Last October I visited Thailand. I took the Lumix GX800 again and was super happy with some of the photos it produced. The last two Lumix related posts are because I found the images tucked away on my home storage server and edited up the images that I’d not really touched from last year on that camera.
A pocket camera I keep with me is the Lumix GX800. It’s a cracking little camera and takes brilliant photos. I don’t use it as often as I ought to.
I did take the camera to Cornwall last summer and gave it a bit of a run out.
I decided to get away for the half term break and stretch my photography a little further. We visited Bath (the city, duh!) for a few days, then spent a day in the Cotswold and another day exploring Cambridge. They’re all lovely old cities with plenty of history, charm and tourists! Bath is an ancient city and has a lot of amazing history to explore – particularly the Roman Baths and the unique circular architecture in Royal Crescent and the Circus. I managed to get some nice shots.
Cotswold was a quick stop through on the way home. The weather was lovely and the main part of the Cotswold was very vibrant and had a really fun, sunny vibe with people picknicking on the grass, playing in the shallow stream (which my kids enjoyed while harassing the ducks!) and having a pint in local pubs.
Cambridge is something special. Particularly the free museums everywhere that are also working environments for zoological and archaeological students. There were so many great little museums to dip in and out of. But Cambridge also had a great street photographers vibe – from the Palestinian protest camp, to the students on bicycles, the canal boats, the bridges and the character of the people and places. It’d be worth spending some time in Cambridge, just to explore the streets more and capture the personality of the city.
Another couple of hours editing photos on twitch and chatting with viewers. It’s always a fun way to spend an evening. I’ve moved my photography streams from Saturday to Sunday night (7pm UK time) to free up my weekend a little more, but to also give my weekend a really nice closure and vibe before returning to work on Mondays. Well, it works for me anyway.
This is my photo of the week. It’s from when we trekked to Everest base camp in May 2009. I love the contrast between the colourful tents in the foreground, mixed with the rocky landscape, plus the white jagged peaks of mountains, the blue sky and clouds. A lot happening, but a visual feast. Sometimes you want to have a photo that lets your eye wander around and appreciate things to explore within the image – it’s the nature of landscape photos.
I’m enjoying the streaming and uploading the streams to youtube to build on my youtube memes. I’m having fun!
Regular Saturday photography stream on twitch was fun. Started with Bangladesh, a little Thailand, then Burma and into Nepal. Some cracking photos amongst them. You can check the latest upload on you youtube channel.
Photo of the day (and week) is this one, a great shot from up in the Himalayas (Nepal) and the mountain yaks that are up there.
I’ve also found a photo from Nepal that would make a lovely wallpaper, which my viewers during the stream agreed would be very cool. So here it is for free. Creative Common licence free to share and use for personal use but not commercial or ‘for profit’ applications. It’s not permitted to remove the watermark, but you won’t even notice it on most monitors. The image is slightly larger than 4K resolution and looks great (I’m using it on my mac right now!)
Free stuff!! YAY!
A day trip to Stratford turned out to be the first brilliantly sunny day of the year. There was quite a summer vibe with hundreds of people all relaxing on the grass areas, wandering around the Sunday market, or buying pints and food from the many market stalls that had set up. We walked up to Trinity Church where Shakespeare’s tomb is (sadly, the church was closed for a private event) so we couldn’t go in. We did enjoy wandering up and down the Avon river, dropped into the Royal Shakespeare Company building for a trip to the observation deck, and also enjoyed a pint and some food on the grass. Was a damn fine day and I got a few good shots.
Another Saturday photo stream complete and uploaded to youtube. It was a fun two hours of editing and chatting with viewers. I got a bit lucky today and had two new viewers show up who are photographers and found my stream in the twitch art category. So that was nice. I’ve since joined a photography discord full of photographers who also create content on youtube and twitch.
My photo of the week is a shot I edited during the stream. While I was in Pakistan I was fortunate enough to get up to Kashmir. I stayed on Lake Dal (literally on the lake in a house boat) and did a number of tours of the lake and the city. this shot was from when I was on Lake Dal looking into the Himalayas. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.
I’ve also added Pakistan now to my travel map, and there are lots of gorgeous shots of that country to look at.
I stream on Saturdays I also upload all my images to this site and export the video to youtube. As part of that routine, I’ll pick a favourite image for the week and add it to my site. I may forget or may not do this every week.
This week’s photo is from Goa, India. I spent about a week there lounging on the beach and doing very little. That’s the point of Goa … to forget about the world. As with all things in India, street kids are very open about begging. Most speak zero English and don’t even speak, they just walk up and put their hand out hopeful of getting something. This is not an indictment of India, it’s an incredible country, but just the nature of a place with incredible poverty mixed with fat white cashed up tourists!
This young lady walked up to me at a cafe and held out her hand. I indicated that I would give her some money if she let me take her photo. She was happy to agree and leaned on the railing at the edge of the cafe and let me take this snap. I got one photo – this one!
Sometimes your best photos aren’t planned. They’re not the ones you’re looking for and they’re not photos that you get 5-10 shots or more and pick the best of the bunch. Sometimes your best photo walks right up to you, you get a shot, and it’s beautiful!
The weather was clear but the wind was chilly. It’s a good enough reason to jump in the car and find a place to explore. We settled on the National Arboretum (https://www.thenma.org.uk/) located north of where I live. It’s a huge place with hundreds of memorials to various wars, conflicts and those who’ve given their lives across a multitude of causes. While it’s a sombering place, it’s also a lovely grand park to walk around, with statues, signs, monuments and lots of hidden nooks and crannies filled with lovely memorial tokens.
I ended up with a few photos I liked, but the one above is shot of the day. I was shooting with the Hasselblad X1D and 45mm lens. I did have a polariser on for most of the day.
On an unrelated note, shooting with the Hasselblad has presented a few logistical issues that I did mention on my editing stream. I moved 50 images to my server so that I have redundant backups. The problem is that 100mb files quickly rack up the file sizes!!
Yeah, that’s a lot of memory! I’m going to quickly burn through the 4TB I have on my server shooting with this camera … that said, the images are glorious and lovely to work with!
Last night was (hopefully) the start of something bigger for me. I spent 2 hours streaming my photo editing and talking about my photos and my travels. I actually had a lot of fun looking back through older photos and albums that I had taken in 2006 and 2013. I started with some nice photos from Korea in 2013 when I visited a Buddhist temple. There were some gems in there that I enjoyed rediscovering and editing. I also had a look at some photos from a trip to Cambodia in 2006 with some mates of mine (shout out to Craig). It made me realise how different my photography was back then, and the limitations that I had with the gear I was using and my re-emergence as a photographer after so many years away.
From last night’s crop of 25 photos that made the cut, this one is my favourite – Sunset over Ankor Wat, Cambodia
I’m going to make my instagram public once I can figure out how to schedule posts automatically. Come find me there!
An older photo from 2010 with the cameras that I bought while I was in South Korea. Left to right is a Nikon FM2 (with 50mm f1.2 lens), Hasselblad 500CM (80mm f2.8 lens) and Leica M6 with a summilux 50mm f1.4 lens.
I still have all of these cameras … I haven’t shot them for a while, but my future plan is to either get access to a reliable developing and scanning shop, or find the space to do my own negative developing and scanning at home.
This is the first of (hopefully) many posts … a new blog as a way to get myself back into photography, get active, get shooting and get better at my favourite craft. I’ve been messing around with various site platforms and, at least for now, I’ve settled with wordpress. I’m not entirely happy with it, but it’s going to have to do for now. I wanted to run a gallery specific software, but I realised that most don’t allow comments, or have a ‘blog’ function, which means I can’t occasionally post discussions about where I am and what I’m doing.
Who am I? I’m David … an Aussie! 🙂 But more importantly is that I’ve been a photographer for 30+ years and have traveled around the world having fun, causing mayhem and taking photos. I’ve lived in Australia, South Korea, Egypt and England. I’ve been settled in England for a while so that my family would have more stability, but my feet are itchy and I’m keen to get moving again. For now, that will be short stints checking out this merry, muddy island called Great Britain … but soon it’ll be a little further and my ‘country count’ will hopefully start ticking up again. FYI, my country count is currently 55 and I’m looking to keep steadily increasing that number.
