A beautifully frosty winter morning to mark the end of the year.
Thanks for putting up with me and my photos for another year!
Here's to 2026.
Thanks to @countryside_joy for phoning me at the crack of dawn to wake me up and encourage me to get out and enjoy the sunrise, I would certainly have remained in bed until at least noon without this provocation; and also for the behind-the-scenes photo in the last frame.
(More after the jump)
Another backup photo today, shot on christmas day when we decamped for a walk.
This field was thoroughly laced with webs, whether spiders' or some other bug, I'm unsure, but it was quite striking when the low sun caught it right.
Fine, moving details like this are often difficult to capture as convincingly as they appear to the eye in the moment, but I think this has come out OK.
A backup photo from a couple of days ago.
I spent quite a lot of the day sorting out a proper place to put the new 3D printer in the workshop - it had initially been occupying a rather large portion of my kitchen worktop, and it was past due for removal to a more appropriate location!
A bit of a smash-and-grab shot as the light was fading, using the fill light built into the front ring of the EF-M 28mm macro lens.
A backup photo, shot a couple of days ago.
I've not felt very photographically inclined today, and haven't taken anything beyond a couple of fairly boring phone pics.
The weather over the last couple of days had been markedly better than forecast a few days ago.
I tried shooting these rather pleasing trees a couple of weeks ago, but wasn't overly happy with the results.
Today, the light and little bit of haze aligned almost perfectly with the look I was hoping for.
I got my EOS M6 Mark II back from a family loan a couple of days ago, so I've been playing with it again.
It's very small and neat in that a remarkably capable little setup with 5 lenses covering ultra-fisheye through to mid telephoto fits into a space roughly equivalent to the R5 with a single lens, but it is comparatively fiddly to use, and the viewfinder feels very low resolution by comparison.
Still a decent little camera though.
Quite pleased with this winter afternoon shot, taken on a post-lunch walk.
A backup photo, shot last week.
Today ended up being fairly busy.
This is a tiny bit of new growth that has appeared in the last few days on a small rose plant that I thought was completely dead.
It very nearly got binned last week, but I thought I'd give it a couple more weeks on the off chance. That appears to have paid off.
This one's a stack of 17 shots at 1.5x magnification.
I went on a rather pleasant misty walk at lunchtime.
We came across another walker who commented "miserable weather" as he passed - this gave us quite a laugh, because the aforementioned weather was the express reason we were out to begin with.
I'm quite pleased with this one, the fog has really helped to isolate the trees from the background, and I thought the punchy black and white treatment suited it.
Thanks to @countryside_joy for the behind-the-scenes photo of me shooting the same trees from a slightly different angle, a couple of minutes before I took this shot (after the jump)
Not the finest of photos today, but a record of my day, nonetheless.
I was running the sound for In Disguise performing at The Dog & Parrot, Eastwood.
Aside from a very minor spot of confusion involving a mis-ordered setlist on my laptop, the gig went rather well, and the audience seemed to be having a great time.
The whole effort raised a nice chunk of cash for Crisis too, so a good cause was served into the bargain.
A macro shot of a little gearbox that (along with a bag of other bits) has been consuming rather a lot of my time this week.
We managed to reduce one of them to a small pile of dust on an endurance test last night, so I spent several hours this afternoon working on some improvements - Let's hope we can treat this one better!
I found myself feeling rather down Tuesday night, and took myself out for a nocturnal walk to try and restore some balance to my addled brain.
The fog was quite pleasant, although an unseen horse sneezing without warning in a field behind me was a mildly shocking experience!
A backup photo today, shot Saturday. A common theme lately!
(Of chocolate to biscuit, in case you were wondering)
Another snackro. The delight of doing these is that you get a tasty treat when you're done.
I find it interesting that you can see a bit of machining chatter, or perhaps more likely CNC stepover marks from the mould on the internal cone shape. I suppose they don't worry about achieving a nice finish in the chocolate mould machining world. How dissipated. Perhaps they are too busy "quality controlling" the final merchandise...
This one's a stack of 41 frames.
This one's a backup from yesterday.
I'd like to take the macro rig out here and get a photo of the wonderful little forest that's growing on top of this old fence post, as well as the way the water drops wrap round the individual strands.
The apple tree and the sunset filtering through the other trees in the background makes for a nice bokeh effect, too.
I actually went for a walk and took photos today. Remarkable.
I don't particularly love this lens from an image quality point of view, but it is certainly versatile.
The archive is taking a beating again, this one's a backup from about 3 weeks ago.
I spent most of my nominally free afternoon fiddling with work related things, albeit ones involving playing with my new 3D printer.
Geneva wheel mechanisms are really quite satisfying.
I quite like this one, grubby weather notwithstanding.
Another backup, I am a tired quasi-human
More like the Bikerlands!
Another backup shot from Arnhem, where the Dutch certainly live up to the cycling stereotype.
This one's a backup from the 7th, but amusingly, I could have taken essentially the same photo today had I been inclined - I was on the same vessel going in the opposite direction.
A tolerably successful trip, all told.
Arnhem, and perhaps the Netherlands in general has some very interesting buildings that would be plain, boring, functional blocks at home.
This is one of the walkways in Arnhem Centraal station's car park. The building itself is a very funky freeform shape, and the stairwells are quite cool, with very few perpendicular lines, glass in unexpected places, and walls that are slightly angled in interesting ways.
The widget I was testing passed (yay), apart from the bits we ran out of time to do (boo), and the bits I failed to ask for a quote for (hiss).
Stupid Boy.
I've been to Arnhem a few times over the years, but never had much opportunity to explore it until today.
I quite like it, at least the bits I've seen.
Incidentally, the rain in the Netherlands is every bit as wet as the rain in the UK (who knew?...)
En Route to the Netherlands for a work trip, my first overseas work trip since late 2019, as I recall.
A surprisingly easy trip on the way out, although I do wish the very drunk and slightly randy people out in the corridor would have kept it down at 3:30AM!
I bought myself a new 3D printer from Prusa.
I'm looking forward to doing some interesting things with the 5 heads on this machine.
It's very nice to finally have a real toolchanging machine which can swap materials in a matter of seconds with minimal purge waste, as opposed to my previous MMU system, which took ages for every material swap, and wasted a lot of material purging the old material remnants out.
I went to see Amy Macdonald live in Nottingham with a friend tonight after taking a last-minute day off work.
I really don't like crowds and close proximity to people, but she was fantastic, definitely worth putting up with the crowd for. It probably also helped that I've had the tickets for ages, and I've really been looking forward to it.
Lots of (great) new songs, but she dug through her back catalogue and belted out most of my old favourites too.
The Fuji definitely wasn't the right camera to shoot this with, at least from where I was sat, but the last thing I wanted to do was get kicked out by taking a bigger camera, so it had to do.
I think this is the biggest diameter moon halo I've ever seen. It was really quite spectacular.
I was out and didn't have a real camera on me, but my phone has done a decent job, especially after a bit of massaging in Lightroom.
A present from my in-laws subjected to the snackro treatment.
This one's a focus stack of 52 shots.
Ideally, I'd have either found a nice shiny example of this chocolate, or somehow polished it up to remove the marks from the surfaces.
A backup photo today, I got home from work and crashed out, falling asleep on the sofa for a couple of hours.
I seem to recall from a few years ago hearing some particularly idiotic politician blathering on about how it was impossible to drive or recharge an EV in wet weather.
(He was very wrong, in case you were wondering).
About 17 hours into an 18.5 hour working day.
Babysitting a twitchy transformer, listening to a 50Hz buzz, while waiting for a spreadsheet full of boxes to turn (and stay) green.
At least the software I wrote a couple of years ago is working well here, slurping up numbers from a data acquisition unit and filing it in an orderly manner for analysis.
I need to do some fairly significant mods to make it fully windows 11 compatible soon though, running it on my old laptop isn't a good long-term solution!
Maybe when this project is put to bed, I'll be able to sit down and deal with it properly.
A spider appears to have been living on it.
Not a very exciting photo, but I was stuck in work for an obscene number of hours working on a very urgent, very long test run, and was losing my mind at this point in the proceedings, so this is all I shot apart from photos of the actual thing I was testing, which I can't share for now.
But no coffee. Not until tomorrow, at least.
The week has gone to pot by Tuesday afternoon...
Not the best shot, but I'm knackered, and the other one I did was worse. I think I've got some minor vibration issues coming from the focus rail with the setup in this orientation.
Continuing my occasional theme of macro photos of snacks with this 1x macro of a piece of popcorn (or my brain, I can't be completely sure these days 🤯)
Snackro photography, you might say.
This one's a focus stack of 39 shots.
This one's my 52Frames submission for the "Sports Photography" challenge.
Sport is very much not my thing, and I have no idea where I'd go to shoot any without looking like a more massive weirdo than usual.
The sole concession to sport that I have in the house is this baseball that I was sent when I joined Smarter Every Day's Patreon, so that's my subject for today.
The first decent misty evening I've seen this autumn.
Not a backup, for a change.
I went to see an early-ish display of the murmuration at Attenborough Nature Reserve this afternoon.
I'm planning to return later in the season when the murmuration is bigger.
Another backup photo, this one from the back end of last month.
A backup photo today, again (see the 17th for why).
A backup photo today.
I quite liked the regular lines and patterns in this new building seen from my hotel room window. Ideally, I'd have been a few rooms to the left so I could have made the composition symmetrical, but such is life.
Almost a week late posting this; things went very sideways with my photo project this week due to work pressures, and I ended up not shooting anything other than work related photos on my phone almost every day.
This is the first time I've properly fallen off the wagon on this project, and it's a bit irritating to break so close to the end of the second year.
Proverbs of spilt milk and crying come to mind, so I shall try and resume normal (ish) operations, although I'm expecting this week to be relatively hellish again at work.
Another possibility for 52Frames "Black And White Minimalism" today.
Can't decide between today's or yesterday's shot yet.
This one is probably going to be my submission for this week's 52Frames "Black And White Minimalism" challenge.
Another backup photo today, I got home from work and crashed out.
It's been a full-on week, and not entirely pleasant in places.
I'm calling it a win that I actually ended up with the energy to cook something recognisable as a meal for dinner, as opposed to eating comparative junk, which I've been doing rather too much recently.
A backup photo for today, posted late.
I spent almost all evening making some prototype parts, and ran out of time for photos.
This caption gets a bit deep, so skip it if you're feeling delicate.
I've been listening to the latest Jack Reacher book over the last couple of days. It's a series that Lucy introduced me to, and one which we used to enjoy listening to together quite regularly, often in the car.
At the end of the book, there is a discussion between the series' original author Lee Child, and the long-time narrator Jeff Harding; several times while listening to it, I had the involuntary, automatic thoughts "Lucy would like this", or "Lucy would be interested by this", or even "I'll have to mention this bit to her", shortly followed by the jarring, unpleasant jolt of realisation that she is no longer here to have these chats with. It is a visceral, almost physical reaction, which is really quite unsettling, and gets you when you least expect it.
A bit heavy perhaps, but this has become almost as much a personal diary as a photoblog now.
