Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

How long is a photograph?

According to my back of the envelope calculations, each of these images is about 4.5 miles long. That's roughly how far the plane I was in travelled during each 30s exposure.

But why was I taking such long exposures ten miles above Canada, in the middle of the night?

The answer's quite obvious really: aurora.

I've seen aurora once or twice before, shimmering sheets of green fire in the sky. But this display was something else, bright and spectacular, huge curtains of light hanging from the heavens, glowing gases in a geomagnetic storm. It shimmered across the north, miles long, flickering from green to blue to red and back again, one moment huge whorls of cold fire, the next a long line of light as it rippled in the teeth of one of this solar maximums' most ferocious storms.

How to capture the splendour of the skies?

I've used long exposures for stars, with a manual infinite focs, to some success, so I decided to give the same technique a try. Using a few pillows I cobbled together some semblance of a tripod, stuck the camera into the window frame and clicked the shutter.

The results aren't perfect, after all, the plane was vibrating and moving, but they do capture something of being in the middle of the sky in the heart of a geomagnetic storm...









Beautiful.

But nothing like the real thing.

Putting aside the distasteful origins of the Olympic torch relay for a moment, today's voyage of the flame down the Thames was, at the very least, a good opportunity for a look at the new Royal Barge Gloriana. So I picked up a camera and wandered down the road to the footpath by the new flats near the mouth of the Wandle to take a few snaps.

The Olympic flotilla was small enough that it was easy to see the barge as it came down the Putney reach of the river, past Hurlingham, and as it turned up to pass under Wandsworth Bridge. The large cauldron at the bows of the barge had been extinguished, and the torch was being held by a young woman, as it rowed down-river with the tide, all gold and yellow, flags fluttering in the summer breeze.









So nice of them to name the barge after one of my favourite Michael Moorcock novels.

Putney, London
July 2012

Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time, with a camera pointing the right way.

Standing on the cliffs of Palos Verdes, I watched a red-tailed hawk speeding to and from its nest, hunting for lizards and the like to feed its chicks. It moved fast, a swept wing bullet in the sky. But I did manage to capture one shot, as I tracked the bird along the cliff face with a 300mm lens.

If I'd been prey it would have been the last thing I saw...


The Rabbit's Eye View
Palos Verdes, California
May 2012

If you're going to watch an eclipse, and you can't get to the point of totality, then there's not many places better than Maker Faire. With so many geeks to hand you know there's going to be lots of different ways to see the return of Fenrir...

And so we saw the 2012 annular eclipse (or around 89.5% of it) through dark film eclipse viewers, through hacked pinhole cameras (ours was aptly made from a Geek Dad postcard flyer), through mylar film, through a solar telescope (complete with sunspots!), and of course, cast in shadows from hands, hats, and trees.


Through dark film


In the shadow of marypcb's hand


Through a pinhole in a business card


In the shadow of a tree


Through mylar film

All in all, an awesome eclipse. And made the more so by sharing it with thousands of people enjoying it as much as we were.

One of the best reasons for having a nice long zoom lens is a garden full of hummingbirds.

And while being Londoners we may not have such a garden, our Silicon Valley friends do. So I spent much of a lazy weekend in the sun photographing little green darts as they flashed around the garden, on their endless quest for sugar. They're fearless beasts, and you can see how the Aztecs believed them the souls of dead warriors, as they engage in wars for flower patches.

There's something ethereal about a hummingbird frozen in time and in space, its wings a blur of pixels, its iridescent fathers locked in one eternal configuration. They're creatures of motion, as they dart from blossom to blossom.

These then are some of the Anna's Hummingbirds that have claimed one small garden as their territory. I can hear them now, in the trees by the creek, angrily disputing their boundaries.











Click through for larger versions on Flickr, along with plenty more images!

San Jose, California
May 2012

Last night we sat in our friends' garden in Silicon Valley, watching the moon rise over the trees that line the little creek that runs behind their house. It was the 2012 supermoon, the closest full moon of the year where the moon is 14% bigger than normal...

I had my long lens with me, and remembering that I was photographing reflected sunlight dialed up my exposure to 1/2500^th of a second. With a little judicious cropping here are a couple of shots taken as the moon floated through a gap on the acacias...





San Jose, California
May 2012

Spring is here, and that means many more mainline steam excursions powering down the line from Victoria to all points west. Today was a special treat, as the recently re-certified for mainline running BR Standard Class 7 No 70000 Britannia was hauling The Cathedrals Express to Bath.

The weather was good too, with the April showers holding off for a while. The book is in, I'd just finished a big feature, and I had a little time spare - so I grabbed my camera and walked down to the footbridge at the end of the street. I wasn't the only one there - a young family had come along to see the steam trains too, wanting to see Thomas go past. Britannia's a bit bigger than Thomas The Tank Engine, but it was good to see children wanting to see history go past in a cloud of steam and smoke.

With a whistle from Wandsworth, and a cloud of steam over the Wandle bridges, Britannia came round the curve into the Putney cutting...







Another whistle blast as the special rushed through Putney station and then silence. Just the gentle rumble of a 747 heading into Heathrow, and the rattle of a Wimbledon-bound tube.

Putney, London
April 2012

There's a house down our street with a dragon on the roof.

It's a proud wee terracotta beastie, rising up on its haunches, wings spread, to greet the sun and the cloud alike. It stares up at the passing planes as they glide down to Heathrow, counting the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years, the centuries. It's our Clock Of The Long Now, older than us all and destined to outlast our scurrying little lives.

It looks down on Putney, it watches and it waits.

I like it a lot.







Every street needs a dragon.

Spring has finally arrived in Putney, and while I'm spending most of my time working on my sections of our first deliverable for The Book, I popped out yesterday afternoon for a stroll up our street to the leafy bit with the expensive houses, to catch the last of the blossoms.

It was a lovely afternoon, sunny and warm, with leaves just starting to appear and the liquid song of the blackbirds dancing from tree to tree. Even the fierce terracotta dragon was relaxing, basking in the sun, on its perch atop the William Morris house. I had my camera with me, and started playing with depth of field...

Some of the results were really quite pleasing.


Green leaves, orange wall


Little purple flowers


Apricot flowers


The last of the cherry blossoms

Putney, London
March 2012

Spring has started to arrive in London, at long last.

So what is a south-west Londoner to do on a sunny March afternoon? Why, they go to Richmond Park for a walk around the ponds.

We weren't the only transplanted Londoners there, as the feral parakeets were taking the opportunity to noisily begin their mating season. I took a photograph of a pair necking in a tree as we walked through a small wood near Pen Ponds.



There's something alien about seeing a parrot in London, but they're certainly colourful.



Richmond Park, London
March 2012