No, not to the site. Don’t be silly. I fully intend to keep posting my usual brand of nonsense for the next mumble years. But it is time to say goodbye to something that has contributed to the site. As I mentioned just over a week ago when I took the dramatic step of buying the Fujifilm X-E1, I’ve decided to switch over completely to the smaller and lighter, but quite remarkably good Fuji X series. And as the first step, well, the second after buying the X-E1, I’ve sold the Canon 5D Mark III. Previously, when I wanted to sell a camera, I’ve done the traditional thing[1] of putting it on eBay, but these days there are alternatives. There are a number of companies who will buy your kit, and as one of those is the excellent Wex Photographic, I thought I’d give them a try first. So, I filled in the form, and soon afterwards, I got an email with an offer.

It’s a lot less than I paid for the camera, but as I did do the moderately insane thing of buying a new high-end DSLR almost as soon as it was released, I was always going to lose a lot. On the other hand, it’s not hugely less than I could expect to get on eBay after paying the fees. Wex even arrange collection, which removes another bit of hassle.

The offer is conditional on them agreeing with my assessment of the camera’s condition – if they don’t agree, they can make me a different offer. If I decide not to accept that, they will return the camera to me at their expense, which is rather more customer friendly than some “buy your toys” companies.

The only catch, if you can call it that, is that they don’t pay actual money – what you get is credit to buy more stuff from them, but as I have a shopping list, that’s not a problem.  It’s due to be collected tomorrow, and I should have confirmation of the final offer a few days later.

Here’s the box:

Goodbyeeeee….

For my next trick, I’ll be selling some lenses, but I’ll probably be sending them elsewhere, as I’d like to turn them into actual money. If I get this right, what I get for the Canon kit will cover all my Fuji requirements. Well, for now, anyway.

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

Down a bit today, good stuff.

I went for a short walk at lunchtime – I didn’t have time for a proper one, what with being short of staff this week and having a meeting. I took the Fujifilm X-E1 with me and did some random photography, more of which will appear when my tuit supply improves. This is a nicely silly cycle rack on Collingwood Street:

Silly Cycle Rack

That’s an unadjusted, straight out of camera JPG, for those who like to know the details. On the other hand, this photo of the nicely restored[1] Stephenson statue[2] was created from a raw file. It’s had quite extreme use of the highlights and shadows sliders, a bit of cloning and a few other tweaks.

Stephenson

Here’s the walk – click the map for more details on the Garmin Connect site:

Monday Walk

More photographs to come!

[1] Which hasn’t stopped birds from marking it. Naughty birds[3]
[2] Which I suspect is going to be moved a bit as part of all the entertaining road works around Newcastle station..
[3] Not to be confused with Angry Birds

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

Moving on with the Great Terry Pratchett Re-read-athon, and it’s time to catch up with the City Watch. There’s a Cunning Plan involving some of the city guilds. They want to replace Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, with a more, err, flexible leader, someone who can do all the ceremonial stuff, wave, smile and generally not get in the way of business.

To that end, someone by some devious means is slowly poisoning Vetinari. Just enough to debilitate him, and avoid all the trouble that a sudden death would involve. By some even more devious means, the conspirators select a suitable candidate for King of Ankh-Morpork. They’ve decided that a member of the Watch is just the man they need. Now it’s well established that Captain Carrot is the obvious heir – he’s got the birthmark and sword, but he really wouldn’t meet the needs of the conspiracy, what with him being thoroughly decent and honest. So their idea is to use someone else altogether…

As if that wasn’t enough, Golems seem to be having some trouble. Used as motive power, or for jobs generally too dangerous or vile for humans, dwarves or even trolls to do, they normally just work continuously, apart from the odd Holy Day. But something has gone wrong. Could a Golem be killing people? Surely not!

Meanwhile in the Watch, a new recruit is causing some surprises. And Vimes is getting nicely angry.

All good stuff, as ever, with a very serious meditation on notions like freedom and rights hidden between the jokes.

For instance, Vimes is about as keen on the idea of Kings as his ancestor “Old Stoneface”, who executed the city’s last king:

Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.

But we also learn some useful vocabulary. For instance, it would appear that the dwarfish for dwarfish is

Sh’rt’azs

Just try saying it out loud.

And while the guild leaders are plotting, we have this little discussion on Vetinari:

“He does have all street-theatre players and mime artsits thrown into the scorpion pit,” said Mr Potts of the Bakers’ Guild.
“True. But let’s not forget he has his bad points too.”

Carrot gets frustrated enough to almost swear:

“D*mn!” said Carrot, a difficult linguistic feat.

And of course, the usual game of “spot the reference” can be played. When confronted by the shattered remains of a Golem…

“We can rebuild him,” said Carrot hoarsely. “We have the pottery.”

Oh dear.

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

No change today, but never mind.

You might recall that I had originally planned to do something quite different last Saturday before ending up in Teesside, and that I mentioned yesterday that I was hoping to go somewhere today. Well, I did what I planned. I took the Metro to Seaburn, and this time turned left and headed north along the coast. There’s a coastal path which offers a lovely view of the coast, though it wouldn’t be pleasant on a wet and windy day. My target was to get as far as Souter Lighthouse[1], which I haven’t visited in a long time. It looks just as lovely as it ever did:

Souter Lighthouse

Today’s walk was the first serious outing for the Fujifilm X-E1, and involved a lot of swapping between the 18-55mm and 55-200mm zoom lenses. Both performed well, and swapping is a lot easier to do with a smaller and lighter camera than I’ve been used to. But I don’t want to neglect the lovely X100S, so I brought it along with the infrared filter and took a few shots, such as this rather spooky view of the lighthouse:

Ghostly Lighthouse

I stopped at the lighthouse for a sandwich and a pot of tea[2] then walked a little further north to Marsden Rock. This is a rather large outcrop, which used to be more impressive before the natural arch collapsed and somebody decided that the smaller stack was in danger of collapsing too, and so they demolished it. Shame. It’s still quite impressive, and is home to a lot of birds:

Marsden Rock

The people give you an idea of the size of the rock. I did contemplate going down to beach level, but decided to leave that for another day rather than inflict thousands[3] of steps on myself. While in the vicinity, I spotted this little thing, which the X-E1 captured quite nicely:

Microlite

I did crop that one down quite a lot, but it’s a promising sign of what I might manage to capture at this year’s Sunderland Air Show.

At that point, I decided not to walk any further. According to Garmin, that was just over five and a half miles, which isn’t bad. Evidence here:

Sunday Walk

I waited about ten minutes for a bus into South Shields, then got the Metro back to Gateshead, where I stopped to have a look at a bit of activity. I’d heard that the High Street had been closed, and guessed that this was probably for the final tower crane to be removed. I was right, as you can see here:

Now that’s a big crane

I took a few more pictures and waited a few minutes until the cab was disconnected and lowered to the ground:

Who’s driving?

And then I came home.

[1] Hi Sherry! 
[2] Earl Grey. Hot.
[3] Possible exaggeration

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

While we’re waiting for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special in November, there’s time to catch up on some of the classic DVDs that have come out in recent months. This one was first shown from January to March 1971, and is the second story to feature the Master. There’s a bit of a pattern to the 1971 Master stories: Master teams up with an alien force in an attempt to take over Earth/the Galaxy/the Universe, it all goes a bit wrong and the Doctor sorts it out, but the Master escapes. And this one’s no exception.

This time, he’s posing as Professor Keller, and claims to have invented a machine that can remove all the violent impulses from a man. In rather dubious circumstances, it’s being tested on hardened criminals at Stangmoor Prison. Apparently in the 70s, background checks and the like were considered optional. As you might expect, the machine actually contains a lethal alien mind parasite, which quite naturally gets out of control and threatens everyone. As if that wasn’t enough, the Master is using all this as  a distraction for his main game – stealing an illegal chemical missile that for reasons of, err, reasons, is being transported for destruction while a delicate peace conference is going on. His Terrible Plan[1] is to set it off, kick off a world war and take over what’s left afterwards. This doesn’t seem too wise, as his Tardis can’t go anywhere because the Doctor borrowed a vital component in the previous story, Terror of the Autons.

Lots of the usual fun and games follow, with Deadly Peril from the Keller Machine, prison riots, rescues in the Nick of Time, and so on. All good fun, if a bit stretched over six episodes.

The main extra to be enjoyed here is the fact that it’s in colour at all. The first episode had no colour data at all, and was recoloured by a more manual process than normal, while the remainder had the now quite standard but clever process of recovering colour data from black and white copies. Err, something like that. There’s stuff there, apparently.

Other items, apart from the commentary, photo gallery and information subtitles, include:

• The Military Mind It’s a sign of how long it’s taken to get this story into presentable form that this making of documentary was made in 2009. This does mean that it benefits from the presence of producer Barry Letts and Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney as well as the other usual suspects.
• Now and then Looking at how the locations have changed in the last forty years. In the case of Dover Castle, which played the prison, not very much, really.
  
• Behind the Scenes: Television Centre A 1971 piece on how things worked at BBC Television Centre. Nicely historical.

[1] Most of his plans are like that. Really, really terrible…

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

Down again today, good stuff. I had sort of planned an outing for today, but the weather forecast suggested that my plan might involve me getting rained on in a location with not a lot of shelter, so I decided to postpone that to tomorrow. I did have a brief visit to the MetroCentre, where I looked at some stuff, but didn’t buy anything significant. I then went into Newcastle, where I looked at some other stuff and didn’t buy that, either. Then I went home, and then popped out to Tesco’s for the second time today, where I bought some bubble wrap and a box. And when I got home, I packed my Canon 5D Mark III into the box, ready for it to depart early next week. Yes, I’m following through with my decision to Fujify myself. The camera is going to be bought by those nice WEX Photographic people (or Warehouse Express as I still think of them) for a reasonable amount. They’ve offered me a bit less than I could potentially get on eBay, but as the eBay thing would involve eBay charges, PayPal charges, courier charges and potential hassle, the WEX offer seems like a good deal. All I have to do now is start selling the lenses…

Here are a couple more photographs which go some way to explaining why I’m quite happy to move on from big and heavy DSLRs to dinky little mirrorless Fujifilm cameras. This is the top bit of the Swing Bridge, as seen from the Tyne Bridge. I’ve cropped this, but not done a lot else:

Swing Bridge

And from a nearby location, here’s the clock on the Guildhall:

Is it that time already?

And the Fujifilm results can only get better as I (a) get more lenses once WEX pay for the 5D and (b) get more practice with a quite different kind of camera. Some serious wide angle stuff will follow…

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

Hmmm, up again today. And that’s a morning weight, as the evening figure would have been adversely affected by the wee drinkie I may have accidentally had after a late finish at work. I had a bit of a walk at lunchtime with the Fujifilm X-E1 and the 55-200mm lens which arrived this morning. At the long end, that lens is the equivalent of 300mm on a full-frame camera like the Canon 5D Mark III, but in a delightfully light form. Here’s a picture taken from the Tyne Bridge:

Watching

That’s been cropped down to concentrate on the pigeons, and given minor tweaking in Lightroom. This one needed a bit more work – it’s a closer crop, and adjustments have been made to reduce some excess brightness. It’s also been cropped a lot.

Do you like butter?

Just showing that long lenses aren’t just for things at a distance…

Here’s the walk (if you click the map you’ll see the fascinating distance details)

Friday Walk

More photos to come!

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

What? Another episode in the Great Terry Pratchett Re-read-athon already? Well, I did say I had a bit of a backlog, and this is where I catch up with my reading so far.

Maskerade picks up the story of the Lancre witches. Well, two of them. Magrat is far too busy Queening to work with Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, and that’s a problem. You need three witches to work together properly, and without that third witch to moderate her, Nanny’s concerned that Granny’s power could force her in on herself and lead her to become something like the notorious Black Aliss, who before some damn kids stuffed her into her own oven was the kind of witch who

turned people into gingerbread and had a house made of frogs

The witches decide that a local girl called Agnes Nitt is the ideal candidate. Agnes prefers to be known as Perdita X, and has gone to Ankh-Morpork to become an opera singer, which leads us into the main theme of the book. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, The Phantom of the Opera with the knobs turned up to, ooooh, about 152.

More fun is involved with the slight problem of Nanny Ogg’s book which has been published in Ankh-Morpork. It includes some of her more, err, interesting recipes, and has been selling rather well. Granny thinks that Nanny is owed rather more than the three dollars she’s been given, and this prompts the witches to go to the city. This is, of course, a Cunning Plan on Nanny’s part to get Granny to meet Agnes Perdita and recruit her.

At the opera house, amongst many other extreme characters, Agnes (OK, I’ll stop doing the name thing now) meets Walter Plinge, a young man who is quite blatantly Frank Spencer. And much fun follows. There’s the Opera Ghost who’s quite harmless, apart from killing a few people, a mystery in the cellars, more confusion and misdirection than the average opera and as you might guess, it really isn’t over until… well, you’ll need to read that bit for yourself, won’t you?

I’ll give a small selection of quotes to give a bit of a flavour of the book. Nanny admits to Granny that her recipes might not be altogether innocent

“Weeelll, they starts out as Maids of Honour,” said Nanny, fidgeting with her feet, “but they ends up as Tarts”

When the witches first meet the publisher of the book, Granny insists that Nanny should be paid.

“She wants a little bit of money for every book you’ve sold.”
“I don’t expect to be treated like royalty, said Nanny.”

Grone, etc. It’s been clearly established that Granny rarely uses actual magic, and that much of her power comes from the use of headology. It’s important to understand that this isn’t the same thing as psychaiatry:

A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a large and terrible monster, will endeavour to convince him that monsters don’t exist. Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

But the best bit is Granny talking about how she can’t do Bad…

“The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong, you can’t do Wrong. you just can’t do it and live. So… if was a bad witch …”.

She mentions some of the things she might do if she was bad, then gives a chuckle. And happily sets off to do what’s best. Which is not something you want to get in the way of at all.

All good stuff, and some quite serious signs of Granny’s growing power, which is always fun, so long as you’re not in the way of it. And you’ll never look at opera the same way again. You might think it’s all a bit silly, but it’s much sillier than that…

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

Up again today, mutter, mutter.

I’ve had another look at the photographs I took in London, and done a bit of tweaking. This is an edit of the raw file version of the front of St Pancras which was included as an untouched JPG in Tuesday’s report[1]. I’ve made the shadows lighter, the highlights darker, and generally twiddled a bit to show rather more detail:

St Pancras Revisited

And this is a view of some construction work. I liked the forest of cranes set against the sky:

Going up!

[1] Any suggestion that Tuesday’s report was retrospectively posted on Wednesday will be unconvincingly denied, of course.

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.

It’s time to start catching up with the Great Terry Pratchett Re-read-athon. I’ve got two books on the desk ready to post about, and I’m about halft way through the next one, so I’d better get on with it.

Interesting Times features the return of Rincewind, and is a sequel to The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Some time has passed, and Twoflower (that tourist who caused Rincewind so many adventures) has returned home to the Agatean Empire, which can best be thought of as a Chinese culture with the knobs turned up to about 35. It’s a strictly regulated cultured, ruled by the usual warring families and so on and so forth. In order to keep things strictly controlled, a suitably evil leader wants to have a dangerous opposition to suppress, and works quite hard to create one. This being the Discworld, this doesn’t go too well.

However, copies of Twoflower’s memoir of his trip are circulating and inspiring a lot of people with tales of “The Great Wizzard”. And so, the Empire demands that the “Great Wizzard” is sent to them. Once it’s realised that the only person who spells wizard that way is Rincewind, he’s magically dragged back from the island he’d been happily marooned on and subsequently sent to the Empire.

And much of the usual fun and games follow. Cohen the Barbarian is back, accompanied by his Horde (a few other octogenarian barbarian warriors and a schoolteacher) and with a Cunning Plan to steal something quite substantial.

We learn some interesting things, like the magical Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which is

Named after the wizard Sangrit Heisenberg, and not after the more famous Heisenberg who is renowned for inventing what is possibly the finest lager in the world.

Cohen tells Rincewind about how rule-driven the Empire is, to the point that you can’t go to the privy without a piece of paper…

“Well, as a matter of fact I myself -”
“A piece of paper saying they can go, is what I mean. Can’t leave your village without a chit. Can’t get married without a chit. Can’t even have a sh- Ah, we’re here.”

As Rincewind’s arrival in the Empire involved him arriving at high speed, not to mention a canon disappearing at the same time, people were quite impressed:

“I saw him, I tell you! A legion of soldiers collapsed with the wind of his passage!”
The wind of his passage was beginning to worry Rincewind as well. It always tended to when he was frightened.

And sooner or later, it had to come. Rincewind, who never could do actual magic, is put in a position where he has to cast a spell:

Quanti canicula illa in fenestre

Which would seem to be something about asking the price of a small dog on display in a shop. Or “how much is that doggy in the window?”, perhaps. Waggliness of tail not specified.

As always, lots of jokes, lots of silliness, and the usual mix of serious points being sneaked in. Good fun, and it’s always a joy to have Rincewind back.

©2013 Les Bessant. All Rights Reserved.