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Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

Flower bed in Ikebukuro

Posted in from the dark room, photography on February 12, 2008| 8 Comments »

brassica

Isn’t this an interestingly different flower bed in the middle of the busy Ikebukuro district of Tokyo?

flower bed ikebukuro

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A view of the hills

Posted in from the dark room, photography on February 11, 2008| 4 Comments »

I like to look out onto the hills every morning. You’ve maybe seen some of my photos that I’ve taken from my living room windows. In Tokyo, it’s not so easy to see the hills but when I looked really to the side out of my hotel room window, I could see them. Oh, yes, there they are!

hills beyond tokyo

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The home of electronics?

Posted in from the dark room, photography on February 9, 2008| 2 Comments »

As the sun set over Tokyo I snapped this photo of the coppery-reddish sunlight illuminating this office block. It looked like a massive silicon chip or computer motherboard and, somehow, I thought that was really apt.

office ikebukuro

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Sky high window cleaning

Posted in from the dark room, photography on February 8, 2008| 2 Comments »

I looked out of the window of my 18th floor hotel room in Tokyo and saw these guys cleaning the windows.

I loved the glass, the reflections and the sight of the two men perched up there…..I wonder how long it takes them to clean ALL those windows?

windowcleaning

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Human beings – wired for change!

Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography on January 19, 2008| 3 Comments »

herd of elephants
I’ve been to game reserves in South Africa a few times. I tell you, until you’ve been yourself, you’ve no idea how difficult it is to spot an elephant or a giraffe! Seriously! Huge big animals but in their natural habitat, really they’re not easy to spot. What gives them away? Movement. As you scan the bush, or a plain, or a hillside, the first thing which will catch your eye is a movement. If they stay stock still, they might be only yards away but you won’t see them till the last minute.
traffic jam of elephants
giraffe parent and child
zebra
rhino
tiny deer

Many animals are good at detecting scent change. The slightest whiff of a predator, or a human being, arriving on the scene and they pick it up.

Another example of how we give priority to change detection is noise. I’m sure you’ll have had the experience of a background noise suddenly stopping and it’s only at that moment when it ceases that you become aware it was even there. You notice it when it goes away, not when it stays the same.

Change impacts on us. It catches our attention. A recent study has examined this phenomenon and interestingly shows that we are much better at detecting auditory changes than visual ones. I’m not sure that holds true for everyone. One of the things that NLP teaches is how we have different processing preferences – by that they mean that some of us are especially good at processing visual information, others auditory, and yet others, kinesthetic. From what I can see the researchers who produced this study didn’t make any allowances for that.

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Local hero – Wallace

Posted in from the dark room, life, photography on January 18, 2008| 2 Comments »

One of the most frequently viewed posts on this blog is my photograph of Stirling Castle and Wallace Monument. As you might imagine, both of these structures sitting atop hills looking over the town of Stirling, have made a big impression on me over the years. I was born here, worked here in the local hospital in my training years and have returned to live here in recent years. You’re probably familiar with the Wallace, who the monument commemorates, either from history lessons, or from the movie, Braveheart. (Mel Gibson doesn’t look a bit like the real Wallace by the way!).

In the middle of the town of Stirling is a cobbled street that climbs a steep hill to the Castle. The first part is called “King Street” and at the top of King Street is this statue

Wallace

As you’ll see from the carved writing, this is Wallace. If you look a little more carefully, you can see a few words in Latin – “nemo me impune lacessit”. It’s the motto of Scotland and translated into Scottish it says “Wha daur tangle wi me!” (roughly in English that means “Don’t mess with me!”)

Have you a local hero? Have you a motto?

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An ocean of memories

Posted in creativity, life, photography, writing on January 7, 2008| 4 Comments »

A mind like the sea

Atlantic

Imagine life is like a ship sailing over the ocean. Every experience you have makes a mark on the sea. As you travel through the world you leave a wake behind you, a white foam, a swell and a pattern of waves. These are your short term memories. If you look back behind you, you’ll see traces of what you’ve just done, of where you’ve just been, but the wake doesn’t last long. It soon dissipates and settles and becomes indistinguishable from the surface of the ocean again. But some experiences are heavier. They make a bigger impact and they leave objects floating on the water. The flotsam and jetsam of daily experience, lasting longer than a wake, but still floating away, scattered, unanchored. Memories like little fragments of material, boxes, or bottles, washed white in the sea and the sun. Possibly to be recovered some day when they come floating by again, or because you find them lying, unexpectedly, on a desert island somewhere, or someone else picks them up and brings them back to show you. Some sink deeper below the surface and turn into fish or sea creatures with a life of their own, coming up near the surface from time to time, flashing silver or rainbow colours in the water as they swim by. Some become sharks and scare you every time their fins break the surface of the conscious sea. Some become dolphins or whales and leap up joyfully and thrillingly. You can go looking for some of them if you know where they live. Some sink even deeper and become coral and wrecks on the deep sea bed, rusting, encrusting, growing and changing ever so slowly, imperceptibly. You only find them if you dive for them.

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The shape of water

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

16 in 1

If you look here, you’ll be able to see a short slide show of a single wave. Well, what is a “single” wave actually? What I did was set the camera to continuous take and held the button for a wee bit.
What I love is the constant change. Yet even within that constant change we can see something that seems to remain the same and name it – a wave………..somehow, like a piece of water, (if there ever could be such a thing). Life’s like this, isn’t it? We’re like this, aren’t we? Constantly changing, shifting, growing, moving, yet having something I can name and know as “me”….

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Christmas decorations in Paris

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 30, 2007| 2 Comments »

fountain lights paris

fountain lights paris

fountain lights paris

fountain lights paris

fountain lights paris

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What a library!

Posted in from the dark room, photography on December 29, 2007| 5 Comments »

A couple of days ago I visited the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

bnf

bnf

bnf

bnf

What an amazing and immense building! You’ll see it’s composed of four great L-shaped towers, one at each corner of a garden space and all connected by long corridors. I went when the library opened at 10 in the morning and the queues of readers were already huge. By the time I was leaving every single reading room was full and there were individual queues of people waiting for spaces in each and every one of them. Very impressive!

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