Monthly:March 2010
Darren Rouse over at Digital Photography School recently asked the question, “What was your first photography experience?”. My first experience was borrowing my mother’s Instamatic (don’t recall if it was a genuine Kodak or a ‘Boots-the-Chemist’ branded camera). The Kodak Instamatic was a simple to use snapshot camera. Using 35mm film pre-loaded in a drop-in cartridge it was simple to use and rare to fail. The images it produced were square. Kodak also provided the Magicube flash cube that gave […]
I spent the bulk of 1998 and 1999 living in Paris, France. For the first time since 1985 I didn’t own a car. I walked, took the bus or rode the Metro and RER practically everywhere. Paris (inside the peripherique) is such a compact city – you can walk across it diagonally in only a few hours if you concentrate on the walk. Each little quartier within each arrondisment has it’s own character. I’ve only had the opportunity to return […]
In 1986, having received a sentence of 5-years suspended for 5-years having been caught brewing beer in Libya, I was assigned to South Africa. In January 1987 I found myself in the Northern Cape province, in a small town named Campbell. According to Wikipedia it was renamed from Grootfontein in honour of the Reverend John Cambell. Although it’s not the church in this photo, David Livingstone preached from the pulpit of Bartlett’s Church in this town. When I was there in 1987, […]
In the summer of 1985 I took off for a rail trip around Europe with a close friend. Having traveled around German, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and (the former) Yugoslavia the previous year, we decided to head to northern Europe and Scandinavia. Having passed through Denmark stopping in Copenhagen, we moved on to Sweden. We were on the train heading to Gothenburg where we planned to stay overnight and noticed the train was unusually crowded. Talking to some other passengers we […]
When I first went to Libya in 1984 I was an ‘Assistant Seismologist’. My job function was to determine the static corrections needed to apply to the seismic data so it all made sense in the processing cycle. To do this we had a couple of Mayhew 1000 drilling rigs mounted on Belgian MOL trucks. They’d go out to the location we directed and drill typically a 10 cm diameter hole to a depth of up to 100 meters. I’d […]
In 1990-91 I was fortunate enough to be assigned to work in the Calanscio sand sea in the Libyan Desert. Fortunate because a little to the east (in those days) lay the wreckage of the ‘Lady Be Good’, a WWII era Liberator Bomber. The plane failed to return to Suluq airbase after the crew’s first combat mission to bomb Naples on April 4, 1943. The wreckage was discovered from the air on May 15, 1959 and visited on the ground […]
