Racing Dragons

Spent a weekend at my future son in laws stag party.  Great time drinking English beer in an old brewery, kart racing, vomiting friends- perfect weekend given the event.

Brewery was full of all kinds of old machinery, some had been replaced by modern equivalents but actually the whole process seemed remarkably simple - if not to say even a bit hit and miss - although the beer was all good

 

My Dutch colleagues were amazed I was joining - said that if they joined the equivalent Dutch bachelor party then the wedding would be cancelled as the future husband would surely prove unworthy of their precious daughter.  I am now intrigued to join one of these bachelor parties - just for cultural research of course.

Although the weekend was in the Lake District unfortunately there was no time for landscape viewing or photographing, although I did manage some karting action, maintaining my personal record of always finishing in last place.  Most people seem to improve during the heats building up towards the final race, I on the other hand always start well and then get steadily worse.

Last weekend at last the sun came out so we could at least step outside without a coat.

I was trying to photograph some pictures for my wife - this posed a big problem as they are mounted behind glass and there were more reflections than picture. In the end I had to make a temporary studio by wrapping lack cloth around the picture, the camera and me - must have looked like some kind of photography vampire. Eventually got a quite good picture

Holidays coming up soon so I am thinking of what lenses I might need - I generally use a sigma 18 - 200 zoom - but after doing some analysis of my previous photos using a snazzy little piece of software called automator on my mac, its clear most of my photos are at the low end of this zoom so I am looking at the canon 17-55 lens. As usual this gets mixed reviews, and having read about people being paid to write reviews its hard to know what or who you can trust on the internet.

Maybe see some photo results here after the summer....

 

Tunnels and Bright Lights

The Tour de France had to start without me last weekend but I did manage to cycle from my house in Rhoon to Delft about 30 Km away for lunch on Sunday.

This means having to cross the Maas river which splits Rotterdam into North and South. Being very cycle friendly all the bridges and tunnels have bike routes - so in this case we went through the cycle tunnel part of the Benelux Tunnel

Quite interesting getting in and out of the tunnel as you have to take your bike down and up a long escalator

 

So then to Dubai - for just one day - so more time in the plane than on the ground and not too much time for photos.  Dubai is a glitzy big city with plenty of bright lights best seen at night

But maybe more interestingly moody as a black and white picture

I have not always been a fan of black and white but some of my photographs taken in the early morning have so little colour anyway so I am more and more attracted to this area. 

Like for example below - which I think is far more like a rainy dawn than a coloured version could show.

But for some things you really need the color like these runner bean flowers in my garden this morning - in the warm rainy conditions they are doing really well.