Breakout

The purist in me says this is neither photography nor painting and, if it can't make up its mind what to be, then it's just a bastard child trying on names it doesn't deserve. Maybe.

But the truth is I like it; in places the camera shows through and in others, details are brushed aside in a smear of colour. I find the net result quite compelling as though the idea of the landscape is trying to break out into its own reality.

Sleeping in a silo

 Whether it's the prairies of Alberta or the 'metropolis' of Little River, silos have long been recognised as a potential place to take shelter - provided that is, no one is about to empty or fill your selected silo. There is no chance of that happening with the Little River silos - they have been kitted out specifically for the traveller. This last weekend we spent our first night in a silo.

Downstairs

Upstairs

As a fun place for a stop-over,  the silos are well worth a visit but I thought them somewhat impractical for a longer stay. Nevertheless, they were well maintained, clean and tidy, and there is a well-stocked cafe is right next door, run by the same people who also run the art gallery.

No, the silos aren't bent - all taken with a fisheye lens - quirky, just like the silos.

OldFord

OldFord, that's been my Geocaching name for as long as, and an appropriate description for this very tidy yellow Model A, found sitting in Oxford's Main Street this weekend. A busy Sunday Main Street hardly provides a great background, especially with an all-encompassing fish-eye lens but, dialing back the realism into the interpretative zone, produced something that I found quite pleasing in an illustrative, comic-booky sort of way.

Cosmic Surfer

My first fractal for a while and my first on the new PC. I recognised the Cosmic Surfer as soon as I saw her on the screen; it was just a case of drawing her out from the mathematical mist. When rendering fractals, I am used to it taking hours, sometimes many hours, so when I saw the number '8' in the 'time remaining' I thought, 'eight hours; I'll let it run over night' - only it wasn't 8 hours, it was 8 minutes - oh the joy of a processor with 4 physical and 8 virtual cores!

Last August I wrote about the ease of upgrading to Windows 10 and how, in my view, it was the sweetest Windows upgrade ever. Well, that was nothing compared to Windows 10 on a new PC. Unconstrained by legacy decisions about which storage devices things should live on, Windows 10 looks neater and tidier than it did as an upgrade. And it does what an operating system is supposed to - gets out of the way and lets you get on with actual work. In fact, working on the new PC makes me feel a bit like the Cosmic Surfer.

Shelter from the storm

A stormy day, an abandoned house and Irene, my infrared camera. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out; usually, IR photography is a sunny day activity for me, but the subject caught my eye and the false colours add an 'other worldly' look to what would otherwise have been a rather drab scene.