Great Manchester Run, Big Wheel and Little Fishies, and The Rapture

Last Sunday Yol and I took part in the BUPA Great Manchester Run, a 10K road race with around 38000 participants, and we were raising money for our charity of choice, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. We managed to raise over £400, for which we would like to thank each and every one of our sponsors! I didn't take my camera on the run, but we did snap a quick photo after the race, back in our hotel room, with our newly acquired medals:



We ran the race together, it was our first time over that distance, and we crossed the finish line hand in hand with a time of 1 hour, 37 mins, and 20 seconds. No record by any stretch, but it's something we're both proud of personally! We've already signed up to take part in next year's run, and we're aiming to obliterate that time. If anyone would like to donate to this year's Run fundraising, our Justgiving page is open until the middle of August - many thanks!

As the run took place in the middle of the day on the Sunday, we'd booked ourselves into a hotel for the Saturday and Sunday nights, which gave us a little 'tourism time' on the Monday morning. Echoing the London Eye, the city centre has the Wheel Of Manchester, so we took the camera up into the heavens above the metropolis for some shooting!





You can get some lovely views from the Wheel if the weather is in your favour, so if there are any snappers passing by, I'd recommend it.

After the wheel, we wandered over to the recently refurbished Triangle centre, and in there Yol spotted an opportunity that was too good to miss:




'Silky Feet' in the Triangle is a place were you can get a 'fish pedicure', which involes dangling your feet into a tank of garra rufa fish, who nibble away and leave your feet feeling refreshed. Bottom line is, it tickles like heck! I spent most of the 15 minutes giggling like a schoolgirl. Not my finest moment, but it did feel good afterwards!

The full set of photos from our Manchester weekend can be seen on Flickr here.

US evangelist Harold Camping had predicted that The Rapture would take place at 6pm in each time zone on Saturday May 21 2011 and that "on the first day of the Day of Judgment (May 21, 2011) they will be caught up (raptured) into Heaven because God had great mercy for them."

All over the world, many people had scoffed at this prediction, stating that there was no way that the good and the righteous would be spirited away to Heaven at 6pm on Saturday. 6pm Saturday was also the start time of an extra on-ice session for the Buccaneers, the ice hockey team that I play for, and the start of our session was delayed a little bit because the Coach was Raptured! Here's the proof!:



Enjoy eternal damnation, you unbelievers! ;)

My Flickr page can be seen here, and my Twitter feed can be found here. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Shooting the Heavens, Celestial and Worldly

The wonderful ever-changeable British weather has given me the chance to try my hand at shooting the elements recently, and this past Monday evening I found myself faced with an opportunity that was too good to miss. Sitting on the sofa, watching a DVD with Yol, we heard the first rumble of thunder of the oncoming storm, and sure enough a few minutes later we saw the lightning. Getting a lightning shot is something I've always wanted to try, but it has to be the right kind of lightning - sheet lightning is no good, it has to be forked. So, there on the sofa, I spied forked lightning and knew what I had to do!

It didn't matter that I was dressed only in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. When the opportunity presents itself, you grab your gear and get out there, and that's what I did, pausing long enough to shove my boots on, grab an umbrella and tripod. I set up in the back garden, nice wide lens range (18mm), set the f-stop to something like 22, and set the exposure to 'bulb', which means that I have to stand there with my finger on the button keeping the shutter open.

It is pot luck as to whether you get a lightning strike whilst your shutter is open, and even more luck if it happens to be where your camera is pointing. I was out in the garden for around half an hour, I took around 40 shots, and I got one shot with lightning in, but that one shot was enough!:



The skies over Stoke have proven fertile grounds for my snapping these past few weeks, with the sunsets being particularly photogenic. This one I shot in late April, and the spot in the lower right hand corner of the sun is something that I can't explain. It's not a lens smudge, as it appeared in all of the shots I took that evening in the same place on the sun, regardless of where it was in the frame!:



In this past week, the sunset has been photo-worthy for a different reason, for the effect that the dying of the light has against the sky itself, and the wonderful tones and shades that the clouds adopt as the sun goes down:




Another feature of the heavens that I like to shoot, as you probably already know, is the moon, and this week I found myself with two chances to shoot it in its different phases. I normally shoot the full moon, but this week I took the chance to shoot the crescent moon and the half moon:





The moon never really changes, the face of the moon that we see as it orbits around us doesn't change, which means that when it comes to seeing the detail on the moon, we will always end up seeing the same detail in every shot. But that doesn't stop my fascination with shooting it!

Whether you're a photographer or not, I think it's always refreshing to stop once in a while, take a look around, and drink in the beauty of our skies and beyond. It can be so breathtaking!

My full Flickr profile can be seen here - thanks for looking!

Gardening, Spiders and a Bank Holiday with a Piece of History

The recent glut of Bank Holidays saw people all over the country doing what Britons do best on Bank Holidays, chiefly invading B&Q and attempting to do DIY and gardening. Our household was no different, with Yol deciding that it was time to tackle the garden. Joy of joys.

But even the most mundane of activities (unless you're Alan Titchmarsh and love this stuff) can present a photographer with some opportunities, and these opportunities can sometimes give a little spark of inspiration which leads on to something a little bigger...I'll get to that later!

Gardening isn't a passion of mine by any standard, but Yol seems to enjoy it, so I do my part with a smile (a disguised grimace really) and my very fine hat. The weather was absolutely marvellous, so Lola and Lucy were playing outside whilst we attacked the undergrowth. Lola, being largely white, takes the heat a little better than Lucy, who prefers to find a little shade and chill out:



Sometimes though, she picks the most inopportune places to get some shade and take a nap!:



Clearing the undergrowth and trimming back the neighbour's overhanging bramble bushes disturbs a lot of the local creepy-crawly population, and they take refuge on the walls and the fences giving me a lovely chance to get the macro lens out!:




Whilst we were outdoing the garden, the sky was clear blue, and the vapour trails of the aircraft going over stood out against the heavens. Like all good (and not so good) photographers, I like to keep my cameras close by so that when inspiration strikes, and it struck!



I've always liked the sight of vapour trails across the skies, and with my interest in air shows at the back of my mind, an idea for a Bank Holiday trip turned into a wonderful chance to combine that interest with my photography. May Day Bank Holiday for me was spent at the Manchester Airport Runway Visitors Park:



We spent several hours watching the planes take off and land in the glorious sunshine, snapping away with my range of lenses to see what I could get.







We also went around the static displays, snapping away inside a parked-up Trident jet which gave me a chance to try some lower-light detail photography:




But the best opportunity came inside the main hangar - the home of G-BOAC, the Concorde. The Airport is home to this icon, this piece of aviation history, and for a small price you can take a tour of this beautiful aircraft, learn a little about its history, and take as many photos as you like. This was too good an opportunity to miss!





I would encourage all photographers, even those with only a passing interest in aircraft, to take advantage of the presence of Concorde, the presence of history, and get your lenses out at the Airport!



My Flickr albums can be seen here. Thanks for reading!