Status-Q

My brother-in-law's dog Joshua got up on the sofa to help me check in for our flights, but it turned out he wasn't really too interested in Delta Airlines. He was more keen to chat to these girls.

Two days ago I enjoyed elk quesadillas
Yesterday I had a bison burger
Today we fished the Yellowstone River under the watchful eye of a bald eagle.
Feeling very Western.

Oh give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above...

We're in Montana, and it's beautiful.

No, I mean really beautiful.

We made some friends amongst the natives.

The humans are friendly too. All in all, a lovely spot.

More pictures are sure to follow soon...

A couple more pictures from the industrial periphery of Motown.

Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere...

By the time you read this, in contrast, we'll have taken the dawn train going to Montana, from where I'll probably post some rather different photos!

I was quite pleased with this shot, taken by the Marathon Petroleum plant in Dearborn, Michigan last night.

(You can click it for a larger version, which looks much better)

This was handheld - I wish I'd had a tripod, but at this point the security guards pulled up and asked us to move on...

Part of what makes it 'pretty' is the use of two different types of lighting - given the industrial location, I imagine the golden light is sodium and the silver is halogen - and the camera's auto white-balance did a good job of reproducing what I saw.

But when I got home and loaded it into Lightroom, I thought it would be fun to try calibrating the white balance based on a chimney lit by the sodium light. (I could have achieved a similar effect by selecting tungsten white balance in the camera.) The result was also pretty. Can't quite decide which I prefer...

Tilly and I had a lovely early walk at Wimpole Hall today. But we weren't alone...

As the poet said,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young, with four legs and a waggy tail, was very heaven.

It was a moist early morning... but the light felt almost like a Constable painting.

Tilly enjoyed it, and showed some reluctance to get into the hay wain and head home...

I like this one - somehow I feel there ought to be an interesting story behind this street in Orwell...

The second-best camera is the one you have with you.
The best is the one you have in your hand.

The new Materials Science and Metallurgy building, Cambridge.