…because there’s a duck nesting in my garden again!

The first year we had ducks nesting we were like concerned parents. We’d be constantly checking to see if she was OK, wondering if we should put water and food out, on the look-out for cats all the time, panicking if she’d left the nest and hoping she was coming back and just generally worrying. Since this is the third year now we’re a lot more laid back about the process. We just leave her to get on with it. She knows what she’s doing and she doesn’t need us to do anything other than stay out of her way.

In fact the only thing we need to do is keep an eye out for when the chicks hatch since there’s no way for them to get out of the garden unless we leave the gate open! Shouldn’t be long now.

Since I made the switch from blogging platform Movable Type to Wordpress last year I’ve never looked back. Not only is it easier to customise the theme, easier to extend the platform itself in any way you can imagine and has an enormous user and developer community, but every version just gets better and better. The most recent release - 2.5 - comes with a completely redesigned administration section among a host of other cool things. Since everybody hates change (we all get used to doing something in a certain way and learning to do things differently is painful) there were quite a lot of negative comments about the redesign initially, but these have quickly quietened down - and I have no doubt it’s as a result of the user experience being a hell of a lot better. It’s amazing how a piece of software can make you feel more creative but that’s exactly how I feel when I log into my installation of Wordpress.

Anyway, I thought I’d take a moment to explain a couple of changes I’ve made to the layout of this site and how easy they were to implement in Wordpress. Firstly, snippets. You may notice some posts that instead of having a big banner with the title, the date underneath, the post itself and a link to the comments at the bottom, they have a blue bar to the left, no big banner and… Well, in short they look like this:

I felt the weight of expectation of my site’s design bear down on me every time I wanted to post something. If all I wanted to do was put up a link to something interesting I could hardly justify writing a full article about it and a one-sentence post just looked wrong. So I wouldn’t post. I saw that Matt (that’s Mr. Wordpress to you) creates mini-posts when he wants to say something briefly so I pretty much copied his layout (I hope he doesn’t mind)! What is it Picasso said? Good artists copy, great artists steal…

Next, I’ve wanted to post more of my photos to this site rather than over on Flickr but have never had a really neat way to do it. I had on my to-do list “investigate or write a photo gallery app” for ages. Well, fortunately Wordpress 2.5 supports image galleries and I could finally get my wish! Out of the box the image galleries don’t do much but since Wordpress is endlessly extensible it didn’t take me long to display a gallery as a single image with a description and link that takes you to the actual photos:

Each photo is a post in its own right so can have a description, has links to the previous and next pictures and can accept comments. It’s simple, effective and all I really wanted out of a photo app. Since Wordpress reads the EXIF information of all the photos I upload (that’s all the data your camera sets in the picture file like the shutter speed, date, time, etc.) then in time I can change my design to show more details about them as well as other related photos. In fact with only a few tweaks to my templates I could pretty much replicate your average Flickr photo page. Not that I will mind, I want to keep it simple and not spend all night every night redesigning my site!

Anyway, with Wordpress I was able to make these changes quite easily and only required a few lines of code added to my template. And the really cool thing is that whereas in my old Movable Type days (note that I used MT3 and MT4 is now available so my knowledge is out of date somewhat) if I had an idea for a way to change my site I’d likely give up as it would require a lot of investigation and work to get it implemented, but it feels like with Wordpress I can turn an idea into reality in less time than it took to write this article. Which in the case of snippets and photo albums is absolutely true.

Despite being ridiculously busy lately I’ve managed to find some time to work on my beloved John’s Background Switcher. I was originally going to leave it for a bit then over the Summer work on version 4 with some wholesale changes and major improvements. Then I had a few ideas and started fixing bugs and implementing some of these ideas and thought I may as well spend a few weeks putting together an interim release (which I’ll call 3.4). I’ve been working on features like this effect:

[Originals t-l to b-r: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19]

One of the coolest features of the previous version was Snapshot Scrapbook mode that made your desktop look like you’d thrown a bunch of Polaroid snaps onto it. I’ve built on this by adding the option to change the size of each snap (meaning you can get more on your screen - which is much better it turns out). I’ve also added a new option I’ll call ‘Postcard’ mode - which you can see above (this one’s a selection of ‘Interesting’ photos from Flickr over the last 7 days). I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty slick effect and again you can change the size of each photo to decide how many photos you want on each screen. While I may not be getting the time to go out and take landscape photos just now, at least I’m able to write some software that lets me appreciate other people’s!

In a week or two (if you’re a Windows user - I promise one of these days I’ll write a Mac version) - you’ll be able to do the same!

Even though I love my car and would never change it, I sometimes like to look on car sites - like Auto Trader - at what other cars are out there that I’d be tempted to buy were I looking for a new one. I do this knowing I’m not in the market for a new car.

In a similar vein, I sometimes like to look on dating sites - like match.com - to see what single women are in my area that I might be interested in were I in the market for a new woman. I do this knowing I’m not in the market for a new woman.

When I look at different cars I realise that I’m quite happy with the car I have and forget about it. But when I look at different single women I find myself getting a bit depressed - but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t look at all these attractive women thinking “oh no, I’m stuck in a relationship and wish I could try a few of these lovely ladies out for a while - play the field as it were”. Instead I feel sad that so many women are alone, looking for love, pouring their hearts out in their profiles, trying to find a decent man to share their lives with. Frankly, I can see why some of them are single from reading what they’ve written and some of the scary pictures of themselves. But the vast majority, through bad luck or some as-yet unspecified personality defect (like the common “attracted to bad boys but are surprised when they treat them badly” effect), find themselves alone and rather relying on chance (which is like playing the lottery - only less fun), try to find the man of their dreams through dating sites.

I would often wonder why these women can’t find decent men. Take me as an example. I like to think of myself as a decent guy and nothing special (the bravado and ego on this site is just for my own amusement you know). A lot of these girls are into the outdoors, hiking, travelling, talking, laughing, that sort of thing. Well hey, I’m into all of those things! Someone with a winning personality and a sensitive side to them? C’est moi! A guy who likes romantic nights in, cooking, is laid back and easy going? That’s me! Someone who likes nights out on the town, eating in romantic restaurants and is a highly motivated go-getter who loves life? That’s me too! So if I can fit the bill and am reasonably good looking (well, according to my mother - God rest her soul), then surely there must be loads of guys out there that qualify too and these girls will have no problem.

Well, it turns out that the old saying is true: a good man is hard to find.

I decided to enlist my good lady’s help in researching this one so that it was fair and balanced. You see while I’m attracted to women, I’m not at all attracted to men - so I needed assistance from someone who is. First I showed her all the women that match my criteria - i.e. they live within 25 miles of my house, are single and aged 25-35. We found loads of girls that both my lass and I agreed were attractive (she knows the sort of girls I like), who from their profiles seemed really nice and we agreed I’d get on really well with. Easy. Loads of choice.

We then swapped the criteria over and searched for men within 25 miles of my house who are single and aged 25-40 (since women like older men I thought we’d widen the net slightly). There were pages and pages of them alright and you know what? My good lady spotted one that looked “OK”. The rest were either terrifying to look at (both eyes pointing in different directions for example), sounded terrible on their profiles and quickly convinced you you’d never want to meet them or both! We concluded that there are loads of eligible women out there, but just a handful of decent guys (if that).

The nice thing about not being in the dating game is that you can play it out in your head and imagine how easy it would be. Here I am, a decent guy who’d stand out a mile on a dating site. I’d have attractive women fighting each other to take me out. I could be really picky and choose the absolute perfect woman for me. We’d get together, be happy and live happily ever after! Of course I can remember from my own barren days of being single that it doesn’t work that way at all. But it’s nice to not have to find out!

Playing quite a lot of football as I do I’m forever picking up knocks, bruises and strains. I don’t mind really as that’s part of the fun, although I’m sure some people think I suffer from spousal abuse with all the bruises I get!

Anyway, my ankles seem to take more of a battering than anything else - I guess when you mis-time a tackle and get the man instead of the ball it’s their ankle that you’re most likely to tread on. Sometimes I’d have to strap up my ankle for the next few times games and sometimes I’d have to miss games altogether until it got better. But then a friend of mine gave me some great advice about dealing with ankle injuries - although he warned me that it’s a bit painful. Since it’s been such a successful treatment for me I thought I’d mention it here in case you’ve hurt your ankle stepping off a pavement / playing football / mud wrestling / Scots country dancing / doing some other activity.

So, here’s how to get a speedy recovery from an ankle strain or mild sprain. I like to call it the “Ice Bucket Treatment”:

1. Fill up a bucket or basin with cold water and as much ice as you can get your hands on.
2. Get yourself a towel (handy for all occasions).
3. Plunge your foot into the bucket until it goes numb (this should take a few minutes and you’ll know when it is because the agonising pain will have stopped - see right).
4. Take your foot out, dry it and wait for it to warm up again.
5. Repeat from step 3 several times until the ice has pretty much melted.

If you do this for a few nights after your injury you’ll be surprised how much more quickly it recovers than if you just left it alone.

One thing to warn you of is that step 3 really is surprisingly painful. My good lady made the mistake of telling me she’d hurt her ankle and having laughed at my suffering many times doing the ice bucket treatment I suggested she give it a try. The first thing she did after putting her foot in the bucket was to take it out again followed by uttering an expletive about how cold it was. I told her to put it back in and keep it there until it went numb - which she duly did. However the poor thing had tears streaming down her face from the pain as she did it so in the end we agreed that maybe the ice bucket treatment wasn’t for her. She doesn’t find it as amusing when I do it now so it wasn’t a total loss!

Ice baths are commonly used by professional athletes after training sessions and games / races to good effect but I don’t fancy filling up a wheelie bin with water and ice after every game thank you very much - however don’t let that stop you if you have your own ice machine!

This is the tenth in a series of articles discussing some of the photography techniques I’ve learned and employ when I’m out on a shoot.

One of the things photography has done to me is make me look at everything. Until I started taking photographs whenever I’d walk somewhere I’d pretty much be looking at the road / path / bracken in front of me all the way there. I’d take the odd glance around me from time to time to look out for cars / cattle / bracken but that would be about it.

But going out taking photos means looking for something to take pictures of. This is an incredibly obvious statement but bear with me. Instead of looking at what’s in front of me I now look at every little detail. I don’t just see a hill in the distance and a river in front of me, I see the way the light falls on the hill in the background, the shadows, the texture of the grass in the middle ground, the reflected scene in the river, I look for any possible leading lines, anything in the foreground I can use as a point of interest and a host of other things that might make for an interesting picture.

When I started out I’d wander around pointing my camera at random things and really struggle to get anything decent. However after a few trips with my friend Ade I learned the great lengths he goes to to make a great picture out of what he can see. He’ll crawl around on his hands and knees searching for different angles, make inanimate objects you’d usually ignore into the centrepiece of a beautiful shot and even when driving along a road he’s looking in every direction for a picture (I pity anybody stuck behind him as he has a tendency to throw the car off the road and go taking snaps with no warning).

This habit has rubbed off on me to the point that when I walk down a street I’m automatically looking at all the buildings, the roof lines, the pattern of the pavement (if there is one) and if any street furniture lines up. If I’m on the hills I’m looking for leading lines from fences, ruts made by tractors, trees, sheep, anything. And I’m always on the lookout for good light - which can turn an OK shot into a great shot. Even if I’m out with my camera feeling uninspired I challenge myself to make a shot out of what I can see - even if it’s just a dry stone dyke and some weathered trees. Especially when it’s a dry stone dyke and some trees!

For example, I went out the other evening just before sunset as I could see the light was really good. With tripod and camera in hand I walked along the canal from my house and tried to get something interesting. The light was indeed great but the large number of pylons sort of spoiled the view so I only got a few OK shots. But as I walked back along the road to my house - eyes everywhere - I noticed the sun line up with the top of a barbed wire fence and snapped this shot, which I rather like:

There’s no particular technique to looking out for something to photograph - it’s just about persistance. I find that if I make a point of keeping my camera out, ready to take a picture of something, it encourages me to keep looking. If it’s packed away in its bag over my shoulder there’s that bit more effort getting it out and setting it up so I tend not to bother.

So go out with your camera, it doesn’t have to be anywhere interesting and could be somewhere you’ve been a hundred times before. But try and take a picture you’ve never taken before. Try and make something interesting out of what’s in front of you instead of just putting the camera to your eye and clicking the shutter. Take your time and look around all the time. It means you have to walk slower but that’s fine, photography isn’t something you should rush.

Next: Low Light Photography.