A Bulging Album

I had the need to take a look through my photos the other day, needing to see what photos I had of the town for a project that I'm working on. It's a sobering sight; looking at just how my photography has dropped off so dramatically in the last decade or so.

I'm one of the die-hard users of Google's Picasa software for quickly finding my photos and it can order by folder as well as show how many photos are in each folder. Because I always file my images by year and date it becomes trivial to see how many I'm taking each year. The headline figures are still scary - 156,000 images taken digitally on whatever camera was my main device over the years. There are about another ten thousand taken with phone and pocket camera as well.

Taking more than 60,000 travel photos out of the equation leaves me with something around 100,000 that have been taken right here on the Isle of Man and it's a staggering number of images that almost defy explanation.

Still, let's try.

Firstly, and by far the biggest count is photos of the TT. I'm trigger happy and I've experimented extensively with multi-shot composites of bikes over the years. Without adding them all up precisely, it's clear that between fifty and fifty-five thousand of these are photos of bikes.

So, we're down to those 50,000 or so that are photos of the Isle of Man. I can easily explain 2,000 of them away as the usual daily junk that I've taken with my phone. There are countless photos of screens or the labels on routers and printers that I just never get around to throwing away.

Then there are about 2,000, taken on one day watching the F4SA Powerboat race in Douglas when I once again got carried away. The same is true for roughly a thousand from the last Jurby air show.

A thousand more are panorama shots. That might not sound like a lot, but this probably also accounts for up to 10,000 of the remaining total, as they are the shots that the panoramas are built from and I still keep everything.

If I take a little time and look through the rest, I find many of birds and flowers. From perhaps a thousand attempts to get a photo of a diving gannet to dozens of studies of primroses, roses, daffodils and daisies, there's much that I'm glad I have taken.

Beyond that, it's landscapes, seascapes, woodland walks and failed experiments. There's no rhythm, rhyme or reason to them all, but they tell a story of the last 25 years.

6,000 images a year on average. I'm well behind and it's time to get the numbers back up.

An Office With a View

 

At some point in the last six months, things just began to click into place. I can't say that I ever missed being in Jurby per se, but for a while I did feel truly out-of-place. Slowly, however, that seems to be changing. Now, this little apartment on the edge of town is becoming home. Even more surprising is that my brother seems to feel the same.

For me in particular, a great deal of the reason for this has to be the view. It is, honestly, something we really didn't have in Jurby, despite the possibilities. In many ways, my two office views are similar. Both look out of a bedroom/office over the rooftops.

In Jurby, however, that view was of close bungalow roofs and only the sky beyond. There wasn't much to see out of the window, apart from the odd gull, rook or pigeon.

Here, in Ramsey, that is totally different. I still see the rooftops of the bungalows opposite, but here I'm high enough up that the view is of the whole of town, or so it seems on a bright and clear day. You don't really get to see the movements of people in the town, but you get a real sense of what the day is like. Trees blow in the wind, the mist closes in as the rain falls and the roofs get dusted with snow on those rare days when we actually have some.

The sea is tantalisingly just out of direct view. I need to stand in the lounge window and look out to the right to see a bit of the Pier and the bay, but even that minor detraction doesn't bother me anymore.

It's dynamic and interesting in a way that the view in Jurby just wasn't able to be. Now, if only I can manage to not let it distract me from either work or writing!

A New Toy - Ricoh Pentax K3 Mark III

Couldn't Resist

I'd pretty much always planned to replace my main camera at some point, but particularly if I was going to go back to Africa. I had resigned myself to waiting until the end of the year and seeing if there might be a bit of an offer around Black Friday. It was always going to be expensive, but the current camera is more than eight years old and starting to get a little bit twitchy in the buttons. It really doesn't owe me anything, having been to Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Uganda and Zambia with me and taken almost 60,000 photos.

So, I've splurged far too much money on a new one, as the prices were heavily discounted and inflation is rampant. This is a Pentax K3 Mark III, and it's better than the old K3 in just about every field except perceived battery life. I'll need a lot of time to get used to it, but I've still got a full six months until I head off to Tanzania and I should be used to it's quirks by then.

I'm starting off slow with a few simple landscapes and lots of plants to test out the colour response, but so far, it is nothing short of fantastic. Everything is quick, intuitive and very smooth. I've got to do lots of adjustments to get the Autofocus response and the colour settings just how I like them, but that shouldn't take too long once I spend a few hours just taking photos.

Sadly for my bank account, I couldn't resist finally getting something to replace the venerable - but now long gone - Sigma 50-500mm zoom as well. That something is the Pentax 150-450mm HD D-FA F4.5-5.6ED DC AW. (That's quite a mouthful, but it describes a 150mm to 450mm zoom lens designed for full frame with fancy glass in the lenses and special coatings on the glass). It's been back-ordered, so a good job I decided to get it now rather than in the autumn.

That's by far the most money I've ever spent on a single item without wheels - twice in a row. The lens is even more expensive than the camera body and I've now got to try and get my money's worth out of the combination.

A Few Samples

I'll add a couple of photos here to give just a hint of the quality that comes right out of the camera. They are all taken with the K3 Mk III and my trusty but compact Tamron 18-200mm walk-about lens. I'm starting off slow, trying to get a feel for the colours and focussing abilities first.

The Zambia Report

This one is ready in record time. I wrote the entire text of the journal for our epic trip to Zambia while I was there and finished it on the plane on the way back. To sum up:

ZAMBIA IS AWESOME!!

I saw everything I could hope to see, so many mammals and such good views that I'm overwhelmed by the whole trip and the destination. South Luangwa is the best National Park I've visited in Africa, both in terms of the range of game and also in the quality and frequency of sightings - even in what is considered the quiet season.

The trip report starts HERE...

I've also finished the book of the trip and the first copies are already on their way from the printers. Here's the preview as usual.

Zambia 2019

By David Kinrade