A Geek in Lockdown
What’s a geek to do to keep the world turning?
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Caithness Holiday Day 5: Badbea Clearance Village
An unusual choice of place to visit on the last day of one’s holidays, but an important monument to Highland/Caithness history nonetheless, and one ideally suited to a bleak cold foggy day, too. Forced off the land as part of the Highland Clearances, people from the surrounding areas (Ousdale, Auchencraig) sought refuge at Badbea. Not the […]
Around Binnend
After serendipitously discovering a lot of heritage information about the abandoned former village of Binnend, on The Binn outside Burntisland in Fife, I spent much of Sunday afternoon exploring the area. It was smaller than I expected from the maps – about 30x30m or so – and very overgrown. The central region is a mix […]
Morvern 3/4: In Search of Purity
Time to explain the motivation for this excursion to the Morvern peninsula. A few months ago, I was exploring what Google Earth had to show for the West coast of Scotland. A lot of photographers gravitate toward the north-west, around Sutherland, and rightly so – the geography up there is impressive. However, coming a little […]
Landscape, Photography and Land Management
This is going to be a long post, drawing on several disparate areas of experience and interest. Welcome to my mind… Photographic Influence The Highlands are not like 18th-century Venice. On driving around – which you can do around here – the landscape is raw, rugged, elemental, positively harsh on a cold day. We do […]
Hogmanay 2016/2017
Happy new year! I saw the year in from Blackford Hill looking at the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle. Watching folks arrive was almost like a scene from Lord of the Rings – this line of torch lights processing along the hillside track, reminiscent of the last march of the Elves.
Cultybraggan Camp
Another set from a photo-excursion in May this year, directly contrasting with the pleasure of nature’s bluebells earlier in the day. Cultybraggan is situated just outside village of Comrie. It was first used as a prisoner of war (PoW) camp during World War II and then became an Army training area before housing a Royal […]
Too-Big Data? That don’t impress me much
On a whim, I spent the evening in Edinburgh at a meetup presentation/meeting concerning Big Data, the talk given by a “Big Data hero” (IBM’s term), employed by a huge multinational corporation with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies (including the UK Welfare system). I think I was supposed to be awed […]
Festive spirit
A carpark in central Leeds, one Sunday morning during Christmas 2014. Which serves the public better – a traffic warden ticketing cars or the gritting of road and pavement so folks could walk safely along?
Perth Winter Festival: Stories (2)
Continuing the theme of things I saw on my travels around Perth one Saturday afternoon – this time, some rather more classical / stereotypical street-photography subjects in gritty black and white.