My Top Photos of 2011

Since my boy was born in June 2010, my photos have been less about eastern European architecture at obscure angles, and more about partially digested carrot. Not as appealing to everybody (though Mrs Tea Set points out that Budapest Bus Station is not exactly gripping material for most either..).

Anyway, in 2011 I took a few non baby related photos, and here are a few of my picks.

The o2 Arena - in the Spring, I went to see a couple of expensive mega prog gigs - The Wall and Rush. This shot of the o2 and surrounding buildings to showcase an entirely modern part of London which could just as well be in Istanbul or Qatar for the stylings.

Boris bikes... I suppose this is in as an editorial shot - a sign of the times where austerity is taking over, and the London commuting public is encouraged to get on their Boris bike as a way of avoiding the horrible Tube and overpriced trains.

Freelance 'gigs' are always a bit bizarre, but earlier this year I was asked to take photos of Handel House for a photo gallery backdrop to the Montreal Tafelmusik chamber orchestra's season. Nuts, but a great opportunity to have a museum to myself and take photos of harpsichords. And also discover the legalities of not being able to show any images of someone else's paintings! Who knew?

London Zoo penguin enclosure had a revamp, as the lovely art deco concrete curves were giving old pengiuns arthritis or something like that. The new enclosure is a big perspex tub which has a viewing gallery in front of it. the penguins swoop around when the zookeepers drop fish in, and the local seagulls go crazy at the same time too.

Sunset over Newquay. Just a nice sky shot from a fun wedding weekend in Cornwall. 

A bicycle in Bruges. Ah yes, the old bicycle against a fairly ugly paint colour wall in Belgium - the Lepki photography of my youth is coming back to me.

The London Shard will be finished this year. There is a better picture to be had here, but this is just a placeholder whilst I get to it - the old British phone box and the largest tower in Europe. 

Tiny birds. Again not a brilliant picture, but one that shows a few tiny birds and a big bird and a bit of focus.

Well on Ukrainian Christmas, my blue and yellow photo from Alberta, Canada is reminiscent of the flag of my ancestors!

Chains and mountains in Canmore - I quite like this empty playground shot. Nothing deeper really.

A bit postcard like this one. The Chinook sculpture, by the Bow in Canmore. I can feel the summer day around this picture.

Sunset over Somers Town - at the end of my time with the Guardian, the sunsets were huge. This one was in my final week as I prepared to move on back to Critical Mass.

Answering the question of how reindeers handle warmer climates - Santa arrives by speedboat in Antigua.

Examples that will come in handy, possibly

Just a few handy bookmarks - not really anything you won;t have seen anywhere else, but useful for me to have in one place.

This is how the BBC is seen as a trusted source of news on some external research

Who needs passports? A Canadian man entered US using an iPad - I tried to use an iPod touch once to pull up some wedding details - UK immigration were not super impressed.

And also, Facebook starting letting you print business cards. The service is through moo.com, who I have used for printing custom cards before and always been very happy with their results.

Gigs Gallery

I updated my Flickr account again, so I thought I would try embedding a photo gallery...

My Completo versus a Boots Meal Deal Sandwich

Check out the measly number of prawns in my Boots Prawn Cocktail meal deal... Made look all the more paltry by delicious bespoke Chilean sandwich of last night...


Boots Meal Deal BLT, Chicken Salad, Prawn Mayo


Completo (Sausages, Guacamole, Onions, Chili Sauce, Mayonaisse, Tomato, Garlic in a freshly baked bun)

Visually Similar

Google Images now enables you to drag and drop an image from one browser, into the Google search box...
the bonkers thing is that it returns 'visually similar' images, as well as letting you know where on the web your picture is from... Spooky, and kind of uselessly funny too... I applied the lepki.com image test...

beer turns into people

train tracks into a roundabout

and a horse turns into a motorbike

not quite figured out the utility just yet, but bonkers work Google...!

Non-disposable camera

I thought my lovely brown Canon Ixus - IS1100 was a goner back in December 2008.

I took it into the Canon repair centre in Calgary on a quiet Tuesday afternoon just before Christmas complaining that the lens didn't open and close like it used to, and that it didn't focus properly any more, despite the fact it was only 8 months old.

"Did you get any sand in the lens sir?"

"No, surely not, I haven't been anywhere near sand..."

On Saturday, after 3 years, and several thousand pictures and videos, amassing Airmiles, Aeroplan points, OnePass Priority points (you get the idea), it looked like the little camera had met its maker in a riverside lunch spot in Kingston Upon Thames.


This made me think about the things this camera had seen... sunrise over frozen over geysers in Bolivia.

Fearless seals on the beaches of islands on the Galapagos

The first wigglings of the feet of my son



as well as a plethora of nerdy time-lapse experiments







Quit repurposing material Lepki - get to the kicker.


I was sort of a little bit excited when I thought I lost my camera that I could justify picking up a new shinier one, that could maybe do more stuff. What stuff? I have no idea, but I never knew I needed time lapse functionality before this camera and I could never have made this (which is possibly my favourite non baby related video).






Once I reflected on the happy days and nights captured with this little dense block of engineering cleverness from Japan, I was reluctant to see it go - nostalgia, Don Draper's carousel...


The moral of the story? Well, none really. Take care with things, for no matter how replaceable everything appears to be, you can get a little bit attached to the idea that you and technology have shared a moment or two.


As it turns out, my camera is safely in an office store room, and so lives on to capture a few more portions of life, and live on good old http://www.lepki.com

my love for my new, old walkman

I recently recovered a box of tapes from my brother's loft a good 5 years after I put them up there, in what looked like it might be the last resting place before landfill.

That landfill has recently claimed a large mass of low quality plastic with the magnetic footprint of low quality comedy abutted with long forgotten weather forecasts.

My rescue of the tapes was primarily to scour those largely unindexed reels of Chrome Dioxide BASF C90s for some old band material to digitise and play on my ipod, but something about the ahem, user experience, made me wonder about the medium and our attitudes to stuff these days.

In order to actually play the tapes, I bought a Sony Walkman, for just over 20 UK pounds.

So, to unbox, what do you get for that these days?

The Walkman unit has a tape player with rewind and fast forward functions. It has bass boost. And there is an FM and AM radio. And a case. And some earphones.

First up, the tapes. I put in one Duracell AA battery, stuck a tape in and bingo, I am back in 1995, as the great Tallgroove jam away. The sound quality is very good given it was recorded on a Bush tape recorder, in the corner of an LS6 bedroom, using the last available plug socket.

The real magic here is that the tape played. It had not been touched for 5 years and sat patiently in a box as Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp, Sonic Stage (yes, I used that as my main player in my Vaio days) and various phone based music applications and tools went through hundreds of builds, moving to and fro around DRM issues wrestling with limited hard disk space, then limitless lossy rates, sluggish store interfaces and the death of Woolworths on the high street. The tape sat patiently, and as soon as it was called for, continued on without missing a beat.

It was not so much an attention span issue, but a surprisingly interjected U2 song which made me first reach for the next track function. Ah! A flaw. I have to "Fast Forward", where the unit forwards, but not that fast.

The Walkman can not send and receieve emails. And I can't play Peggle on it.
On the plus side, I do not need to upgrade the tape playing mechanism and spend hours on blogs trying to identify why version 10.1.4 behaves slightly more idiosyncratically than expected.

The world a tape transports you to is flawed, but curated. Not necessarily always curated with the first compilation for new girlfriend level of detail, but with songs cut off, DJs plugging the Radio 1 roadshow, and traffic updates from days before the M25. Quite a few of these little addenda add the colour to the compilation.

12 songs slid into an iTunes playlist does not cut this level of affection. And what if you only want the reprise of I Am The Resurrection on one compilation, but are looking to fill space on another?

And then you have the attention issue. Track 2 sounds a bit iffy, but rather than skip straight away, the peril of fast forwarding past track 3 means you are more likely to stick it out rather than instantly dismiss material as incorrect from the off due to 200GB more unindexed music on various other portable hard drives.

A case in point, I listened to two Seal songs just in case the me of the 90's had recorded a few chords in the middle of whatever came after Kiss from a Rose on Seal 2.

As well as the tape, you now have the radio. Imagine now, having an untethered free data source with content readily available in any country of the world. Apple would charge you crazy amounts for bandwidth for this service!

So what have I learnt from this... Imagine the prospect of checking your work email on a Walkman back in 1997. Did you really need to? You probably knew all the phone numbers off by heart of the people who you called most often so didn't need to Sync your contacts. Or you had a little book that you kept relatively safe.

There as something of a commodity about a tape - it captured that moment in time, the addenda mentioned earlier, alongside those live gigs taken from the radio, the first play of Love Spreads, and of course, the lovingly crafted adolescent compilation tape.

Eternal love was up for grabs if you could just cram as much appropriate material into that 90 minutes. You could dictate the whole flow and mood of the tape without there being the option to skip over to Facebook and see if any other suitors looking for fun and feeling groovy.

Quite what the end game with my Walkman remains to be seen. The initial novelty will no doubt fade, but then I can  choose to either store the memory in a box in the loft, or tape over it.