It's like deja vu all over again.

So I drew the curtains this morning to be confronted by a totally unexpected thick blanket of snow - the dratted white stuff is back again! I am pretty sure this wasn't forecast. At 8am when I took this picture of the Mighty Terios on Aileen's drive it was still falling. Luckily it stopped soon after. Weirdly, if you travelled 3 miles from Macclesfield there was no real snow. It's almost like we were at the epicentre of a personally gifted bad weather day, courtesy the snow gods.

Day of the Potatoes

Today is Bollington Horticultural's Potato Day, when Yvonne and Peter Holden bring about a ton of seed potatoes to the Civic Hall and the great and good of Bollington (and further afield) come and stock up for the next season. Here's mum and Kath Moores serving one of their first customers on a day that ended up with about £1500 of potatoes sold. That's a lot of spuds!

Marilyn and Diane in the Sir Titus Salt

Diane's birthday tomorrow, so we met up with Marilyn in the Sir Tutus Salt on Great Horton Road for lunch. Here she is with some birthday flowers. And some wine (of course).

Big wheel in the sun

OK, I admit it - another blue picture, but I can't help what colour the sky is. I went out to do some shopping at dinner and in the brief time the sun shone I managed to grab a few pics of the wheel. It wasn't long before the cloud rolled in and things turned back to January grey. Meanwhile I do like the white against the blue but maybe that's just me?

Homage to Steve (and Nikon)

Two things today - Steve Jobs has attempted to create a computing paradigm shift by announcing Apple's iPad, and on a more personal note, I have have received a Nikon SB-28 flashgun from eBay. In homage to both I took this self portrait whilst dressed in Jobs' traditional black and using the new flashgun. one of my other SB-28's provided the separation light at the back. The moody look is pretty much how I hoped the picture would turn out.

The devil's in the (architectural) details

I noticed that in the combined thumbnails of these project pictures so far that there seemed to be a definite blue theme emerging. I'm not especially attracted to blue, and to prove it I thought I'd find some other colours to break it up a bit. Yesterday's green bottle went some way to redress this, but today's dinnertime walk produced some nice reds on the Jessop West building of the University.

Hitting the bottle

Another cold and grey day here in paradise, both of which are making outdoor photography very undesirable. I've been a dinnertime walkabout with the rangefinder loaded with Tri-X - B&W being all the weather is good for IMHO - but it could be some time before any of those images appear here, if it happens at all. In the meantime here's the results of this evening's messing about with two flashguns and a green bottle on a black background. I have found glass is always hard to photograph nicely, so I am quite pleased with this result from an hour's worth of jiggling with sticky tape, pegs and white paper.

A walk down the Rivelin valley

Even though it's grey and very unphotogenic today, I decided to head down the Rivelin valley to see if there was anything worth pointing the camera at. It turns out there were several things and both the G10 and K20D saw some action. I chose this picture for today, not because it was the 'best', but because it was the first outing of the G10 with its new filter mounting. Here it's been used with a 0.9 ND grad upside down to bring the brightness of the water down (first time I have done that too). I also love the bright greens despite it being such a grey and overcast day.

Going to the dogs

I'd been busy all day with chores and it was quite late by the time I realised I still hadn't taken a picture. Rather that do another interior/studio picture, I waited until it was properly dark and then drove down the road to the dog track. I love this sign; unfortunately there was racing in full swing and the they were charging for the car park. It proved quite hard to find somewhere to park nearby for free, so I ended up with more like a snap of the sign than the picture I'd envisaged.

Treasure from the USA

It's becoming painfully obvious that the wee Canon G10 is doing most of the heavy lifting in this project so far. Maybe that will change when the weather gets better and the big guns come out? In the meantime I have treated the G10 to an adapter kit from Lensmate in Seattle. This lets the G10 mount a 72mm filter in front of the lens with no vignetting and/or, as in the case of my kit, mount a Cokin 'P' filter holder. Since I already have lots of Cokin filters including the expensive circular polariser, this turned out to be a very inexpensive way to add filters to the G10. The build quality of the kit is excellent, being made of black anodised aluminium, and the price including postage was about 1/2 what Cokin would charge for their own stuff in plastic. Even better, when it arrived today customs hadn't stung me for VAT. Yay!

(S)he who looks after the server room

Some time ago we were clearing out the lab used by the aerospace students (AKA the batcave) and came across this wee Hindu (?) statue at the back of the shelves. (S)he obviously had some sort of beneficial effect there because the batcave had lain undisturbed by management for years. Now (s)he gaurds the server room. I have no idea which god it represents and I am not that mithered to find out. (S)he'll probably turn out to be the god of destroying computers or something, though if that's the case, apart from an ongoing saga with the backup server, the voodoo hasn't worked.

Round and round and round we go

I've spent a good deal of the evening setting up a new Macintosh desktop in my 'study' (cough) at home. The idea to try this picture (it's not an original idea, sadly) came quite late. It was surprisingly quick to do. I had to repeat the setup about 5 times before I got a nested set of pictures deep enough to lose the original Apple desktop. Apart from being a cool use of digital, it actually makes a surprisingly good desktop image to boot! BTW, my real desk is not normally that tidy.

Some days are just crap

So my 'departing' cold has made an overnight U-turn and returned with a vengeance this morning. Spending most of the day coughing and snuffling. When I took a trip out for a sandwich at dinner, this little poor little fellow was at the corner of the street. Heaven only knows why they play it so close with the cars. Obviously this guy played it a little too close.

Monday morning blues

Start of anoher week and here I am with the tail-end of a cold, feeling rough & cheerily wishing I didn't have to be in this office right now. The whole place would benefit from a bit of filing and sorting, but that's not going to happen today. And who took the picture? Check the radio trigger button in my right hand.

Sunday chores

The first warm, sunny (ish) day this year, so I was outside at Macclesfield trying to do maintenance and fix some of the problems the cold snap had caused. In the afternoon the two Daihatsus that have carried us so well through the snow and ice (and salt and crap) were given their first wash of the year. A lot of foam to start the ball rolling...

A visit to Pandora

Took a trip with Gareth to Cineworld at Parrs Wood to see Avatar in 3D. Driving back it was dark, which gave me opportunity to try out the suction cup mounting for the camera. With long shutter speeds set you get these dreamy effects that aren't entirely out of tune with the disorientation caused by the 3D effects in the film. Good film though!

It must be Friday

The support team went to the Devonshire Cat at dinnertime for some beer as reward for a really quite tiresome week. It's not especially dark in the Cat but trying to find a decent shutter speed I was still pretty disappointed with the low-light performance of the Canon G10 - anything over 400 iso is noisy and anything below is blurred. Anyway, of the sharp pictures, this is George, who was late eating his dinner so also turned up late at the pub.

You know you have too many cameras...

...when they start to spill over onto the bookshelves randomly. I really must have a sort-out of gear and get the unwanted stuff (what unwanted stuff??) on ebay. Then I'd have more money to spend on more cameras! PS I can't believe how grainy this is at 400 iso on the Canon G10. Maybe I should use the money to upgrade to a G11? I took a version of this shot with the Ricoh rangefinder on Tri-X film. Be interesting to see how (if?) that turns out.

When just nothing goes right

Today's been spent arguing with various pieces of computer kit, none of which wanted to co-operate at all. All because a network switch was slightly mis-configured. It ended up with the spare RAID deciding it hated its server and it wasn't too keen on one of its disks either. This picture is the RAID going into sulky rebuild mode.

An indoors sort of day

The unremitting cold and grey outside is enough to put anyone off going out to take pictures. However, I have a whole load of ebay stuff to put up as soon as I can, so I rigged up a wee studio to try out some setups. In the past I have usually waited for overcast daylight so that I can take pictures of reflective stuff outdoors, which has meant most of my ebaying has been between spring and autumn - not necessarily the best time for auctions! Anyway, this is maybe the best of a bunch of test shots. The biggest problem was getting enough depth-of-field; what looked ok on the lcd screen turned out to be rubbish on the computer. Still, we have learned something and can go back to it easily. You have to admit the result's tons better than the usual ebay blurry sh*te. BTW, the Agfa Isolette in the picture isn't going on ebay!

A quck stroll around town

I had to go and do a bit of shopping at dinnertime today. The weather was pretty grey and miserable (and cold and intermittently sleeting) and there didn't seem much worth photographing out there. However, this multi-storey car park is hard to take a bad picture of. I am sure it will repay other visits in different lighting conditions too.

The big freeze continues

No sign of a let-up in the freezing temps. More snow forecast today, so an early trip back over the Peaks. A real horrible trip as it happens with snowdrifts across the road. Not much time to take pictures (I really hope that car camera mount appears soon) but a quick stop in Chapel-en-le-Frith for this snap of icicles on a shop.

Snowy Gawsworth

Well the ice and snow are still here. They can't last much longer, surely? Took a ride out to Gawsworth village, where amongst the many scenics I spotted this snowy lane (which I have seen before). It turned out to be pretty hard to control the contrast between sunlight and shade for most of the pictures, but this one didn't turn out too badly IMHO.

And now for something a little different

Are you getting a bit fed up of pictures in the snow? Well today I set up a small table-top studio to attempt taking pictures of water droplets with a macro lens and a single flash. It turned out to be surprisngly easy, if a bit hit-and-miss catching the drops at the right moement. I think there's possible a bit more to finesse out of it but changing the distance the drops fall and maybe a different backdrop (birthday wrapping paper here), so I'll prob have another go at some stage.

Yesterday's picture, today

Well as promised for yesterday (and interrupted by fire engines) here is St George's church in the sun and snow. This isn't actually yesterday's picture recycled, but a fresh one taken this dinnertime. Nothing but the best for you people...

Best laid plans...

in the unlikely event that you're not already bored of snowy scenes, today I had inended to upload a picture of St George's church in the snow, taken this dinnertime. However, just before tea a trio of fire engines (lights flashing, etc, etc) pulled up just a bit further up the road from Casa Chris. There was some smoke, but it looked like whatever it was was under control quickly 'cos they all departed within the hour. Not the worlds most accomplished image, taken through the bay window with the lure of shepherd's pie pulling me away, but something unique this year already.

What a difference a few hours makes

The whole city's gone from next to no snow to "no-one can make it in to work" snow in less than 12 hours. This picture shows the quad of Regent Court this morning in between snow showers. A very different day to yesterday.

First day back at work

This is one of my favourite views of Sheffield at the moment - the buff stone of the town hall with the bright white of big wheel in front of it - especially on a sunny lunch break like today. It proved quite tricky to take a nice picture on a working day with vans constantly parking up and people crossing the road in front of the camera, but I hope this image conveys a decent impression of the scene.

Across the Pennines in the snow

I thought that an afternoon trip home across the snowy Pennines to Sheffield would present some opportunites for a picture today. The road I hoped to take through Winnat's Pass was closed, so I was diverted onto a more heavily used road. Unfortunately on this road the dearth of parking laybys and big banks of snow pushed aside by the plough made it all but imposible to stop. It was quite late in the afternoon when I managaged to pull over at Tideswell Cemetery by which time the sun had almost disappeared. Managed to get a few pics of graves in the snow, none of which I am 100% happy with. I know there was a picture there somewhere, I just couldn't find it.

Snowy end to the second day

So the plan today was to visit Great-Aunt Dorothy in Derbyshire, but no sooner was the plan made than the snow came down (and down and down) for the rest of the morning. Frankly it would have ben stupid to try crossing the Pennines in that weather for a social visit. So instead of pictures of Derbyshire people (probably), I waited until the light faded and took a picture of the house in the snow.

First day, first picture

There's nothing like starting out as you mean to go on - this first picture was taken just a few minutes after midnight on 1st Jan. Richard and Peter launch one of several Chinese lanterns to celebrate the New Year.