A Fly In The... Urinal

Over the last few years I've been through quite a few German airports; Berlin, Cologne/Bonn, Munich and Frankfurt. They are all very different, but they seem to all have one thing in common -- the toilet supplier.

All the urinals have a weird fly logo on them, and strangely they aren't always in the same place or position. I've thought that it was odd many times before, but coming back from Munich was the first time I found myself alone in the toilet long enough to take a photo.

I Am Supposed To Be Here Today!

Some of you may remember that back in September I ended up in Munich when I should have been in Brussels. Well I'm back in Munich but this time I'm supposed to be here. Yes it's that time of year again -- the first project meeting of the year. Munich makes a change though, as for the last two years I've been in Bled.

I arrived in the dark so I'm not sure what the view is like but given that I'm actually just outside Munich, at a place called Starnberg which is right by a lake, I'm hoping for some nice scenery and hence some nice photos to show you.

Right, must read through my notes for tomorrow and then get some sleep...

Along The Railway

What with being ill, the boiler breaking down, and then having to catch up on lots of work I managed to completely forget to post some more snowy photos.

On the day I found out that Penistone was having a bit of a food supply problem, I'd walked to the shops by following the railway line. The sky was quite dramatic and I captured a few decent photos, although I think this one is my favourite.

For those of you who have been following my new photography blog, Fifty-Two (or more), then it's worth noting that this is an example of an HDR image that I couldn't have achieved using the Le Grey method (like I could with the photo of Ingelborough) as the light through the trees would have been impossible to deal with.

MAG's 2009 Christmas Quiz: The Answers

What with the snow, lack of food, and not being too well the fact that I was supposed to post the answers to my Christmas quiz completely slipped my mind, sorry!

Rather than put the answers in the post I'm keeping them in a separate file so that I don't spoil the questions for anyone who is still trying to figure the answers out.

Nobody got all the answers right but some people came close -- no one got the answer to question 10, sorry if it was a bit too ambiguous! Hopefully you all enjoyed the quiz and I'll spend the year trying to come up with at least another ten questions ready for next Christmas.

Front Page, Below The Fold

Well I thought I'd be quoted somewhere in this weeks Barnsley Chronicle after the call I received from the reporter on Wednesday but I didn't expect the article to be on the front page, albeit below the fold (if you can't read it properly then try clicking on it for a bigger version).

Although it looks as if the reporter found my phone number from an old telephone directory, given that we moved from Wentworth Road back in July.

Penistone Starves: An Update

Click To Play

Well it sounds as if at least one delivery lorry made it to Penistone with some bread yesterday. Apparently the problem is panic buying as well as delivery problems. It was enough of a problem to make the local news (if you prefer reading your news then try this article).

This news story was then picked up by the local newspaper, the Barnsley Chronicle, which isn't published until Friday. So how do I know they were working on a story? The answer, about 4pm yesterday I got a call from a journalist. Apparently having seen the news article she went hunting on Google for any further details she could find and out of the whole web happened upon my posting from yesterday. So I had a ten minute chat with a nice sounding journalist about what I'd seen and overheard in the shops and so might be quoted in her story when it appears in the paper.

I was intending to make sure I walked up to the centre tomorrow to find a copy of the paper but I now seem to have come down with some horrid vomiting/diarrhea bug and so don't want to stray too far from the house. And to top it all off the boiler seems to have given up. It heated the radiators this morning but when I went to switch it onto constant it wouldn't light up. Someone is coming to look at it later today but he has already warned me that getting parts might be tricky as, yes you guessed it, getting deliveries into Penistone is proving difficult!

Penistone Starves!

Okay so the title might be a bit overly dramatic, but we do seem to have a food supply problem at the moment.

I've just been shopping to make sure we had food for dinner only to find that neither the co-op, the Spar or Greggs have had deliveries since yesterday morning and all three are out of bread. All together the shops seem to be completely out of bread and milk, almost out of fresh fruit, veg and meat and running seriously low on tinned food -- the co-op had one tin of soup and three tins of beans.

And Still It Snows!

The snow which fell in Penistone before Christmas never all melted, and it has snowed on and off ever since.

I got up this morning though and it was snowing heavily. It has continued to snow all day with no sign of stopping -- the sky looks as if it is still full of snow.

Hopefully the gritters will keep the roads open or it could get interesting if it keeps going like this for much longer.

Fifty-Two (or more)

I currently own three cameras; two digital and one film. I haven't used the film camera (a Miranda Sharp Shooter) since we bought our first digital camera back in 2005, and having just fished it out of the drawer I'm not sure how well it will now work as the batteries for the flash have corroded a bit.

The first digital camera we bought was a Sony DSC-F828. This was an expensive camera and has most of the settings you would find on a DSLR but without allowing interchangeable lenses. It can shoot RAW as well as JPEG files and has so many settings and options the manual is huge.

On the simpler end of the scale I also have a simple point-and-shoot digital camera, a Fujifilm Finepix A900 , which is ideal for travelling and which I nearly always have on me.

Whilst I can use the auto settings on both cameras to produce reasonable photos, I've never really mastered all the options or thought much about technique when taking photos. Given that I've paid for cameras with options I've decided I should learn how to use them. I've started buying the odd photography magazine to get ideas/tips/hints on better ways of taking photos, and post-processing the images in the hope of learning something.

When trying to learn anything practice and perseverance are important. So that I keep thinking about photography techniques (both during the shoot and when processing the images) I'm going to start yet-another-blog, Fifty-Two (or more). The idea is that I'll post one (or more) photos each week. These will either be new photos taken that week, or older photos that I've spent time working on over the week. I won't just be posting the photo though I'll also write in some detail about the ideas/motivation for the image and the techniques involved. Hopefully writing this stuff down will both help me to remember what I did and provide a useful reference for other people. I've already made the first post on the new blog so hop on over and let me know what you think.