I spent the weekend over on the east coast of Yorkshire with a whole bunch of photographers in places like Whitby, Staithes and Robin Hood’s Bay. My friend Ade got to know them from a photography site and they periodically meet up to take photos, talk about photography and kit and drink alcohol! It’s the first time I’ve done something like that and it was a bit strange being in a group of 13 people standing on a beach with tripods, expensive cameras and all the paraphernalia.

It was really good fun though. As well as meeting some real characters it’s interesting to see what shots other people take, how they look at things, what they do with a camera, what’s going through their minds and so on. There were some very talented photographers there and it’s not often you get to pick the brains of that many of them at once!

I took this picture in Staithes and it’s the first one where my girlfriend actually said “wow” when I showed it to her! (Her exact words were: “that’s as close to a wow photo as I’ve seen from you” - these Yorkshire folk don’t give out compliments easily you know). I think I’m going to get it blown up to a decent size and hang it on one of my walls at home.

Anyway, I took more than 300 shots over the weekend which is a lot to go through! It’s going to take me a while to sort through them, decide which ones I like enough to work on and upload them. You can see the set here. Enjoy!

Oh, and note to self: I really need to stop buying more camera kit from ebay and other people - this is going to be an expensive month!

I’ve noticed a lot of people use satellite navigation in cars these days. What I find most surprising is that people use the things while driving along a motorway. For instance, when I last drove up to Scotland I spotted loads of people driving along an empty motorway with their sat-nav telling them to keep driving straight ahead. Great you might think, there’s no way the can get lost, they don’t need to think at all. They just follow the instructions and they’ll arrive with no problems!

Let me tell you a story that illustrates why I find that mentality to be bad. A few years ago an American shopping mall caught fire (I can’t remember which one). When the accident investigators came in they were bewildered by the number of fatalities. There had been plenty of time for people to escape, there were multiple fire exits and really no reason that anybody should have died at all. The answer to why lay in the location of the bodies.

The greatest concentration of bodies was in a restaurant - again with ample means of escape. It turns out that when the fire alarms sounded the staff all ran out of the restaurant to escape. However some of the customers didn’t, they didn’t want to leave until they’d paid their bills - as all good people do - so they were burned alive where they stood. Stupid right?

The fact is that most people follow scripts in their daily lives. Procedures that mean they don’t have to think about what they’re doing - like being on auto-pilot. You go in, get a table, have your drinks order taken, look at the menu, order food, eat it, pay and leave. Social conventions you might say. The problem comes when something unexpected happens. A lot of people freeze, their brains switch off and they have that rabbit-in-the-headlights look about them. They can’t adapt to an unexpected situation and so shut down.

As far as I’m concerned, once you stop thinking you’re a drone. Soldiers are trained to always think on their feet so they can react to situations rather than standing slack-jawed as enemy fire comes in. And so it is with satellite navigation (although to be fair it’s not quite up there with being burned alive in a restaurant waiting to pay).

Navigation isn’t very hard - I’ve never found myself lost and I’ve driven all over the place (well, there was that one time in LA but we got there in the end). When I go somewhere I’ve not been before I make sure I know the route, get a geographical picture in my head so as I’m driving I know where I am. If I were to start using sat-nav I’m sure I’d still get there, but if anything went wrong - like one of the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, a UFO interfered with the signal, the lousy sat-nav broke or there is a road closed ahead and I have to follow a diversion and then it broke - then I’d be far more lost than I would have been without it. I’d have been following what it told me without thinking like a good little boy and my brain would have been slowly turning to mush through inactivity.

If you don’t exercise regularly and just sit around watching TV all the time it’s no surprise that you’ll get tired walking up the stairs and consequently never get any regular exercise and just sit around watching TV all the time. You end up in a rut. If you do the same with your brain and never use it, never challenge it, you’ll spend your whole life as a drone doing what you’re told to do by adverts or articles in glossy magazines. Never thinking for yourself. You’ll be a sheep. Oh wait, that’s what most people do already isn’t it? I think I’m too late…

After a 10 month break my good friend John Topley has finally listened to my persistent nagging and returned to the world of blogging (I still hate the word blogging, can’t anyone think of a better one?).

This time he’s gone with Wordpress as his blogging tool of choice which, if I were to do it all again, is what I’d probably have used. I’m waiting for the next version of Movable Type and if it’s not a big step forward (it’s been a long time since 3.2 was released) then maybe I’ll follow suit and make the switch…

There must be something about blogging, or the people who do it. John, Derren (who also uses Wordpress - they may be on to something) and I are just three people out of a straw poll of three who’ve taken to blogging, lost enthusiasm / interest in it, given up, gone away for a while before being drawn inexorably back in! There is no escape! Mwa ha ha ha!

Hell, next thing you know Mark Pilgrim (who also uses Wordpress) will start blogging again…

I finished work yesterday and went over to Ade’s. In typical Yorkshire fashion the weather’s been wild lately - rain, hail, rain and more rain, with occasional sunny spells. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that it was in fact raining - very heavily!

We decided to go to Ferrybridge power station in the hope that we could beat the storm cloud working its way across the sky. We arrived 20 minutes later and it wasn’t raining! Until we stepped out of the car and the downpour began…

So the three of us were sitting in a car with the windows steamed up next to a power station while it rained torrentially outside looking at the horizon hoping for clear skies. I’m glad no police or spirited members of the local community walked past! Fortunately our waiting paid off, the rain passed and we were treated to some excellent lighting conditions as the sun went down:

So the next time you see a nice photo of a mountain, or a nature program on TV, spare a thought for the poor people who had to sit for hours (sometimes days or weeks) waiting for the right conditions to capture the moment. Having said that, they’ll tell you it was worth it in the end, nothing worth doing is easy!

I just had a look in the folder on my laptop that stores all the photos downloaded from Flickr by my Background Switcher and I was really impressed. No, not by my software, but by the sheer high quality of photos its downloaded over the last few months.

There are 466 photos in there taking up 162MB of hard drive and my switcher’s been either looking at specific groups or the most interesting photos of the current day. There really are some amazing photographers out there and without Flickr I’d never get to see their work and be inspired by what you can do with a camera.

Sure, the internet can make the worst parts of human nature accessible to anyone, but it can also showcase what creative things humans can be. Flickr may just be a piece of software but a paintbrush is just a piece of wood and some hairs stuck together and look what you can do with that!

When I was a kid my mother would always try and catch my dad out on April Fool’s day. She’d wake him up with some piece of surprising news and generally catch him off guard so he’d quite often fall for it. In an ironic twist my brother would also try and catch my mother out - with a pretty high degree of success too!

Trouble is, when truly bizarre things would happen we’d think she was joking. One time she came in and said that a herd of cows was in the garden and we thought she was up to her old tricks but it turned out that a herd of cows really was chewing up our garden! They’d escaped from a nearby field - what are the chances?!

I had a bit of a sleep in this time since I was knackered and was woken up by my girlfriend bursting in at about 10.30 to tell me that one of her friends just texted her say she’d just won £100,000 in premium bonds. The way she spelled it out: “one… hundred… thousand… pounds!” made me realise she believed it, but my brain immediately started looking for reasons it wasn’t true and then it occurred to me it was April the 1st. I told her and the smile dropped a bit as she realised she’d been had, then started laughing. She had already replied to congratulate her friend!

When you lose someone close to you it’s the little things you miss. Sometimes you don’t think about it at all, and then a day like April Fool’s Day comes along and a load of happy memories come flooding back. If I recall correctly my mother actually fell for the BBC’s Spaghetti Trees joke of 1957 so she wasn’t entirely immune to it herself!