Home or away

I seem to have been very busy recently, so I am falling behind both in writing these notes but also in submitting the assignments for my photo course.  This weekend I plan to catch up on everything.

This has not been helped I have also had a serious problem with my home WiFi network, which simply stopped working correctly so I had to spend some time trying to work this out.  Our system had a simple router and a repeater (our house has concrete walls which seem to eat the signal) First the repeater stopped, so I bought a new one, which then turned out to be an extender not a repeater - so an apparently simple problem got bigger and bigger - so here I am with a whole new system - which seems to have solved the problems at last. Except my backup system is now not working properly. Why is that once one part of my computer system breaks, as I fix one bit another bit seems to break. I suspect that this could be my lack of computer competency shining through...

At last work is starting to calm down travel wise, Just one trip to London last week, but interestingly one night staying in a hotel in my 'home' city of Rotterdam.

Its a bit obvious that you don't often stay in a hotel close to where you live - you just go home - who wouldn't.
But this week I had a good reason so stayed in a small boutique hotel called Pincoffs in Rotterdam
(www.hotelpincoffs.nl )  This was doubly interesting for me as we used to live in an apartment building only 100 metres away from this hotel while the original building was being redeveloped into a hotel.

Unknown to me at the time was that the development was also the subject of a TV show about the dream of the owners to create a luxury hotel in Rotterdam   You can see a bit of this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aooKKECgJ-s

We worked in the hotel during the day and then went out for dinner, when we returned we found another TV show was being filmed in the Hotel at that moment -  A famous Dutch actor (or maybe presenter) - who of course I did not recognise and even after shaking his hand in the bar I have no clue of his name or why he is famous  - was making film about the homeless in Rotterdam at Christmas ( homeless in Dutch is Dakloos - literally 'roof less' )

Rotterdam has a nice skyline at night which was clear from the window.

 

Erasmus Bridge Rotterdam

The latest part of my photo course has been about exposure and rescuing photographs, this has taken me a long time to do and it is a bit strange deliberately taking bad photos so you can save them later. Some turned out OK but the real lesson is that a bad photo usually stays bad whatever you do

I did have one very frightening moment, I had agreed with our neighbour in our rented house in Grasmere that I could walk down his fields to the lake to take some photographs.  By the lake in a little corner of a fenced off field there was an old boat which had filled with water, and on the morning I visited was just covered with ice, and from the corner of my eye i saw there was a small body trapped in the ice - for a heart stopping moment I thought it was a child, but luckily it was just a big doll someone had left there - for me a very rather scary experience. You can just see the doll peeping out of the boat in the next photo, and below that a rescued photograph of Grasmere village

  

Living behind a gate

The Big Event since the last update was my daughter getting married - great event and a great day if a little strange from a photography perspective as I naturally my attention was focused on my daughter and not on my camera - so I will rely on the photographs from the official photographer and the other guests

Regular followers and friends will know that my job takes me all over the world and last week after the wedding I went straight to Durban in South Africa, 

Of course being there only a few days while working does not give you much feel for the country but there are clear concerns about personal safety and security in that you have to be aware of where you are and what you are doing.  During the day and in the city it seems like any other big city, but there are clearly places you would not venture to at night or by yourself.

What did strike me is how it is accepted that many (if not most) of the people who I met where living in gated estates or gated homes, with 24 hour security.  Everyone just seemed to accept that is how it needs to be but I am not sure I could be happy living that way.

Gated Entrance to the small hotel where we were staying

I have had no time to work on my course but my continual work travel has started me on a photography project where I am trying to take a picture out of the window wherever I am staying each night. 

So here's a few of the batch I have already after only 2 weeks or so......

Room 5 Thornton Hall Hotel Heswall UK

Kirstens House York UK

Room 10122 P&O Ferry Hull Rotterdam

LH 999 @ Amsterdam Netherlands

Room 9 Auberge Hollandaise Durban South AFrica

LH7335 @ Johannesburg South Africa