My 2011 Photographic Year-End Review
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.
“The New York Post” – Photo Report
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.
Open Letter to the UK Home Office about the Imminent Closure of the IRIS E-Gate System
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
South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 4 – Landscapes
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.
South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 3 – Other Animals
Following on from my last two photo reports from our Kruger safari (see “The Big Five” and “The Birds”) I will close off the animal-based photos with, well, everything that isn’t a “Big Five” or a bird. This menagerie includes a wide variety of wildlife, from the ever-present (Impalas) to the tiny and rare (dung beetle).
Giraffe
Wildebeest
Zebra
Hippos and Crocodiles
Reptiles and Insects
Leopard Tortoise
Dung Beetle
Warthogs and Hyenas
Antelope
Kudu Bull
Impala Ewe
Impala Ram
Male Steenbok
Well, that’s it on the wildlife photography front from our Kruger trip. Next up will be a few landscapes from the Kruger Park, and then a selection of shots from our trip to New York last weekend. See you soon.
South Africa 2011: Kruger National Park Photo Report 2 – The Birds
On our self-drive safari adventure in Kruger National Park (see previous entry on the “Big Five” here) we were amazed at the sheer variety and exoticism of the birds we saw. Apparently over 400 species (resident and migratory) call Kruger home, at least for part of the year. The park is really well set-up for birdwatching, with many hides set up next to waterholes and so on, and while I would not in any way call myself a twitcher, I did at least take an interest in what birds crossed paths with me, which is more than I can say at other times in my life.
In any event, we were lucky enough to encounter these fellows during our time in Kruger:
Scops Owl
Common/Steppe Buzzard
Goliath Heron
Cape Glossy Starling
Southern Masked Weaver
Southern Ground-Hornbill with Scorpion
Common Bulbul in a Bird Bath
Lilac Breasted Roller
Martial Eagle in Flight
Crested Barbet
Guinea Fowl
A few more bird shots can be found on my Flickr set here.
Next up: some more of the fantastic creatures lurking around the Kruger…
Luke's Flickr Photos
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