Category: Photography

As of the time of writing, November 2017, it’s almost 28 years to the day that Mrs Sciencebase and myself (although we weren’t Mr&Mrs at the time and Sciencebase didn’t exist) backpacked our way around Australia. Greyhounding from Melbourne to Adelaide, North through Coober Pedy to the Red Centre, Alice and Uluru, onward to

the Top End via Kakadu to Darwin, then back across to Townsville up to Cairns, Magnetic Island, and the Great Barrier Reef and back down the East Coast through Brisbane, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, and back to Melbourne.

The sacred site of Uluru was an important pilgrimage and at the time, the site told you it was hazardous to climb and that dogs, bikes, and camping were not allowed. Although the Anangu people had been encouraging visitors not to climb for a couple of years in 1989, they had not banned the climb and we were told that the Anangu got a percentage of the takings from backpackers and tourists visiting. Looking back, that’s probably unlikely given how the people of Australia have been treated historically.

As of 2019, climbing the sacred site will be banned. UPDATE: The last climbers took to the chain on 25th October 2019.

The universe’s first-ever 360-degree video filmed in open space on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS). The video shows Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryazansky and Fyodor Yurchikhin launching satellites and generally spacewalking…

Mr and Mrs Sciencebase have been celebrating their wedding anniversary in Croatia, hence the recent radio silence, we were also laid low on our return by an incubating aviation-acquired viral infection. Anyway, a quick snap of one of the beautiful cities we visited along Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, Pucišca on the island of Brac with its locally excavated limestone buildings and many “snowy” (as well as the more familiar Croatian terracotta) rooves.

Early morning, I hopped off our little, 16-berth boat to get some golden hour shots of the town (day before it had poured with rain), and almost didn’t make it back aboard, despite the captain assuring me I had “ten minutes, no worries”, I’d been gone perhaps three when I saw them starting to raise the gangplank, as it were.

Anyway, I got back on and was reunited with my bride and our many new friends and island hoppers aboard from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, UK, and USA on our journey from Dubrovnik to Korcula, to the aforementioned Pucišca, Omiš, Bol (on the other side of Brac), Hvar, Mljet (with its national park) and back to Dubrovnik.

The public gallery of my photos is on Flickr, but you might also like to friend or follow me on Facebook for updates if you’re interested in Croatia, Dalmatia, Dubrovnik (and its Game of Thrones connection) and more…

Headed out before sunset today to see if we could spot the barn owl hunting again…no luck. Lots of linnets, wood pigeons, long-tailed tits and not much else. However, the sun had gone down and we were almost back to the main road when we spotted a (juvenile?) fox pouncing on insects in the recently mown hayfield adjacent to the road. It was almost dark, hence the noisy photos (really high ISO). The fox never seemed aware of our presence although we were no more than 100 metres away from it. There was no wind and we were partially shield by the broken hedgerow. Eventually, it ran to earth when it saw a tractor steaming up Rampton Road with lights whirring and beams on…

Heading home from a camping trip in North Norfolk, we had vague plans to visit an RSPB reserve in the area but sidled up to the second largest of the broads, Barton Broad in Barton Turf. The broad was apparently only accessible by boat until 2003 (when a boardwalk was piled and constructed to get you to a viewing platform) and is alleged to have been a splashing ground of local boy Horatio Nelson. It was acquired by Norfolk Wildlife Trust in 1945.

From the viewing platform in late August 2017, cormorants winging it on pontoons, lots of great crested grebes and a few gulls, roach with their red fins in the water, but more intriguing a couple of swallowtail caterpillars on the milk parsley readying themselves for pupation at the foot of the reeds where they will overwinter and emerge next Spring.

Also sighted a couple of reed warblers and various dragonflies, and an orange flower that seemed quite whitespread in the darkest recesses of the area surrounded by the Herons’ Carr Boardwalk, Facebook friends identified it as an invasive species, orange jewelweed (Impatiens capensis).

Earlier in the trip sandmartins and lots of cormorants on the North Norfolk coast, at least one meadow pipit with a mouthful of crickets and dragonflies and an exotic-looking sycamore moth caterpillar in the less exotic Mundesley car park, oh, and a somewhat exotic alpaca farm (all females, apparently).

You can check out various other arty farty fotos from our most recent trip to Norfolk on my Flickr page.

Apparently, magpies (Pica pica) are invoked in Christian allegory because they look like a composite of a white dove and a black raven…they were alleged to have perched on the prow of The Ark during the Biblical flood and to have cackled and laughed whilst the world drowned…

Then there’s the nursery rhyme, made famous for British children of the 1970s by the ITV rival to Blue Peter, Magpie. The theme tune for the show perhaps usurped earlier, traditional versions of the nursery rhyme from our collective psyche.

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret,
Never to be told.
Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a bird,
You must not miss.

There are versions that begin:

One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral
And four for birth

and

One for sorrow,
Two for mirth
Three for a funeral,
Four for birth
Five for heaven
Six for hell
Seven for the devil, his own self

Why the magpie gets such a raw deal in mythology and folkore is perhaps down to the sound it makes, the cackling laughter, and perhaps also because it ties together white and black, day and night, good and bad, light and shade…either way it’s just a bird, a corvid, or crow, albeit a clever one.

Listen:

I tried the Prisma app when it first launched, a year or so ago, but then quickly forgot about it. A few friends have been playing with the app recently though and producing some nice filtered photos, so I thought I’d have another play. I picked a recent closeup of a greylag gosling I snapped in Milton Country Park north of Cambridge.

It seemed to be the perfect sort of shot to apply the various mosaics and filters that go by the quite esoteric names of Thota Vaikuntam, Wave (Hokusai-like), Mononoke, Mondrian, Femme (Picasso-like), The Scream (Munch-like), Roy (Lichtenstein-like), Heisenberg (ink sketch) etc. Top left in the contact sheet is my original photo, the others are various Prisma treatments picked to taste from the first few and applied with 100% of the processed image showing rather than blending with the original

Although this is a mobile app I ran an Android emulator known as Blue Stacks on my Windows 10 desktop machine and loaded the app in that to make it easier to pick and choose and to save files rather than messing around with the tiny mobile phone screen and shuttling files using the cloud. Montage was made with “paint.net” and my “dB” logo applied, as ever with Paintshop Pro. having mentioned a hack for uploading photos to Instagram from a Windows desktop machine, Blue Stacks is another alternative, run Instagram as an app within BlueStacks.

The Heisenberg filter, emulates an ink pen sketch and is styled for that TV programme, Breaking Bad

If you’re watching a sunset or a sunrise, occasionally you might see a green flash or green rays from the edge of the sun just as it disappears from view or begins to peek over the horizon. This a purely atmospheric, optical phenomenon, nothing to do with surface activity on the sun. By pure chance I seem to have caught a bit whilst photographing a sunset on the North Norfolk coast recently (one of the only places in the UK where, in the middle of summer, the sun both rises and sets over the sea on the “east coast”. I don’t remember noticing the green flash whilst taking the photos, it’s only now in scanning through the files that I spotted it.

Earthsky has as interesting explanation of the phenomenon:

The green flash is the result of looking at the sun through a greater and greater thickness of atmosphere as you look lower and lower in the sky. Water vapor in the atmosphere absorbs the yellow and orange colors in white sunlight, and air molecules scatter the violet light. That leaves the red and blue-green light to travel directly toward you. Near the horizon, the sun's light is highly bent or refracted. It's as though there are two suns — a red one and a blue-green one — partially covering each other. The red one is always closest to the horizon, so when it sets or before it rises, you see only the blue-green disk — the green flash.