Look at the stars, look how they shine for you

It wasn't long ago that a small news item declared to the country that the Brecon Beacons has been designated a Dark Sky area. This means that the effect of light pollution is minimal, allowing the night sky to shine through on a cloudless night. This is all well and good as long as the clouds stay away, but in such a wet land as Wales, the rain and the mobile rain delivery system are never far away.
The One show did a snippet on the Beacons new designation a few weeks ago and interviewed a photographer who specialises in time-time photos and time lapses, mainly based in the beacons.
I've long admired time-lapse photography, creating gracefully arcing star trails over a number of hours to show the rotation of the earth and how what we see at the start of the night is different to the end.

In this spirit I went out for a long walk one night, all the way out of my back door, down a full 4 steps and then half a dozen paces into the garden and set up my camera and tripod in the hope of capturing the night sky. I had attempted this before in Surrey, but the light pollution from Guildford, and maybe even London stopped me from getting the balanced exposure that I wanted to achieve.

My first attempts were a bit sketchy. I tried to take single 15 minute exposures, which would end up a little shaky and noisy. These needed extensive work to make the stars stand out against the light pollution and weren't all that great.
For my next set I decided to let my laptop control the camera's shutter, set a timer and let it go for a few hours. The only problem with this approach is that I didn't want to leave my camera and laptop outside, so i turned off nearly all the lights in my house and stuck the camera in the window hoping that the window wouldn't show too many reflections. unfortunately double glazing means double the reflections, and in most of the photos you could tell the camera was in a room with curtains.

Thanks to the new release of Magic Lantern for Canon EOS 7D (http://www.magiclantern.fm) that includes an Intervalometer, I was able to take lots of photos at regular intervals without touching the camera, hooking it up to a laptop or buying an expensive shutter remote.
One evening I came home to a clear sky, and expected it to stay that way for the rest of the night so i set my camera up in the garden and set it to take a 15s exposure every 20s for a few hours (until I wanted to go to bed basically).

I mashed the 500 or so photos together, lowered the saturation a bit to get some of the remaining street light out of the picture, and voila, my first star trail time-lapse photo.

Painting with light

Just a quick post to say I've uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr of my Scandinavian adventure.

These are my favourite photos, I may add some more later but these capture the essence of the journey.

Click here to see the album

Click the LINK. geddit?

Keep Danish and carry on

We arrived in Copenhagen on our second day with a long time to explore.

We decided to follow the method we had taken in brussels and cologne of navigating unknown cities using tall buildings and spires. Unfortunately this method wasn't that useful in Copenhagen as there were next to no tall buildings, and hundreds of spires!

We'd head towards what we thought was a church we had spotted earlier, and find that it was actually a parliament building, museum or another church! We eventually picked up a rough guide to Copenhagen and headed north towards an old barracks in the hope of finding the statue of The Little Mermaid, based on the story by Hans Christian Anderson.
The original story is a bit different to the disney version; although it does include a prince and the mermaid falling in love with him, her changing into a human thanks to a sorceress, she dies of cold in the harbour after failing to make the prince fall in love with her.
The statue was surrounded by tourists taking photos of her, some even braving the slippery rocks to stand next to her to have their photo taken with the tragic figure.

Copenhagen is a city steeped in so much history, and seemingly containing so many historic buildings and royal residences that we were only able to scratch the surface of what the city had to offer. Luckily though we were able, later on in the trip, to spend a day exploring the city a bit more.

One thing we did come across which is worthy of comment, is that on our way to ind the little mermaid and the barracks, we discovered an interesting sport. In what we supposed to be the old part of town due to its abundance of tradition-style buildings, cobbled roads and wooden boats, was a small rectangular harbour where sounds of wood being hit against wood could be heard.
As we went towards the waters edge where a large crown had gathered we discovered a circle of men in wetsuits floating in the river hitting a small wooden barrel with a stick. The barrel was suspended from the bow of a boat so it was some form of Piñata, which we found was not filled with sweets or keepsakes, but with inflated balloons! We're not sure whether the barrel and balloons were significant, if there is any historical reason for playing this game while floating in a river, but it was certainly entertaining and drew a largish crowd (most of whom seemed to be english!)
We realised we were hungry at this point so we halted our search for the little mermaid and went into an old and danish-looking pub for some fishy dishes, of which there were many to choose from! There was a small translation error with Marylise's order when she chose the three fish baguette thinking that you chose one of the three fish listed, but it didn't matter in the end as it was all really good food.

We didn't spend the night in Copenhagen, but journeyed to our fourth country, Sweden, and stayed in a youth hostel in Malmo. Supposedly Malmo has a reputation for being one of the roughest of the cities in Sweden, but we found it quite typical of a scandinavian city. This was our first night in a hostel, and it was quite plush.We had a 4-bed room to ourselves, the beds were very soft and we were able to have a shower! This was also the hostel with the best kitchen, which was about the same size as the eating area, which is probably overkill but allowed three groups to cook at once, something we were to wish for later on!

After a good nights sleep, we continued on our journey to Norway.

Here today...

Brussels from high up

The first night of our great journey was spent in slightly less auspicious surroundings than you might expect, it was in a small flat in Surbiton, south London, rented by tom, whose idea it was that we should undertake such a journey. Surbiton has a reputation for being a boring and purely functional town, as it has no centre, no high street and is devoid of any buildings that display an inkling of character. Luckily Surbiton was just somewhere to sleep and therefore we didn't have to spend much time there.

Welcome to the Tin Tin shop!

It was at the beginning of this first night that I met a third of our travelling party, a french girl called Marylise who knew Tom through university. If I had paid more attention to Tom's time at uni I might have known more about her before spending a whole two weeks in close proximity. But even though Tom had written a play about his time in uni, which I was involved in, all I knew about Marylise was that she was french.

We made good time on our first full day, leaving surbiton on the first train of the day, arrived early at St Pancras with plenty of time to check in at the Eurostar. I had a sharp awakening when I forgot to take my belt off before going through the metal detector and was promptly frisked by a big black security guard who, when he had finished, gave me a cheeky grin and a Thank You for my co-operation and gestured for me to carry on through. I gave my own thanks to him for a thorough job and carried on quite awake now, despite it being so early in the morning.
We travelled through France barely without realising it and arrived in Brussels with a short stopover, granting us enough time for a cursory walk around the city, deciding to strike out from the station without a map and just navigating using tall buildings and spires. We found the old quarter eventually, by following the old city walls, and had ourselves a celebratory genuine Belgian Waffle near to a local landmark of a small statue of a boy weeing into a pond. (He apparently has over 600 costumes that mark national holidays, events and any other excuse to dress up.)

Belgium is the birthplace of a very well-known cartoon character who has many books, a TV series and most recently a film, he has been to the bottom of the ocean, into space, across seas and deserts and always up for an adventure with his friends. Since the first Tin Tin comic strips appeared in newspapers, he has been embraced by the people and Brussels is littered with lots of touristy Tin Tin knick-nacks, artwork and the official Tin Tin shop!

After two or three hours wandering around, we caught a train to Cologne where we were plunged suddenly into the middle of a carnival! The man in the ticket office wasn't able to tell us what was being celebrated, and there was a conspicuous absence of advertising or even police, but it was all very good natured. The general theme seemed to be that there wasn't a theme, you just dressed up in/as whatever you wanted, perhaps drank some beer, join a spontaneous drumming collective or have a sing-song outside an irish-themed pub.

One drumming group's human metronome

There are too many photos of all the costumes to put in this post, so when I get round to uploading all the photos into a public domain, I'll put up a link on here as well.

Unfortunately we only had a few hours in Cologne before catching our first overnight "sleeper" train. We weren't feeling rich enough to spend €40 on a cabin bed, so had to try and sleep in a small cabin of upright seats, with two ladies who didn't speak english. A fitful night of half-consciousness and being shunted as the train split into three at Hamburg meant that we were starting the holiday with a sleep debt!

It was strange to think that at 5pm the previous day I was in work in Cardiff, and just 24 hours later I had already been through England, France and Belgium and was waiting in Western Germany for a train to Denmark!

Next time: The Little mermaid, canal-based piñatas and the first glimpse of snow.

Trip of a lifetime

Recently I made a journey. It wasn't a spiritual journey, nor a psychological feat of endurance, but an actual journey. Most people call them holidays.

A month or so ago a friend got in contact with me and asked me whether I wanted to join him on a trip to see the northern lights. It would be a two week trip, made entirely using railways and would see us traversing 5 countries to reach the arctic circle.

Looking out the train window on mid-norway

I tend not to do holidays, especially abroad, as I can't seem to justify the expense to myself. But this one intrigued me, and since this year is the best in the next decade for seeing the northern lights, and I haven't been abroad for almost ten years, I thought why not?

As the time to leave drew closer I realised that I wasn't prepared for the cold arctic weather and borrowed a coat, hat and gloves from various friends, and hoped that my old hiking boots and thin battered scarf would stay in enough pieces to keep me dry and warm. The beanie I borrowed didn't quite cover my whole head, so my ears tended to get chilly, so I gave in and bought a large wooly hat in Bodø, the northern-most point of our journey.

But that's jumping a few pages ahead and missing out a good three days of trains, hostels, passport check and the initial meeting of our third travelling companion.

Try, try again

I've got even worse at keeping this blog up to date, but I'm going to have another bash at this gig.

Plenty to mention and muse upon this past year, attending six weddings, turning a quarter century, changing jobs and house and most recently breaking my 9-year travel drought by exploring Scandanavia using just trains.

The biggest thing i suppose was changing job and moving back to the valleys.
Moving to London last year was a necessary move as I was only scraping by as a freelancer, but the new job felt increasingly more like a social life-sentence. Though it allowed me to save lots of money thanks to living at home, spending 4 hours commuting and working the evening shift and the odd weekend meant I didn't see friends for weeks on end, even when they lived just round the corner.
As well as this, my progression within the company seemed stifled as I was in a useful role for the company but I wanted something more interesting and challenging. I applied for a few internal roles, but lost out for whatever reasons. I could have played the long game and got there in 5 years, but I was impatient for something more challenging and instead accepted a job back in Wales, working for the dark side of the force; a sound company. The new job offered better money and prospects, and a return to independence. Things are looking up!

Hey, how you doing?

It's been over a month since I last blogged, and I know some people are getting a bit antsy, barely containing their desire to bang on my door, shouting "WE NEED SOMETHING TO READ!"

I had my one year anniversary of my first full-time job at the start of this month.
It happened at the grand old age of 24, not because I have commitment issues with working for any one company too long, but due to the fact that, until two years ago, I was surfing on the wave of educational one-upmanship that dictated my work patterns. I could only work full time during holidays, which gave way to part-time hours during term time.

I had a hard time adapting to full-time work for the first few months. My year as a freelancer was much like my uni years in that I would work late hours, travel a lot and spend a lot of time in bed.
When regular, unrelenting work and commuting took over, I thought I would make myself stressed with the monotony of it all. I'd never had an ID card, an oyster card, a lunch hour or a commute, but a year down the line I've found it passable, and going to work on a Monday isn't a chore or something to dread, It's the beginning of a new week where i get to enjoy working with the great people around me, and letting any stress of the day wash over me when I clock out.

I get reminded of how lucky I am to even have work when I meet with friends who are struggling to get full-time permanent work and have to rely on part-time, temporary or project work. That's not to say I don't sometimes miss being freelance; chasing work and getting the satisfaction at the end of a week of a job well done, ready to move onto the next project. But at least in the rat race I know how much I'm getting paid each month.

Love is a many splendid thing

Recently there's been something funny going on...

Over the last year or two, I've noticed that a large amount of my friends, both christian and non-christian, are getting engaged, married and starting to have kids.
It's hard not to sound envious when talking about the couples, and when most weekends this year are taken up with engagement parties, weddings, stag parties, and even the odd hen party, there is the odd occasion when I find myself thinking of that old maxim usually applied to women in this situation, "Always the bridesmaid and never the bride".

photo by Photo Forrester

Of course, I haven't been cast in the role of bridesmaid for any of these occasions, but I got to wondering why there is such a distinctive difference between a woman who doesn't get married (Spinster) and a man who does likewise (Bachelor). Why one is associated with an unhealthy obsession with cats and the other conjures up images of expensive suits, an excellent knowledge of wine and a reckless abandon with women's hearts, is a mystery. The origins of the "bachelor" degree and its relationship with bachelor status is equally as puzzling.

Last year I found out how expensive having a friend who is getting married is. I know they're dishing out thousands for the wedding, but being involved or even just attending is bound to cost a few pennies for everyone involved. I worked out that last year, attending a wedding worked out to be about £100 for accommodation, travel, wedding gift and dry cleaning. This price rose if I was invited to the stag do, and again for a hen do (it happens!). The average wedding last year cost me £150-£200, with this year looking to follow a similar pattern! It comes part and parcel with having friends from all over the country.

But at the end of the day, my friends are inviting me to be present at a pivotal part of their lives; and you can't put a price on the warmth of friendship. Especially if that friendship involves a hog roast.

It'll be a sad day if I ever have to turn down a wedding invitation.

Don't adjust your set

I know it's just been videos for a while, but videos can say so much more than a huge essay.

This is a video I stumbled upon when looking around Vimeo, and it is amazing.
It is a modern adaptation of the nativity story, using no words, but still all the characters are easily recognisable if you know the story.
Enjoy.

'Tis the season

Every month or so I make a few videos for an event called Alchemi. Working on a format that is used by many larger churches, the sermon or talk is superseded by a short title package whose function it is to introduce the topic that is to be covered in an entertaining, informative, provocative or otherwise thought-provoking manner. The video sometimes poses questions to be answered in the talk, or may just set the scene and tone, providing continuity for a series of talks.

Even though I make teasers, trailers and intro videos for these events, I don't tend to showcase them beyond their intended audience. This is usually because I don't think the videos would fit when taken out of context or just aren't good enough to be widely broadcasted. The intro video for tonight's event is one of the few exceptions to this, as it doesn't need a context and I think can hold it's own.

So instead of waiting until after the event to show off the video, I've published it early.
I hope you enjoy it.



Soundtrack: Instrumental cover of "My Almost Lover"
Performed by Iwillbot http://www.youtube.com/WillTingMusic
Original by A Fine Frenzy http://www.afinefrenzy.com/