Knaresborough's this little town, not too far from where I live. The River Nidd cuts a gorge along the edge of the town - in some sense, separating it from nearby Harrogate - and a tall viaduct was built there in the 1850s to allow rail transport. Today, the train line is just as functional, with regular train service stopping there on the way between Leeds and York. I spent a couple hours…
Back in Amsterdam again for work! Gave myself more time to take photos, this go around, and so spent all of Sunday wandering around. Amsterdam was beautiful as ever (it's kind of unfair, honestly). A fun aside: All of the geolocations on my photos are actually set manually after the fact - usually it's a kind of fun challenge to see how accurate I can get (often pretty close, depending…
Visited Bempton Cliffs with family - time for more bird photos! (well, a few weeks ago, at this point.) It was a pretty cloudy day, raining towards the end, and while there weren't any puffins willing to put themselves on camera, the gannets were quite active. They're really fascinating birds - oddly shaped, with faces that map to human expressions in funny ways. On a personal note: I…
York Pride was on! Spent a little while wandering around town, wandering around the festival grounds, and then got some pictures of a few creatures on the way back. (Unrelated to pride, alas.)
Vancouver is an unbelivably beautiful city, as it turns out. I was there for pgconf.dev , and took a couple days before the conference to take pictures, get sunburnt, and get over jetlag. I finished the trip with nearly 400 photos, with almost 300 from just Sunday. (A typical day out usually gives me 50-100 photos, with ~5% that I think are worth publishing — maybe 10% on a really good day. This…
Friday morning, I spent a couple hours in town, trying to capture the feeling of such vivid light making every tree glow. I did get a few that captured it well, but found they weren't saying much beyond it. Here's some of the ones I liked.
Was asked to take some pictures of the blossoms in someone's garden — the light was fabulous, and with the big zoom lens, I was surprised at just how much more is visible than typically with the human eye (even when all photos were from relatively far away!) While editing these, I found myself getting lost in all the details that only make themselves known as you zoom in — iridescent fuzz,…
I find it hard, sometimes, to see the beauty in winter here — cold, dark days, when all color's been drained for the season. It's a relief, to go outside & see nature springing back to life :) Not pictured in this batch: The river was surprisingly flooded! My usual path was impassable at one point, from water rushing from the river into the adjacent fields — by the time I saw it, the…
Went for a little wander at ~golden hour. Saw some birds — the blue tits were a little too skittish to get a clean photo, but this robin was very very accommodating & posed nicely for me.
Wandering around town again — overcast and crowded, but got a few photos I liked.
With recent flooding (typical for this time of year) and a drop in temperature, there was a thick blanket of fog, up and down the river. I took the opportunity to get some pictures in it.
Last week, I took a few days off to visit Edinburgh – I'd never been, and figured there's good photo opportunities. Ended up taking around 200 photos over several days, narrowed it down to just these ones. And, for fun on a whim, on Friday I walked 50 thousand steps. I hear that I got very very lucky with the weather :)
I spent much of the week watching the trees slowly turn shades of yellow & red, waiting to have a few hours available to wander around town with my camera. Like most weekends, the city center was completely packed – so here's some pictures from around the walls. (Plus some googly eyes. Why? Who knows! The first one was fabulous; coming across the second one completely sent me.)
A work trip took me to Amsterdam for a few days – got a chance to wander around one evening with some friends from work.
I got some pictures of the sunset the other day. The sunsets here are beautiful — sometimes. Lately I've been going for walks in the evenings, and every once in a while, the conditions are just right for a fabulous sunset. Unfortunately it's also rare enough that just bringing a camera isn't enough – it's hard to get enough interesting clouds without the sun also dipping below…
I spent a month repeatedly building my website in Docker, and now have horrors to share. I've got a problem. My website (the one you're reading right now) is mainly served by a single Rust binary. For far too long now, every time I wanted to make a change, I would: Build a new statically linked binary (with --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl ) Copy it to my server Restart the website…
Spent some time over at Bempton Cliffs , in part just for the visceral feeling of the wind from the sea, but also for the truly incredible number of birds there. Ended up taking about a hundred photos in total – with so many birds just everywhere , it's hard to avoid slipping into the trap of trying to just get a decent photo of a challenging subject, rather than trying to get a good photo.…
Took a few photos taken while wandering around York before my on-call shift. Seems like weekdays are the right time to go see the shambles – it gets packed at the weekend with everyone wanting to get their own version of the same picture :) Anyways - the light had this kind of ethereal quality, bright and sunny, yet cloudy enough that the sky was still a blanket of white.
A cloudy day, wandering closer to the city proper.
There's been a few mornings recently with a kind of very thin fog that I've never seen back in the bay area. It's a somewhat tricky thing to capture, being so thin – there was shockingly little light, and the layers of things in the fog are ofen partially obscured by noisy objects in the foreground. Halfway through, I also found myself half a mile down the wrong side of a…
This is the last one, I swear! Sorry for the spam to my RSS inclined friends – I took a small hiatus from posting photos due to [gestures at US political situation], so I still have some more to get through, but this should be all for now. A sunnier day – still struggling to find inspiration (lots of noisy browns this time of year), but here's at least a couple. The few pictures of birds I…
One of those "everything went wrong" kind of days – went out walking, only realizing 20 minutes in that I forgot to put the SD card in my camera; came back to get it; went back out and slipped in the mud trying to get a picture of the river. Got mud on my camera, but thankfully not on any moving parts, so cleaning it just took some time. In any case – odd photo day! Kind of eerie vibes at times,…
Another batch of photos for all of you RSS enjoyers. News has been shit lately, but photography continues, so I'll keep posting them. Be well <3 Staying in the suburbs of (old) York – there's ample opportunities to find nature :) Still getting used to the lighting conditions though – it feels like that's more difficult here, even on a sunny day like this was. Maybe it's because…
Happened to be in downtown SF with a camera right around sunset, and figured I'd wander a while instead of immediately hopping on Bart. Still getting used to the 17-55mm! The warping from the FOV is so much more visible than the 100-400mm that I've been primarily using for the past couple years.
Just one photo this time – the first sunrise of the new year, rising over San Francisco. But there's a bit of a story here, so I'll indulge myself on this one. Doing photography in the bay area, it's hard not to be jealous of those early morning fog pictures people take from Marin, looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge, at San Francisco, or even just the forest. I live too far away…
Very late on uploading these, but such is life sometimes. This batch is from from wandering around Lake Merritt before another one of the cohost meetups. Nicky wrote about it at the time on their blog – go check it out :) Lake Merritt always has a lot of birds, but this time felt almost like a religious experience – birds everywhere you looked. At no point was it lacking for birds! Plus, TONS of…
Another batch from the backlog — from a walk near and around Lake Temescal. A bunch of the photos from this day were a little borked because the camera settings weren't great — things like f/30 with 800 ISO in daylight, which together cause a stark loss in detail. But overall still some good ones to show. I'm especially happy about that sparrow picture.
We're due for tons of rain over the next few days, so I took the opportunity to go for a hike while conditions were still okay-ish. Sky was quite dark, and generally wasn't feeling inspired, but... there were at least a couple opportunities for photos. Also completely missed the turn back for a short route, and ended up walking for an extra hour or so, uphill along a busy road in the…
These photos have been in my backlog for a while, posting them now in lieu of anything taken more recently. I was regularly putting birdseed out for the various birds that come visit, and on this particular rainy day, there were a couple California Towhees that were braving the elements to get their snacks. I've found that California Towhees tend to be pretty comfortable with you being…
We had a second cohost posters meetup on Sunday. It was peaceful, nice to talk to the people who came again. I wandered around Lake Merritt and some nearby residential areas as the sun was setting. The light was challenging, but... birds are always great inspiration. And there was a truly enormous amount of crows — probably on their way to the roost. I'm publishing these on the Thursday after…
I was recently visiting Northfield and went for a walk around the Carleton Arboretum. It's a neat place! Lots of fall vibes that you don't really get in most of California.
I recently got myself a treat — Canon's EFS 17-55mm f/2.8 zoom lens. I'd heard good things about it, found myself wanting a lens that was at least somewhat closer than the 100-400, and one thing led to another... 🤷 Anyways. It's pretty good! Feels almost like playing on easy mode — I was particularly shocked that I was able to get a good photo at 1/20s exposure while holding the…
Afternoon hike at Sibley. Some of the photos came out really well! Others, maybe kinda meh. Figured I'd include them though – it's nice having more photos here. And, the critters were posing nicely for me as well :) Anyways. Took a little while to get through editing these, but we got there in the end. Hope you RSS feed enthusiasts are enjoying!
It's been exceptionally hot lately; went for a walk in the morning before it heated up too much. Lately I've been trying to articulate the type of photos that I'm looking for – I think the broad theme is "beauty in the mundane". Little things, like light shining through leaves, or the way a palm tree sits against a clear sky. I'm not yet sure where birds fit into that (they…
Went for a kinda long hike near Lake Chabot – took a ton of photos, and ended up quite pleased at how they turned out! (Initially, because of the flat lighting and grey sky, I was worried that there wouldn't be much that caught my eye.) I'd been on shorter out-and-backs here before, but with more time, I decided to explore a little further – I'd heard, after all, that the trail did…
First Atom feed entry :) Here's an assortment of photos, exploring new trails around Vollmer Peak .