I’m always up for a nice walk around some National Trust grounds (member for quite a few years now), so when they announced a ‘Fungal Foray’ at Calke Abbey we signed up for a couple of tickets.
This wasn’t a walk intended to show us which mushrooms were edible, it was to show the variety of fungi that exist in the Nature Reserve. I have done one of those at Calke before, but that wasn’t organised by the NT. The walk was guided by one of the rangers who was a pretty keen amateur mycologist but she was keen to correctly point out that she couldn’t 100% identify everything and to trust nothing. I decided to take the DSLR along as it’s been a while since it’s been used.
The walk was very informative. Specimens were a bit sparse due to the glorious weather we’d been having, so there were some points where the leader had to produce one she’d found earlier, or in a couple of occasions had moved from another site.
In lieu of any content here’s a picture of a fern in Nottingham’s arboretum. Lots of stuff on at the moment with M208 TMA03, 2 audax gps routes to sort out (Lincolnshire Cross 200km, and “Moors and Wolds” 400km and lots of chances to spend longer than expected at work have contrived to make life a bit duller than expected. Hopefully sorting out the first 2 of those will provide some interesting posts, and unless I really want to become know for Dynamics CRM and SQL Server clustering, I’ll keep the last one to myself.
And we’re not talking about policemen trying to be environmental activists either. Plant growing in Nottingham’s Arboretum park last summer. Taken with Canon EOS 3, 50mm f/1.4 on FP4 @64 ISO and developed in ID-11, scanned on Epson V500
Another year, another trip up to York for the annual Yorvik Viking weekend. No photogenic snow this year, and no buying of new cameras either. And as usual, I mostly got pictures of the birds of prey show. It was the same
No owls this year, and a lack of falcons as well. But a good display from a Bald Eagle, various vultures and some caracara for light entertainment
Pretty happy with these snaps. All taken on the 30D with a sigma 70-200 2.8 EX and then fettled in LightRoom. One regret was not taking a tripod along, but I didn’t fancy carrying it around York all day. Might have helped get some of the action shots a little sharper:
Though it’s not too bad as is :).
All the birds were supplied and flown by http://www.birdsofpreydisplays.co.uk/ who seem to do this event every year. So it’s always a decent show as he knows what he’s got to work with.
Photos of actual vikings (or of actual accountants impersonating vikings) to follow:
Working through a backlog of photos I found a couple more from the Great Central Railway at Loughborough. Just taken inside the restoration shed of bits and bobs lying around. Though obviously not of the same quality they do remind me of the Maurice Broomfield exhibition we visited in Derby last year. Need to get out and take some more of these sort of photos, but it’s all a bit hectic trying to fit it all in with cycling and OU coursework. Maybe need to work out a decent way of carrying the camera kit on a bit. Shame I don’t have rack mounts atm.
(Both photos taken with Canon EOS3, Sigma 24-70 2.8 on Ilford FP4+ @ISO125, developed in ID-11 and scanned on Epson V500).
Another one from the rainy afternoon in nottingham. Just down the gutter from the other photo (here). A bit more swirling and motion in this one, and a little leaf holding on
A photo from last year during a particularly wet night in nottingham, almost thought I’d broken my 50mm lens but thankfully it just needed a good drying out back at home.
This is one the reasons I’m moving Lightroom-wards. I scan my negatives in to 16-bit uncompressed TIFFs, which means Bibble won’t take them. So I end up having to work on them in Photoshop, which is fine for the images that need a lot of work, but most of the time I just want to adjust levels and curves and go.
Taken with a Canon EOS 300, Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 on Ilford HP5+ 400, developed in Ilford ID-11 and scanned on an Epson v500.
Been thinking about moving across to Lightroom from bibble recently. I’ve never really completely got on with the layers in bibble for some reason, but find the localised adjustment system in Lightroom a little more logical. So going to be working with both for a bit to see what happen.
Also just got some new lighting kit, so been having a play with that. So here’s my hand in all it’s glory.
Well, a small modicum of fame my way. Nottingham BBC decided to pick a couple of my snow photos for one of their slideshows. Not huge in the grand scheme of things, but it’s nice to have been picked. Not 100% sure about the crops they actually decided to go with, but I guess that’s forced on them by their viewer software.
And this snowy gate photo seems to be pretty popular as well. So that’s made up for having to kneel in one of Nottingham’s soggier bits.
More from my trek around Wollaton Park in the snow on Saturday morning. And looking out of the window at work, it looks like I might be getting some more snowy photos at this rate this week:
Woke up this morning to find that my dreams of heading out on the bike had disappeared under the snow. Other people seemed to be OK on bikes, but I’m attached to my one piece collar bone so decided that discretion was the better part of valour so headed out with the camera to Wollaton park instead. Unfortunately only 1 deer fancied being photogenic, the others wanted to huddle en masse in the trees and didn’t look like they fancied meeting photographers.
Now to try and thaw out a bit before working on the others.
Oops, been getting a bit lax about posthing these up with one thing and another. So quickly getting the last 2 bands out of queue.
So here’s Nachtmahr. Didn’t really know much about this band, but I’ve caught L’Âme Immortelle a few times over the years (Nachtmahr being a sideproject of Thomas Rainer from L’Âme Immortelle)
Fornost Arnor playing at The Old Angel, Nottingham
Twilights Embrace playing at the Old Angel, Nottingham
Some photos from The Old Angel last Friday. Playing that night were Fornost Arnor, No Love Lost, Twilight’s Embrace and Bahamut.
Not too many photos as I was having a few kit problems so kept having to find somewhere better lit to have a look at things. Good sets from all the band on, nice mix of styles as well.
Moving on up throught Sundays bands and we get to Patenbrigade Wolff. Pounding rythyms based around a stage show that seems to be based on German Road menders. Though as it seemed to involve lot of wandering round swigging beer I’m not sure how true to life it was :)
These guys I did really enjoy (and would be enjoying right now if I’d managed to get to their merch stall, and if failing that MusicNonStop had decided to take less than 4 weeks to ship me a CD!). Good old fashioned shouty stompy political stuff always goes down well, even first thing in the afternoon.
And they were the only band over the weekend I felt like breaking out the film camera for as well, though those photos probably won’t appear for a bit as I’m working through a backlog.
And moving onto Sunday we start off with one of Saturday’s bands. By all account Parralox had a hard time making it to the stage, but a hastily rearranged set saw them opening up on Sunday afternoon
Moving on up through Saturday lineup we get to German “Industrial Terrorists” [X]-Rx. Nicely photogenic and a pretty good noise coming off stage, certainly got the crowd up and moving.
As we clambered into the Press pit we were warned “It might get messy”, oh and how right they were. We had fake sperm and fake blood aplenty with Agonoize. We got very good at spotting when the singer was ‘plumbed’ up for some blood action, and it went a fair way (you can see the pressure it was under in the photo up top)
![[X]-Rx performing at Infest 2010](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4132/5043317185_feb02984aa.jpg)
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