Not for the first time, I’ve just published a gallery of my ancient Antarctic images. Maybe this will be the definitive set. Maybe not. Certainly it’s the smallest.

Apart from two photos which I had to rework from the archived scans, due a weird digital disease that seems to be afflicting some of my Photoshop files, these are derived from the “reference” versions I made around 5 years ago.

They’re mostly taken on Kodachrome 64, with one or two Kodachrome 25s and a single Ektachrome 64(?). I’d be fairly surprised if anybody could tell which is which.

I took the photos in 1987/88 while working for the British Antarctic Survey, and in 1991/92 when I participated in the Norwegian-led Aurora Programme, working on a European Space Agency funded project at University College London ... back in the early days of climate change research.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with a camera back then, which given that I was mainly using a fully manual Canon FTb, was not ideal. Arguably I haven’t moved on much, but at least I’ve now got a far better idea of what I don’t know.

I’ve just completed uploading my latest gallery, and this one is particularly special for me. It features 16 so-called panoramic photographs, all taken in Iceland with the Hasselblad XPan. This is probably my favourite format, and the camera I have the closest relationship with it. I had considered selling it along with all my other film gear, but I’ve been convinced by others and myself that this would just be plain stupid. If I’m ever going to produce any notable photography, it is probably going to be with this camera.

An XPan photo of Jökulsárlón which didn’t make the last 16

Note: At the moment there’s a bit of a glitch with the display of the gallery thumbnails (they’re too wide for the page). This is due (a) to lack of planning on my part and (b) because I can’t get the fix I’ve kludged together to work yet.

I have at last added a gallery of landscape photos from Ticino to the photography pages.

The selection of 16 photos was taken from a period spanning the last 6 years. They’re mostly digital: it will be interesting to see if anyone can spot those which aren’t, not that it matters in the slightest as far as I’m concerned.

dusk over Cristallina

The locations are pretty spread about, although Ritom-Piora / Lucomagno and Verzasca / Vallemaggia areas take the majority share. There’s only one winter shot that made the cut. It seems that winter photography isn’t my strongest point!

I’ve left out one of my favourite locations, Lavertezzo and the surrounding area in Val Verzasca, because that is going to be the subject of a future gallery.

Thanks, as ever, for visiting!

At last.

Somewhere around one year ago - possibly longer, I don’t remember - and shortly after being awarded “website of the month” by Outdoor Photography, I decided to take my photo galleries, and indeed my whole website, offline.

The website itself was getting old and creaky, and was becoming a real rat’s nest of patched together hand built code.  I wanted to replace it with something easier to maintain, more flexible, and based on something reasonably solid. This I finished a while ago.  But the other issue was the photographic content.

I used to host over 700 photos online, divided into about 10 galleries. Despite the fact that I got a lot of good feedback, this was clearly far too much. I felt that something was wrong, and some good advice from a friend convinced me I needed to cut down the quantity drastically, and focus on quality, and the message I want to send.

Unfortunately, whatever things I may be any good at, editing is not one of them.  The task of selecting a handful of photos to show from a collection of well over 15,000 was not easy. And it was made harder, when, early this year, I indulged myself in a high quality Quato display. Photos that I had discarded for being uninteresting or flawed suddenly popped into life on this new monitor, and I realised I was going to have to take another look at my archives.  I’ve recently completed reprocessing and evaluating just about all of my several thousand photos from Iceland, and the results of this exercise (started around March, finished a few weeks ago) are the subject of the first two of my new galleries.

The new thumbnails layout

Now that the technical stuff is completed, I can finally give my full attention to the fun part - the photography. I’ll be adding more galleries in the (relatively) near future, in particular panoramic format photos from Iceland and elsewhere, and at least one Ticino gallery.

I certainly want to avoid getting back into the quantity overload scenario, but I do want to try to show a representative selection. Probably I will inaugurate a “recent work” gallery soon, with more rapidly evolving content. I may also showcase some of my infra red photography, as well as black & white, since I seem to be doing more of that these days.

But for now, I’m just relieved that I’ve finally got something to show again.

NOTE: Although I try to test as much as possible on different web browsers, some bugs might lurk.  In particular I’ve noticed an intermittent and baffling bug in (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer (7 & 8, I cannot be bothered with 6).  Full size images sometimes display with a white band across them. Refreshing the page clears it up.  I’ll try to fix this, but I’m not going to hold back from going live because of bloody Microsoft.

the Internet Explorer bug. No website is complete without one.

Murphy has a lot to answer for. I finally got around to taking a mountain outing with only my Ricoh GR-D, in a pleasant valley in the vicinity of Les Diablerets, Canton Vaud, known, it seems, for its marmot population. This time I had the pleasure of the company of my better half, as well as our Romainian-Canadian friends from Ottawa.

At the highest point of the walk we stopped for a lazy lunch. Adrian wandered over to inspect a patch of snow (apparently they don’t have snow in Canada ?) and rushed back excitedly some time later saying he’d seen “at least 7” marmots.

Well, these marmots had unusually long horns and were the size of a very large sheep.  In fact they were a little known variant of marmot, valled “ibex”.

Well, bugger. Ibex are not that common. Relatively approachable ibex even less so. I’ve never managed to get so close without spooking them (about 100m). And I had a 28mm lens…

So, here, for your pleasure, a pair of alpine ibex at 28mm.

Naturally, had I dragged 5kg of image stabilised Olympus E-3 with f2.8-3.5 50-200mm lens up there, would we have met the ibex ? Of course not.