I don’t know if this is just a British obsession or a universal one, but people seem to just love staring at the sea. I’ve noticed pretty much everyone who comes here doing it at some point. Their gaze heads for the sea and the horizon, a distant look comes over their faces and silence descends like a cloak of tranquillity. For several minutes they are then lost in a reverie just gazing towards the lonely sea and the sky.

I do it as well, every day. It’s not just the sight of the waves endlessly rolling forwards and the intriguing flatness of the horizon, it’s the sounds too. The sounds of water, rushing, splashing and roaring and the sound of the seagulls.

If I keep taking pictures of people doing it, it will make quite an intriguing portfolio.

Cheers, Tom.

The Brazilian rainforests are in the news again:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7399109.stm

There is a plan to develop the region to make it economically successful whilst at the same time satisfying environmental concerns. The man in charge of the  plan is “Former Harvard law professor” Roberto Unger. He says:

“We do not see any contradiction in principle between an active economic project and the conservation of this treasure for humanity”

I’m glad he is so confident but I’m not, and what the hell is a law professor doing administering this plan anyway? The plan is to limit the number of trees that can be chopped down every year, and develop infrastructure. Sounds fine in principle, but that’s the legal logging. There is also illegal logging. The effort to prevent illegal logging is described here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7397782.stm

But unfortunately the strenuous efforts to prevent this are insufficient: deforestation rates went up at the end of 2007 and so far in 2008 too.

This is a very difficult situation. I can perfectly understand the locals’ wish to use the great and valuable tree resource they have in order to make money. But if they over-log the area, they deprive themselves of long-term income for short-term gain, destroy a treasure-trove of wildlife and have potentially serious impact on the climate of the whole planet. I have a bad feeling about this situation.

My title comes from Jah Wobble’s “Take Me to God” album. The track “No Change is Sexy” features a heavy stream-of-consciousness rant over intense music, and “I’ll Never See The Rainforest Anyway” occurs during it. Youtube let me down, so I had upload it myself with inappropriate images of waves - I should have used some forest pictures really, but I didn’t have any. It’s an excellent track and well worth a listen. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGxYcyIsdNo

Cheers, Tom.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8huXkSaL7o&feature=related

Two American blokes have just been fined millions of dollars for sending out over 700,000 spam emails. Hooray! I don’t know about you, but I get lots of “snail mail” Spam too. I snapped the chap above promenading very slowly indeed along the promenade a few days ago.

As well as being annoying, Spam emails can also infect your computer with a virus and trash all your data. So, this seems like a good time to remind everyone:

Back up your data regularly!

My cousin Shaun lost his hard disk and all of his photographs and other data recently. How well would you cope if that happened to you? I’d also recommend using a firewall and antivirus software.

Cheers, Tom.

Smoking is to be banned in mental hospitals by 1st July, as part of the general workplace smoking ban, according to this report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7265537.stm

Apparently 70% of mental patients are smokers, as compared to 26% of the population at large. 70% of schizophrenics smoke too, and I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between smoking and mental illness. If it’s just coincidence, it’s a hell of a big one. It’s not just mental illness either: 56% of people with depression smoke.

I see three major possibilities:

1. Smoking is a factor in causing mental illness and depression

2. Those who suffer from mental illness and depression start to smoke, possibly to help cope with it

3. They are unrelated.

Which of the 3 do you think is most likely?

Whatever the situation, it’s going to be a bad time for the 70% of  smoking mental patients for whom hospital is their home. I would have thought the last thing many of them needed was a forcible stop in their smoking to add to their other problems.

Rather curiously, prisons are exempt from the ruling in the mainland UK. The Isle of Man is different though: it's now banned in their prison and a hunger strike in protest has recently come to an end. Result: the prisoners lost even though one of them lasted 10 days without food. If anyone wonders how strong the smoking addiction is, think about how well you'd manage 10 days without food!

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. I’ve posted far too many sunset pictures recently, so my next few blogs (after this one) will contain pictures of something else. Something different, but hopefully equally interesting.

In yesterday’s blog, I gave a few suggestions for how to increase your chances of taking a good picture of the sun as it sinks. Last night, I tried to put those suggestions into action. I concentrated on getting a composition with the sun on one side of the picture and something on the other side to balance it, and with the sun a reasonable size and neither too bright nor too dark, and close to the horizon.

As on previous occasions, I was somewhat stymied by low-lying cloud as the sun descended towards the horizon, but I gave it my best try in the circumstances. I took a few OK pictures, but no really good ones. The best 3 are below, with comments beneath each picture. The pictures haven‘t been post-processed in any way, and they all get bigger if you click on them.

This first picture has good colour and the birds balance the composition nicely, but the clouds are obscuring the shape of the sun.

This picture has the same cloud problem as the first picture and is balanced by the breakwater and post. The reflections in the sand make this more interesting. It is slightly too dark.

The cloud problem again, but good colour. I like the fact that on this one, the image is symmetrical top to bottom, but non-symmetrical left to right. There is too little of interest on the left side though, and ultimately that lets it down, even though the colours are nice.

---

There is a Pink Floyd song called "Obscured by Clouds" that they used to open their concerts with. You can hear it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rxy3EX5a4k

Cheers, Tom.

Last night, the sun was dipping towards the sea in the most stunning manner and it looked like an ideal time to get some good sunset pictures.  So, out on a walk on the beach with Helen, and our 2 dogs, I took 400 pictures: not a single one of them was good. No, not even one. So, the rest of this blog is a list of 10 problems of taking good pictures of the sun as it sets. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means.

1. Composition. It’s boring if the sun is splat! In the middle of the picture with nothing else visible. It’s better to one side, with other things of interest on the other side: trees, rocks, buildings, people, anything. Even good colours are sufficient.

2. Horizon. This should be flat. The sea is a particularly harsh mistress for this as if you have the frame even slightly canted, it stands out like a drunk in a midnight choir.

3. Too bright. The sun is brighter the higher it is. You have to wait until it’s sufficiently low or use some sort of filter to compensate, otherwise it will be too bright. If you over-filter, all you’ll see is the sun and nothing else and that’s a further problem.

4. Too dark. If you wait until the sun is dipping below the horizon, there will be much less light and the chance of a dark picture increases. It will also end up too dark if you over-compensate with the light controls on your camera.

5. Sun too high. You need to be patient. Taking pictures before the sun is close to the horizon can result in having the sun at the top of the picture, a big boring space and then something at the bottom of the picture. This isn’t good. You can get away with this is you managed point 1. Well.

6. Low-lying cloud. This problem occurs everywhere, but more often at the seaside. As the sun dips, the air cools and moisture is more likely to form close to the ground (or water). This creates mist, or even cloud. It feels like a conspiracy. Just as the sun dips towards the horizon it goes behind a dirty great cloud to ruin your shot. This has happened here every day for the last few weeks when the weather has been mostly good. Last night was no exception.

7. Sun too big. If you zoom to get a large sun, it doesn’t look good. It dominates the picture too much, probably looks too bright, and is ultimately not interesting to look at.

8. Sun too small. The sun is supposed to be the main thing in your picture so if it’s just a dot, it’s no good.

9. Too pale. This is generally the result of poor settings on your digital camera. Make it a little darker and the colour should come back, but don’t overdo it.

10. Lens flare. This is a problem with all cameras but more-so with digitals. The unwanted images can sometimes look good but tend not to. It’s best avoided by not shooting directly at the sun, and by not having the sun just out of shot.

Really, it’s a wonder any decent sunset pictures get taken at all! Helen and I reckon there is a higher occurrence of stunning sunsets in Winter.

The picture above is one of my best ones yet, and I took it in early March. Click on it to make it bigger. I think it’s compositionally flawed because the top left side of the picture is fairly uninteresting but I like the colours and I like the size and position of the sun in the picture.

Cheers, Tom.

It’s a terrible picture, but I’m pleased I got it all the same (click on it to make it bigger). There are thought to be upwards of 120 bottle-nosed dolphins living in Cardigan bay and they are often visible from the shore. In  New quay (about 30 miles South of here) they come right up to the jetty.

The fellow in the picture above was about 100 metres from the beach fairly close to high tide and he only appeared above the water for a split second at a time whilst curving out of the water and back in again. I just kept snapping away in the hope that one of them would catch it, and I got lucky.

There are Porpoise in Cardigan Bay too, and they can be distinguished at a distance by the shape of the fins. The dolphins have the distinctive curvature you see in the above picture, porpoise’ fins have more of a straight edge and a sharper point.

Cheers, Tom.

It’s surprisingly difficult to take decent quality pictures of waves as they splash. There are technical factors such as the length of exposure and so on, but there are some practical factors that are equally problematic. One of these is that you don’t know how big the splash is going to be until it has happened. This means that a lot of the time, you end up with either a tiny splash in the middle of your frame, or a huge one that extends beyond it.

I know they say that a poor workman blames his tools, but I have a further problem caused by a limitation of my camera: there is a small time-lag between me pressing the button and the picture being taken. This means that if I wait until the perfect moment to take the picture, I will miss it because the camera takes time to complete recording the image. And just to complete the Catch-22 situation, the lag is larger the higher quality the image is.

The above splash is one I managed to get mewstly in the frame, mewstly. It’s marred by the fact that I had the camera on digital zoom to get it, so the quality is compromised.  Click on it to make it bigger.

All of this means that I really should be considering splashing out on a better camera. *sigh*

Cheers, Tom.

At 9PM last night it was still warm enough to wear just a t-shirt, and I had the beach all to myself. I sat down and listened to the waves gently lapping on the shingle and the occasional seagull in the distance, whilst watching the colours in the sea and sky slowly change. The smooth serenity of the waves and scenery seeped into me as I sat and a great feeling of calmness and tranquillity was soon mine.

There is something deeply comforting about the sound of wave noise. One theory is that it sounds like our mother’s amniotic fluid when we are in the womb, and there may be some truth to this. Whatever the explanation, 20 minutes by the waterside in twilight made everything seem right with the world.

Cheers, Tom.

P.S. To anyone who read my blog of yesterday: I didn’t go for a swim in the sea. I had to stay in to wait for a parcel, honest! It didn’t turn up either.

It was a very warm day yesterday, considering it’s early May. I was in shorts, that’s how hot it was! In the late afternoon at low tide, Helen and I decided to have a walk down by the sea with the dogs. I was surprised to see three lads playing around and swimming in the water for what seemed like a long time and not looking cold at all. This surprised me as I know that the sea warms up over the course of the summer and reaches it’s peak in early September. Yet when I asked them as they came out if it was cold, I was told:

“No, it’s lovely in there”

If today turns out fine as well, as it looks like it will, I will try it for myself this afternoon. The wet feet I got yesterday felt pretty cold, but maybe it will be alright once I get in. As you’ll see from the picture of the 3 lads above, two of them are reasonably well insulated and one isn’t, yet they all said it was fine. I incline towards the well insulated myself so I have no excuse really, do I?

Cheers, Tom.

So there I was on the balcony, taking pictures of the sunset. The bloke in the picture above hoved into view on the promenade from the right, walking briskly and texting furiously all the while. I didn’t once see him even take a glance at the astonishing vista that he could have seen merely by tilting his head slightly to the right. He almost walked into the bench that is just ahead of him slightly out of shot, but unfortunately he missed it. Perhaps if he’d fallen onto it, he might have paused for a moment to sink in the glorious sunset before burying his head in his screen and wandering on, obliviously. He disappeared off to my left, tapping away all the while.

Maybe he was in a hurry, late for meeting someone. I’ll never know. But couldn’t he at least have paused to have a quick peek?

And on the subject of Oblivious, here is a nice acoustic version of Aztec Camera’s song of the same name, performed by Roddy Frame himself, accompanied by Graham Gouldman and Neil Finn:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKlVabL24fw&feature=related

“From the mountain tops down to the sunny street,
A different drum is playing a different kind of beat.
Its like a mystery that never ends.
I see you crying and I want to kill your friends

Just count me in and count me out and
Ill be waiting for the shout,
Oblivious”

Cheers, Tom.

At the top of the beach here, it is shingle. At high tide, you can’t see any sand at all on the beach in front of our house, although you can if you walk 400 metres to the right.

The upper picture above was taken at high tide, and the lower picture at low tide. The breakwater you can hopefully make out in the top right corner of the low tide picture is the same one you can see in the high tide picture. I counted 240 paces of sand, from the edge of the shingle at high tide to where the waves were lapping at low tide. That’s a lot of sand!

The low tide picture was numbered “911” by my camera. I wonder if that means anything?

Both pictures get bigger if you click on them.

Cheers, Tom.

Food scares are obviously big news for people in towns and cities but when you are in a rural area and keep farm animals, they take on huge importance. When foot and mouth was rampaging up and down the country a few years ago, Helen and I were living on a smallholding and keeping sheep. The hideous disease stopped just a few miles away from us and never reached our sheep. I can still picture very clearly the pyres of railways sleepers covered in burning sheep and the thick, noxious smoke lingering in the valleys.

Before foot and mouth there was BSE in which a factor was using animal remains in feed, a practice that was banned by the EEC in 1994. But now they are thinking of partially undoing the ban and allowing dead pigs to be fed to chickens as part of their feed. The details are here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/04/foodtech.food

It’s being proposed, as you might expect for nothing but financial reasons. The cost of cereal for poultry feed has gone up recently, and this would make feed cheaper. Philip Comer, a former “Risk Assessment Adviser for the FSA” said: “The by-products of slaughter are a very valuable source of protein…we should not be wasting it”.

To my mind this suggestion is almost breathtakingly stupid. The risk of some serious illness in chickens, and of this then being passed to humans is very small. That’s what they said about BSE too and that resulted in hundreds of people getting Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease which is a form of dementia (as is Alzheimer’s disease).

The risk might be small, but it isn’t worth it.

Cheers, Tom.

Summer arrived properly yesterday. There were more visitors here to enjoy the seaside than I’ve seen since we moved here in December. Lots of cars were parked along the sea road in front of our house, and people were doing all those traditional seaside things: flying kites, paddling, digging, sunbathing, eating ice creams,  etc. etc.

It’s the first hot Bank Holiday weekend of the year and it really brought the visitors. Luckily low tide was in the early afternoon, so the beach was at it’s best, with a very long expanse of sand for people to enjoy. Several games of football took place and the lads all had their tops off: it really was that warm.

The heading to this blog comes from the great Ron Manager of The Fast Show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NeRoSFZWbs

Cheers, Tom.

The words of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson who is now the Mayor of London. He said that on the Tory campaign in 2004 and looked a bit of a berk, but he was making a rather clever joke about promises that politicians make in order to win votes, and did so in a way guaranteed to cause both amusement and publicity. On this campaign he made no mistakes, and beat Ken Livingstone by a healthy majority of over 100,000.

Whilst it might seem dubious to have our capital city represented by someone with a long history of embarrassing gaffes, at least he is an interesting character rather than your typical grey politician, and he is undoubtedly very intelligent. And I confess, even though I don’t share his politics, I can’t help liking the man. He’s both funny and interesting. I also like the fact that when he makes mistakes (as he often does) he apologizes for them.

As with many very smart people, he swings between raging success and catastrophic failure: the middle-ground is something he’s unfamiliar with. I just hope he carries out his new very important job with much more success than failure.

Cheers, Tom.

The KISS rule. I was given this excellent piece of advice many years ago on a management training courses on how to give effective presentations. I think it applies fairly well to the above photograph (which looks better bigger - click to enlarge). There’s nothing there but sea, sky and breakwater but I still rather like it.

I’ve taken literally hundreds of similar pictures but this is the one that seems to work the best. I wish I knew why!

Cheers, Tom.

The 1st of May, better known as International Workers Day, celebrates the achievements of the international Labour movements around the world. This goes all the way back to 1884 when the American Trades and Labour Unions set a 2 year deadline for the introduction of a standardized 8-hour working day. On that deadline, 1st May 1886, there was a general strike across America of which the most remembered incident was the throwing of a bomb at police in Haymarket Square in Chicago, resulting in the term “Bomb-throwing anarchists”.

Europe followed suit 20 years later. In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called for May 1st demonstrations throughout the world to get an 8 hour working day limit established in law. Since the proletariat’s most effective weapon is the strike, the congress made it:

"Mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1st wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

Here in the UK, the upshot is that we get the first Monday in May as a Bank Holiday.

Even though we are over 120 years on from that 1884 suggestion, many people still work much more than 8 hours a day. That‘s capitalism for you.

In the picture above (click to make bigger), Dan and Shep are both pleading for an 8 hour working day.

Cheers, Tom.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7373667.stm

There’s a report at the BBC today of the adverts that created most complaints in 2007. The winner by a fair margin was the Department Of Health’s anti-smoking advert which featured people being hooked in the mouth rather viciously, like a fish on a line, and then dragged along the ground (you can watch the advert at the above link). 774 people complained about them, saying that the adverts were “offensive, frightening and distressing”. The complaints were upheld on the basis that they “have the potential to frighten and distress youngsters”.

But isn’t that the point? Research has shown that shock tactics are the ones most likely to succeed, and if a few children get shocked by the adverts and as a result never become smokers then isn’t that a good thing?

This leads neatly into the subject of the UK turning into a “nanny state”. There are lots of examples of this, but smoking is perhaps the most visible one. Is it really any of the state’s damned business if people choose to smoke themselves to death? We make risk assessments all the time as we live. Driving a car is a risk, being in a major public building or mass transit system is a risk, even walking down the pavement carries the risk that a car will mow you down as a blade of grass is cut by a lawn-mower. Smoking is the same.

Smokers know the risks and they choose to carry on doing it and I support their tight to slowly poison themselves. The government makes money out of it anyway. The cost to the NHS from treating smokers is far less than the revenue the government makes from the “sin tax” on ciggies. But I do think that adverts specifically aimed at children to persuade them not to start smoking is probably a good thing.

I also think that employees deserve protecting from the smoke of others and for that reason I support the recent ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. Popping outside to appease your addiction doesn’t seem like too much of an inconvenience really. The argument the other way is that the staff don’t have to work in those places, but that isn’t entirely fair. Bar staff tend to be people who are only able to work at specific times of the day such as students and single-parents, and bar work is one of the few options available to them.

Cheers, Tom.

I took the above picture yesterday morning. It was somewhat of a surprise when I got it onto my PC to see myself in each of the bubbles. The picture gets bigger if you click on it.

I can’t help but wonder if the bubbles are as a result of detergent in the sea. Spume is natural, but those bubbles look a little too much like what you get from washing up liquid to me.

Cheers, Tom.

Have you ever tried to take photographs when it’s almost dark, with a very long exposure? They always end up looking blue, like the one above. There is a good scientific explanation for this. It’s because of “Rayleigh Scattering”. The atmosphere absorbs shorter wavelengths of light the most, and this then this gets radiated across the sky. Blue is the shortest wavelength that our eyes are highly sensitive to, so the sky ends up looking blue. Indigo and Violet light is also affected the same way, but our eyes are less sensitive to both of these than to blue, and the sun produces slightly less of both of these colours as well. Otherwise, the sky would look a rather nice deep bluey-violety sort of colour.

Rayleigh Scattering  is also why the sun looks yellow from earth: it looks white from out in space where there is no atmosphere. It even explains why the sun gets redder as it sets. The light is having to travel through more atmosphere, so there is greater absorption of green colours, just leaving the longer wavelength red to yellow colours to get through to our eyes.

When there is moisture or dust in the atmosphere, the absorption patterns vary and we get stunning multi-coloured sunsets with all sorts of  colours. We get these a lot here because of the moisture in the air caused by the sea. The above picture shows this.

“Where The Blue Of The Night” is a song, originally sung by Bing Crosby. This is a fair version of it by Russ Columbo, but the reason I am posting this clip is for the gorgeous old record player:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzD3KFe6BL8

Where the blue of the night
Meets the gold of the day
Someone waits for me

And the gold of her hair
Crowns the blue of her eyes
Like a halo, tenderly

If only I could see her
Oh how happy I would be

Where the blue of the night
Meets the gold of the day
Someone waits for me

Here is Bing doing it from a film, but there is 2 minutes of talking before he starts singing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRl-gMqyJLQ

Cheers, Tom.

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSL1777256220070717

“The divide between rich and poor in Britain has widened to its greatest gap for more than 40 years, a social policy research charity said”

It has happened because “average households” have become poorer: “The proportion of average households fell from around two-thirds of families in 1980 to just over half by 2000”. There are fewer extremely poor people now, but far more near the poverty line, with 27% of families in 2001 being “breadine poor”. The number of “asset-wealthy” households has gone up “dramatically” and stood at 23% of households in 2003.

The root of the problem, according to the report’s authors is “people on higher incomes being overpaid, rather than those on low incomes being underpaid”. And people don’t like it, as this survey from February 2008 shows:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jun/20/globalisation.ukeconomy

“75%, say the gap between high and low incomes is too wide in Britain”

And 54% of people think taxes don’t make society fairer. So what’s the answer? Increased pay for the lower paid is one possibility. Perhaps the minimum wage should be raised.

The major political parties in this country all seem to be debating taxation at the moment and I see that as a very good thing. I hope we get some sensible and radical suggestions, but I suspect we won’t.

Personally, I’d like to see VAT scrapped and income tax increased to compensate, and more of the tax burden being paid by the high and very high earners. Get rid of National Insurance too and put that on income tax. The tax rules should be so simple that they could be written on a single sheet of paper and be understood by a child. It’s harder to fiddle an incredibly simple system.

Cheers, Tom.

P.S: Only 36% of voters want tax cuts, but 67% think they pay too much tax. Perhaps we just like to moan!.

There are some very distinctive noises made by waves as they break and then retreat over shingle.

First comes the low, deep booming roar as the wave breaks and many tons of water come crashing and splashing down.

Then comes the crackling, rushing sound of the water racing inwards.

There is a moment’s lull, like the calm in the eye of the storm, before the water all races out again, with a curious loud rattling and sucking noise.

I think the picture above is quite aural. As I look at it, I feel as if I can actually hear the noises. Does it do that for you?

Cheers, Tom.

I’m sure we are all well aware that we shouldn’t stare into the sun. The risk of permanent vision damage is surprisingly high. It’s particularly bad if you are looking through a magnifying device such as a telescope or binoculars……or a camera.

My eyes are sensitive at the best of times, so on the beach when it’s sunny I always try and remember to wear sunglasses. If I don’t, my eyes are streaming in seconds. This makes it difficult when I’m trying to take a picture like the one above (click on it to make it bigger). I have to try and shield my eyes while at the same time holding the camera steady and then pressing the button. It generally takes a few goes to get the shot I want because of this. The picture above is close to what I was hoping for. The horizon isn’t quite flat, but it captures the sun reflecting off the sea as I hoped: almost all of the colour has gone to just leave a silvery white and black. Every setting was turned down about as low as it would go to make the picture possible at all