really didn’t work out.

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Jul 08 2024
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Daily Post, Flora/Fauna

32 cows above Brighton

Saturday 6th July 2024, 2.20pm (day 4,699)

Cows at Devil's Dyke, 6/7/24

When I was on holiday in Namibia a couple of months ago, one of the places I stayed had these great pictures on the walls, black and white aerial shots of grazing wildlife, like zebras, wildebeest, elephants. Devil’s Dyke above Brighton could not offer any fauna that was quite so exotic this afternoon, but the cows were contented enough, and this shot is my homage to those Namibian pics. I am pretty sure there are 32 here: you may count differently…

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Jun 17 2024
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Daily Post, Interior

Royal Ontario Museum, half-open

Sunday 16th June 2024, 12.30pm (day 4,679)

Royal Ontario Museum, 16/.6/24

There’s certainly an eclectic mix of exhibits in the Royal Ontario Museum: your basic dinosaur fossils, a mocked-up bat cave, Chinoiserie, suits of armour, totem poles, the list goes on. It is interesting but would have been even better if half of it hadn’t been closed for renovation: we noted they still charged the full $23 entry fee though. The board on the left, one of those walling off a big chunk of the second floor while telling us about all the marvellous things we might see if only we would come back in a few months’ time, is included in recognition of this issue.

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May 31 2024
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Daily Post, Transport

Crossing the Forth

Thursday 30th May 2024, 4.10pm (day 4,662)

Was sat in an office for all the first part of the day and a train for all the second part of it. But at least, when travelling home from Scotland, the Forth Bridges usually make an appearance, and they’re almost always worth photographing. The monochrome, as so often, conceals colour balance crimes caused mainly by the scene being viewed through the windows of the 13:59 from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (arrived 16:20).

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May 21 2024
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

Early morning flight transfer

Tuesday 21st May 2024, 5.40am (day 4,653)

Istanbul airport, 21/5/24

Since I last changed planes there in 2015, on the way to Kilimanjaro, Istanbul has built a completely new airport about 30 mies out of the city which is now the second-busiest airport in Europe after Heathrow. It did seem to me that you could catch a plane from there to just about anywhere, certainly in Europe, Africa and Asia — a landmass of which it occupies a very strategic point, and always has done.

I was there early, left early, but so did a lot other people — this moment of solitary contemplation was not characteristic of the whole. This becomes only the second shot in 4,652 days to be taken between 5 and 6am — the other also being in an airport, Manchester’s, while on my way to Moscow in January 2017.

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May 13 2024
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Daily Post, Flora/Fauna

Black and white beetles

Saturday 11th May 2024, 12.15pm (day 4,643)

Black and white beetles, 11/5/24

They did seem like they were quite keen on the idea of making more of themselves, but I moved on before they got down to anything. Apparently these are white-spotted fruit chafers (Mausoleopsis amabilis). Apparently the St Helena Research Institute (hi Becky) would like to know exactly where they were spotted: so I tag these as residing half-way up the slope between the lower Munden’s battery and the one at the top of the hill, just above Jamestown. Ecologically, they’re not supposed to be here, but that is, sadly, true of a great many species, both animal and vegetable, that are now found on St Helena.

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Apr 25 2024
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Daily Post, Friend, Portrait

Samuel, guide no. 3

Thursday 25th April 2024, 1.10pm (day 4,627)

Samuel the guide, 25/4/24

Since I left Windhoek there have been only landscapes and fauna depicted on here — so on my last full day in Namibia let’s pay some credit to the fine people who have welcomed me in this country. My three guides have been particularly notable: Johannes in the Namib Desert; Veondjavi in Damaraland; and for the last three days, Samuel here in Ongava. The latter is seen here waiting with me for my plane to arrive: this is, in effect, the departure lounge of the Ongava airstrip.

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Apr 21 2024
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Daily Post, Landscape

The Hitcher

Saturday 20th April 2024, 4.50pm (day 4,622)

Damaraland Hitcher, 20/4/24

This is a hell of a place to be waiting for a ride — then again there is no public transport this far out. I did feel sorry that our tour vehicle didn’t stop, but we didn’t carry on very far past this point so at best would have taken him another two miles nearer his destination. In any case, he might have been Rutger Hauer.

Going monochrome here, as is often the case, conceals the colour balance sins: this was taken through the dark green sun filter at the top of the windscreen.

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Mar 16 2024
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Daily Post, Interior

Enigma

Friday 15th March 2024, 12.30pm (day 4,586)

Enigma machine, 15/3/24

Found another excuse to leave home for a while and come for a weekend in Milton Keynes, which may not sound the most immediately glamorous destination, but it does have the significant draw of Bletchley Park. It was here that World War 2 was won, arguably, when a (largely female) staff of thousands worked tirelessly to crack German ciphers, mainly produced by the now-famous Enigma machines, of which the museum still has a few dozen, out of about 450 surviving ones apparently.

Do you know that if Enigma had ever enciphered a letter as itself, the code would have been near-impossible to crack? But this was its fatal weakness, giving just enough indication that particular strings of gibberish might just be commonly-used phrases like “Wetter für heute” [‘the weather for today…’] and allowing each daily machine setting to be worked out.

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Feb 18 2024
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Daily Post, Transport

Haworth station

Saturday 17th February 2024, 12 noon (day 4,559)

Haworth station, 17/2/24

Anywhere in the vicinity of the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway and I seem to have an irresistible urge to whack on the sepia filter. It’s appropriate, at least. A steam train would have been nice to add to the shot but one’s just departed, and anyway, it would have got in the way of the nice curve of the track.

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