Mortal Coil

Howdy everyone, hope February’s treating you well. Just this past weekend I travelled to Berlin for my girlfriends’s birthday celebrations and lugged my camera along. I love Berlin, it seems to be right at the centre of Europe’s respective cultural and political maelstroms and it’s a vibrant, ever-shifting and fascinating place to spend a few days. Of course, by choosing to travel there in early February we more or less guaranteed that it would be viciously cold, and we were not let down on this front. One (late) morning we discovered that the reason we’d felt especially cold at 4AM was that the temperature had dipped to -18C (0F). I’m from South Carolina and not even 12 winters living in London meant I had experienced that kind of cold. But, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad preparation. Fortunately both of us were well kitted out with thermals, glove liners, toe warmers etc and still had a whale of a time. Anyway, the photos below show a rather abstract outdoor view of Berlin and don’t reflect the sheer amount of time we spent warming up indoors. But then again, once you’ve seen one blurry picture of a bar you’ve seen them all…

As usual, more photos from this trip can be found over on Flickr.

Last weekend I flew up to Scotland for a jaunt out to the Isle of Skye, accompanied by my trusty pal Corin and our able guide, David Langan, who escorted us out to the Isle of Skye for a full long weekend of trekking around Skye in search of the perfect landscapes. We braved 300m+ vertical hikes and gale-force winds in pursuit of our photos. I am happy to say that one or two of them came out.

The photo below may be somewhat pedestrian, but I had to shimmy out on to a ledge over a giant cliff to get it, which was the only way to shield the camera / tripod from the gale-force winds on the clifftop. The winds were so fierce, a waterfall nearby was blown back over the top of the cliff before any water actually fell. So this photo gets included, no matter the quality!

These and more photos can also be seen over on my Flickr feed.

Here’s a great post from Allen Murabayashi of Photoshelter on why we should all just chill out and love photography unconditionally:

The business of photography is undergoing massive change. People who used to make a ton of money aren’t making the same money any more. Amateurs are giving away photos for free. I totally get it.

But listen. There are so many more incredible photos today than there ever were. And more people consume more photography than they ever did thanks to things like Facebook, Instagram, iPads, blogs, and “best of” compilations. This is the golden age of photography. Everyone takes photos now, and there is inspiration all around us. History is being made, and we’re capturing it.

Hear hear.

From time to time, I will use these “From the Archives” posts to highlight some of my photography from the period before I started this blog in 2009. These photos have been publicly available on Flickr for some time but they have never before been featured on this blog. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past!

JAPAN
Back in November 2007, I took a 2 week photo holiday to Southern Japan. Like many Westerners I had been fascinated with Japan since I was a child – every boy goes through a ninja phase, after all – and I had a growing appreciation for the refined nature of their culture, especially their cuisine. I came to Japan with many preconceived notions, somewhat expecting everyone to be demure, deferential and bowing non-stop, but I quickly realised – of course – that the Japanese are human after all, and a few rowdy nights in izakaya and out on the streets of Harajuku and Osaka quickly put paid to my hackneyed stereotypes. The Japanese people were generally very kind and even inquisitive, and it was a joy to travel through this land, and, barring the occasional instance of having no clue where I was or how to read the signs, I had one of the most perfect times imaginable. I am looking forward to returning to this fascinating land.

Below are a small selection of the thousands of photos I took during my travels through Japan:

Girl dressed for "Seven Five Three" ceremony, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Parental Encouragement, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Tokyo Rockabilly Club, Harajuku

Shinjuku Girls, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Toshogu Shrine Roof, Nikko

Sunset from Kyoto Graveyard

Heian Shrine, Kyoto

House on the Pond in Gardens of Heian Shrine, Kyoto

Mini Zen Rock Garden, Roan-ji, Kyoto

Entrance to Senso-Ji, Asakusa, Tokyo

Lanterns, Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto

Samurai Castle at Himeji

Itsukushima Shrine by Night, Miyajima

Morning at Torii Gate, Miyajima

Owakaduni Hot Springs, Hakone

Mount Fuji from Hakone

Moto-Hakone Lake Panoramic (Mt Fuji in Background)

Backlit trees and Maniden Roof, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Incense Smoke, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

Temple Roof Detail, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Inari Kitsune Statue, Toshogu Shrine, Ueno Park, Tokyo

Temple Gate Detail, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

More of my Japan 2007 photos can be found over on Flickr.

Hi all,

Happy New Year! This is just a quick note to say that yes, I am still alive, and there is definitely more photography in the pipeline from yours truly in the near future.

At the end of January I am travelling to the Isle of Skye in Scotland for a landscape workshop with David Langan, which, if my last jaunt to Scotland was any indication, should result in some good images. In February I am going on a short city break to Berlin, which is also quite photogenic. Finally, in the next month I will be going on various short work trips to Casablanca, Lagos (Nigeria) and Riyadh so I imagine one or two photos might come out of those locations as well.

I am also toying with the thought of doing some “From the Archives” posts to highlight some of my older, pre-blog-era photography.

So stay tuned, there is definitely more to come.

-Luke

It’s been a good year for me. Not only have I got a new and exciting job with lots of travel, but I also moved in with my girlfriend and we’ve had the good fortune to have a couple of great holidays (to Vietnam and South Africa) and a couple more mini-break trips to boot.

It’s been an eventful year for me travel-wise. According to my profile on Tripit.com, in 2011 I have had 14 trips abroad totalling 100 days, racking up 147,596km of travel to 32 cities in 12 countries. Phew.

Apologies for the length of this post – I am having a hard time whittling down my favourite photos of the year!

January
In early January I was still getting to grips with my latest acquisition, a Canon 7D. I took it out on an crisp winter’s day and put it through its paces around West London:

I also made a brief business trip to Saudi Arabia. One of the stopovers was a coastal town called Yanbu, which like many Saudi cities has an “Al Balad”, an old town, which has often been left to rot, due to lack of a tourist trade and lack of interest in anything that isn’t shiny and new…

February
In February I didn’t travel abroad. Instead I continued to get to grips with my new camera, so took it out on another winter walk, this time to my familiar (and subject-rich) stomping ground of London’s South Bank.

March
In March, springtime began to make itself known in London.

Also, the UK Uncut protests swept through the West End of London, mostly peacefully, but with occasional spots of mayhem provided by the Black Bloc splinter group.

Towards the end of March I took a business trip to Kuwait City.

April
April was an eventful month. Within the same week I had changed jobs, moved out of a shared flat and moved into a new flat with my girlfriend, and had all of 4 days to settle in and unpack before we were off to Vietnam for a 3 week south-to-north adventure. The first week of this trip saw us travel through Saigon, Mui Ne and Nha Trang.

May

For the first two weeks of May we continued travelling northwards through Vietnam, through the cities of Hoi An, Hue, Sapa, Hanoi and to the glorious Ha Long Bay.

Straightaway after returning from Vietnam, I made the first of several trips this year to Dubai.

June

In June, I celebrated my birthday and went to Lagos, Nigeria for work. Sadly, neither of these events produced photos worth reproducing here.

July

In July we went on a long weekend break to Barcelona to reacquaint ourselves with this vibrant city and to spend a little time at our friends’ place out in the countryside of Catalonia.

I returned to Dubai for work…

And, back in London, we took advantage of a sunny summer day to stroll the South Bank…

August

We started out August with a trip to the Cotswolds to have a cottage weekend with some friends, and of course enjoyed a countryside hike.

As is our tradition we also made a point of walking down to the Notting Hill Carnival to join the throngs which constitute Europe’s largest street party (Day 1 / Day 2).

September

This month we trekked down to the Isle of Wight to attend Bestival 2011, a “boutique” music festival which is threatening to get bigger than its breeches.

I also made another trip to Lagos, Nigeria, but one can only take so many photos out of the side of a moving car…

October

In October I was extremely busy with work travel, with trips to Dubai, Turkey and South Africa.

Fortunately, the South Africa trip afforded us the possibility of continuing on in holiday mode once work was done. We started out in Cape Town and explored both it and the surrounding areas.

November

In early November we were still on our South African adventure, heading out from Cape Town and headed to the Kruger National Park, where we spent five days on a self-drive safari, stalking the “Big Five”, some stunning birds, assorted other animals, and grabbing time for the occasional landscape.

Shortly after returning from South Africa we got back on a plane and headed West this time, to New York City, to meet family for the Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, I brought my camera…

December

December has (thankfully) been rather quiet on the photo front so far, aside from social snapshots from various Christmas celebrations. This has allowed me to catch up on my “queue” of photos and – goodness – I am all caught up now, fresh and ready for the photographic challenge of 2012. It already looks as though by the time February is done I will have been to Morocco, Scotland (Skye), Nigeria, and Berlin.

We capped off our travel this year with a personal trip over to New York for some family time around the Thanksgiving weekend. Lucky enough to have some relatives and friends who live in NYC, I make it over about once a year and always manage to find time to go out and shoot this mega-metropolis. Though I daresay I probably have enough Central Park shots in my library by now…

More of my latest New York photos can be seen either on Flickr (here) or Google+ (here).

This will probably be my penultimate post for 2011, if not my last – my next one will be a retrospective of the year with some of my favourite photos. It’s been a very fulfilling year.

Forgive me for a temporary diversion into non-photographic territory.

For those of you aren’t one of the nearly 400,000 UK-based frequent travellers who use the IRIS system, it is a rare case of something that takes a good deal of pain out of travelling internationally. It is an automated system installed at several UK airports which allows registered users to gain entry to the UK merely by looking into an iris scanner. If you are like me and are A) a frequent business traveller or B) a non-EU citizen, this is a life saver. IRIS lets me breeze past hour-long queues and I am often at the baggage carousel before the bags have started coming out.

However, for one reason or another, the system has never quite taken off. I have an inkling that it’s down to the fact that the need for pre-registration has put a lot of would-be users off, especially when the registration offices within Heathrow and Gatwick have been keeping increasingly erratic opening hours, and unfortunately with the austerity measures it now means that these offices have largely been closed. Word has been seeping out that the programme’s days are over, and that the machines will only be run until such time as they malfunction or start to need maintenance, at which point the system will be shut down.

I was upset enough about hearing this that I have written to the appropriate address within the Home Office. If you are upset about this as well, I would urge you to do the same.

To: irisinfo@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

To whom it may concern:

I write to express my displeasure at the imminent closure or retirement of the IRIS e-gate system.

I am an expat US citizen who has lived in London for many years. I will not be eligible for a UK passport until late 2012, but I have an Indefinite Leave to Remain visa and a US passport. I am a frequent business traveller, and because of the IRIS system, I have saved countless hours I would have otherwise stood in a queue.

With the staff reductions underway at UKBA, and the resulting pressures on the remaining border agents, surely this is not the time to be adding to the numbers of people having to queue for inefficient manual checks?

However, if the retirement of IRIS is a fait accompli, and it is only a matter of time until the system is decommissioned, then may I enquire what are the planned alternatives for frequent non-EU national travellers such as me?

I am thinking along the lines of one of the following suggestions:

• Addition of non-EU expats to the e-passport system – This would seem to make sense considering the sizeable investment in the e-passport infrastructure throughout the UK airports
• Alternative automated biometric e-gate system – I have heard rumours of a facial recognition technology, and again I would suggest that this be extended to cover non-EU nationals
• Separate queue for longterm visa holders / resident expats – In past times when the IRIS machines have been malfunctioning, I have occasionally seen an “IRIS queue” spring up at an adjacent border desk, for people who would normally use the IRIS machine. Surely this could be a low-cost alternative solution in which you have a dedicated queue for long-term residents (people on ILR or work permits) who simply needed identity verification rather than the lengthy entry interrogation posed to tourists and other temporary non-EU visitors?

Lacking any of the solutions above being put into practice, the prospect of once again joining the non-EU passport queues fill me with dread, and make me re-think my need to travel at all.

Thank you for your time and consideration,
Luke Robinson

Now, if I am totally honest, I wasn’t on the hunt for landscapes in the Kruger. For one thing, we spent every waking moment looking for wildlife. For another, you’re only allowed to get out of your car at certain points, and there’s no clambering through the bush trying to get that perfect framing of mountain, tree and sky. Taking landscapes out of the side of a car window is not ideal. And, regrettably, while Kruger is often beautiful, with wide expanses of veldt broken by a solitary tree, it is also quite often either A) flat or B) barren, and from about a half hour after sunrise to a half hour before sunset, the sun is a blazing presence, obliterating all shadow detail and washing out colours left, right and centre.

All this is a roundabout way of apologising that quite a lot of the pictures below feature, well, trees.

Well, that’s it for the South African photos (finally, a month after arriving home). Next up are shots from New York from a short trip there last month. Then, I think, a roundup of 2011.

Thomas Hawk has been very vocal in recent months about the supposed superiority of Google+ and why all the professional photographers he knows are moving to the service, and leaving Flickr in droves (see: “Flickr is Dead“). I am not sure I agree, at least on the superiority front. I have been frustrated with Flickr’s lack of innovation in recent years, but the fact remains it has a robust set of tools for management and sharing, and these simply don’t exist yet in Google+.

Thomas’ most recent post on the subject asserts:

Over the past few months the tide has begun shifting even more. Photographers are moving in mass from Flickr to Google+ as their primary photo sharing network.

Just like the social crowd moved from Webshots and Fotolog to Flickr a number of years ago, the social photography crowd is now moving from Flickr to Google+.

This may well be true, but I don’t find Google+ any more compelling for photo sharing than I did several months ago when first trying it. I summed this up in a comment on Thomas’ post:

I am a bit late to the party here, but I am perplexed at Thomas’ incessant promotion of Google+ as a superior photo service to Flickr. I will grant that engagement on a photo-by-photo basis seems to be higher, and that more innovations may be coming from Google+ than from Flickr (though I would debate this) but there are still some pretty glaring omissions that haven’t been addressed since the last time I looked at switching from Flickr.

I am currently uploading some shots to Google+ that I also uploaded to Flickr, using the Google+ in-browser uploader. (Note I have not tried using Picasa to upload).

I still find it unreal that despite having entered all kinds of information into my IPTC / EXIF tags of my exported images in Lightroom, most of these don’t get preserved when uploading to Google+. Why do I need to enter a caption again when I have already set this in Lightroom? Why can’t I look at more than a few cursory lines of EXIF information in the photo details page? How come I can’t set Creative Commons options? And why can’t I have the option to upload a scaled-down, web-sized version of my shots instead of having to suffer through painfully-slow (from the UK) full-resolution uploads?

And once the photos are up – can I browse by tag? No. Can I automatically reorder my photos by capture time if I add more shots to an album? No. Can I see a map of my photos within Google+? Astoundingly, no.

Most infuriatingly, is there an easy way for me to generate embed code to share a photo inside my own blog posts? No.

All of the limitations above also limit the ability of others to discover my photos and socialise them.

I am just as annoyed as anyone with Flickr’s stagnation and worry about its future. But, Mr Hawk, I think for you to say that Google+ is currently a superior photo sharing or discovery service stretches the bounds of credulity.

Until Google+ can address some of the shortcomings I see above, I can imagine a lot of photographers will hang fire on completely ditching Flickr. That day may come, but it isn’t here yet.

As a postscript, I do wonder whether Thomas’ experience with Google+ is coloured by his prominence as a photographer / social networker – in other words, his experience and engagement with Google+ has never been less than amazing because he came to the party with an existing mass of followers? For me, as someone with rather less popularity, the supposed benefits of the social experience on Google+ do not outweigh the lack of basic functionality…