hchalkley.blog

Peter's photo of me taking a photo of him at the first Cambridge Flickr meeting - at the Fort St George yesterday

"The ordinary becomes exotic to first time visitors of Bali. In here, the bamboo wicker, the heavy weighing scale, the strange fruit, the traditional robes- all add to the allure. As a frequent visitor to this magical place, I find Bali special for their way of life, on how they manage to keep the old and imbibe the new.
Farl's photos give us a virtual tour around the Philipines, Indonesia, Madagascar and East Africa."

Black-and white street photos from Barcelona are only one style from Notarivs' work - go and have a look at some of his other photos in his stream

An excellent photo (as usual) from Ryan Brenizer, a New York photojournalist.

Here's an example of dR...'s amazing style of (mostly B&W) children's portraits.

The Seven Basic Plots

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Christopher Booker's "The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories"
I never liked English Literature as a subject at school, but since then I've come to love mythology and fantasy fiction. The idea of Storytelling has some small relevance to my work as well.
In the first part of the book, Christopher Booker explains his idea of the archetypal plots underlying all the best stories - "Overcoming the Monster", "Rags to Riches", "The Quest", "Voyage and Return", "Comedy", "Tragedy", and "Rebirth". Warning: this part of the book contains a huge number of plot summaries of novels, films, plays etc - some people may want to avoid spoilers!
In part two, he then looks at the archetypal figures playing roles in these stories, but this section drags a bit as he tends to re-hash the same story outlines as were used to explain the plots in part one.
Part three then looks at where (in his view) storytelling has gone wrong in the last century or two, showing how many novels only follow part of one of his archetypal sory arcs, and are incomplete as a result.
I have found it to be a fascinating read, building on the likes of Frazier's "The Golden Bough" and Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand faces" as giving new insights into the art of storytelling.

Photos on this Blog

When I started writing this blog I intended it to be notes about programming and software engineering, but I found that the level of confidentiality in my work means that I find it difficult to find anything I can safely write about.

Since becoming more involved in photography, I decided to post some of my favourite photos from contacts on flickr. This serves a couple of purposes: it helps to highlight the range of great work on flickr (I'm still trying to get some of my friends to sign up) and also it's helping me understand my taste in photography.

It's summer right now in Brazil, and Neloqua's colourful photos bring some much-wanted sunshine in February (and all year round!)

My friend Elizabeth has just joined up to Flickr, and ahs posted a few photos from our skiing holiday last week. Here's a rare shot of Duncan's teeth!

Dutch artist Mattijn has created a fascinating nightmare sequence of images: follow the sequence here

An amazing desert landscape from Lorien & Joe (nspiration Point, Bryce Canyon Nationa Park Utah, USA)

One of my own photos, for a change - this has gained 1500+ views and 38 favourites in just two weeks. It's a (fairly heavily) processed version of a snap taken in Yorkshire last August. I wrote up the technique on the 2 minute photoshoip tricks wiki.

One of Eric's fine orchid specimen photos

For great british landscape photography, have a look at Rob's photos

We had a coach trip to Cortina d'Ampezzo on Thursday, 08:10 start! It took nearly two hours to get there through the mountain roads - it's about 16 miles as the crow flies.
Cortina is a fashionable resort, so the visitors spend most of their time in town being seen in their furs or shopping in the boutiques; the ski runs were almost empty.
We visited both the Faloria and Cristallo areas.

After three hard days skiing, I decided I needed an easy day. I met Wendy in the morning after she dropped the kids off at their lesson, and took her up the Ciampanoi lift, and back via plan de Gralba. I then met Ann and Jane when their lesson was over, had lunch in Selva, and repeated the same route with them.
In the evening, we went on the 'crazy bowling and pizza' outing.

Trip to Lagazoi: up early, via Dantercepies, Grodner Joch, Colfosco to Corvara. One of the chairlifts at Corvara was broken, so we had a half-hour hike through the village. Up to Col Alto and via Piz Sorega to Armentarola for a bus to the Lagazoi lift.
Duncan, Matthew, Peter and Richard decided to do the back down to the bottom of the lift and come back up again then catch up, while Elizabeth, Rachel and I went straight onto the hidden valley. It was bitterly cold at the top of this run: I guess -10C with a force 6 wind? It was blasting ice crystals off the piste into our faces. We were glad to get to a more sheltered part of the valley and stop for lunch.
Then we went past the frozen waterfall, and down to the flat bottom of the valley where you are dragged by horses back towards Armentarola: still another 10km to get back to Selva.

Up to Ciampanoi; down to St Cristina (by the castle), up the funicular and cablecar to Col Raiser, then chairlift to Seceda; did the run back down to Col Raiser a couple of times, then down the run from Seceda to Ortisei for lunch.
Back up to Seceda; the fast group decided to do the run down to Ortisei again, I decided to take it easy back down towards St Cristina and let them catch up.

The plan was to do some light skiing as a warm-up for the week. By lunchtime we were almost half-way round the Sella Ronda circuit, so we decided to complete the circular route. It's about 19km of lifts, and 26km of skiing altogether.

5:30 am start at the B&B to get to the airport; arrival in Verona was chaotic as three planes had landed all at once, and all the luggage was on one belt. Then a 2.5 hour coach drive up to the resort. I felt utterly exhausted by the journey, and I had a headache from dehydration.

Angelo's got some great pictures of Italy. I chose this one as it gives a clue as to why I'll be offline for a few days.

Another brilliant portrait of Professor Taggart by Anndra Dubhacan - also have a look at his photos of Mr Cameron. (Thanks to Christopherd6's interview with Anndra)

This is my first attempt at an "out of bounds" effect photo. I'll have to read these tutorials to learn how to do better: out of bounds and drop shadows

I think I would have to describe Ivan as an artist who uses photography, rather than as a photographer.

J-Track 3D is an online Java application from Nasa that allows you to visualise the orbits of all the major sattelites around the earth.