Frost on the attic windows, 26 December 2023
Time to break the ice on a new year, with a sidebar picture of Boxing Day frost on the general site pages and one of a chilly Vindolanda from last Saturday afternoon on this month’s. Here’s to warmer days.
9 January 2024
I’ve been so slack with posting here that I’m getting spam from the Speedysnail HR department telling me that I have “areas demanding further improvement”. Which is a shock, given that the Speedysnail HR department is me.
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14 December 2023
Apart from passing through with my family as a kid on our way to Uluru in 1979, before I had a camera, and driving down the Hume Highway with my own family in 2015, my main travels in Victoria beyond Melbourne itself were in 2000–2001, when J. and I were living in Melbourne for several months. This gallery features my Victorian photos from that time, including an airshow near Geelong and a trip along the Great Ocean Road. It also has a couple of shots from Gippsland in 1991, when I was driving my car from Melbourne to Canberra via the Princes Highway.
8 December 2023
On my thirtieth birthday I was up in the air, in more ways than one: between jobs, between homes, and flying between North America and Europe, on the next leg of our round-the-world trip that began in New Zealand and moved on to California, the Pacific Northwest and Alberta. J. and I landed in Stockholm in the final hours of my birthday, in the middle of the Northern winter, to stay for a few days with friends from my Ph.D. days.
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7 October 2023
A few weekends ago I popped over to Glasgow on the train to catch up with my cousin, who was in town for a while. It was the first time I’d passed through Queen Street station since its revamp, thanks to the pandemic, although I drove my son to the outskirts of the city last year for a concert. It meant I was able to appreciate some of the new murals that have sprung up around Merchant City in recent years, as I walked to the Cathedral to meet my cousin. I’d never been inside the Cathedral, either; it’s impressively mediaeval for such a Victorian city.
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3 August 2023
One long weekend in May I took the kids camping for a couple of nights at Ardnamurchan, where we’d been twice before—our first camping trip in five years, thanks to a certain pandemic. The Corran ferry was out, so we had to drive the long way round via Fort William, and it was a bit wet on the first night, but it was worth it to see Sanna Beach again, study the rock pools full of anemones, sea cucumbers and tadpoles, and fall asleep to the sound of the sea. One of my photos is on this month’s sidebar, and others are collected in a new gallery at Detail.
31 July 2023
This gallery was a long time coming. I mentioned the occasion in passing at the time—a work trip for a meeting, with a couple of hours wandering around the city afterwards before catching the train back—but never did anything with my photos. Here they are, then, with some selective desaturation to highlight the greyness of the place on that overcast day, and with a short mp3 of the local soundtrack taken from videos recorded on the Canon Ixus (click on the seagull on the front page to hear it). I’d been there before and have passed through since, but haven’t been back in years, so this is as complete a representation of Aberdeen as I’ll manage for a while.
1 May 2023
My slow chronological march through old scanned negatives got held up last year by my not being in the right frame of mind to write about them, meaning that there’s been a backlog for months of several galleries at Detail awaiting their announcement here. Time to break the impasse by tackling them out of chronological order, starting with some updates and additions to my galleries of 1990s Tasmania.
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30 April 2023