Seasons…

Same place, same bike – but completely different surroundings!

How it was in March 2013:

And now (August 2013):

Which reminds me that the cold season is fast approaching… 🙁

My two vehicles!

My two vehicles!, a photo by Manuel Jorge Marques on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
My means of transportation around Kent (and beyond!). Car was washed this morning, but the weather turned nastier when I wanted to take care of the bike! :/ It is the great British summer indeed…

Weather rant (yet another one…)

In my phone’s home screen I have two weather forecasts: one for Porto, and one for Canterbury. Can you tell which is which?

Interestingly enough, the two forecasts were basically swapped during the time I was in Portugal! I think someone in the Higher Authority (or whatever it is, chaos…) does not like me very much!

I found it!

In a very posh area of Cambridge, where else? 🙂

This wall map of Europe…

(which I got from Lidl, of course!)
… is all very well, but the railway line depicted here (going all the way to Bragança) has been deactivated for almost 20 years now!

The final nail in the coffin of the Tua line will be given when the new Tua dam is completed and an important stretch of the now closed line will go under water.

Aaand… it is over!

This has been one hectic week, I can tell you! 🙂 Glad it is over!…

It was a very interesting experience, though – I got to experience the nitty-gritty issues of organising a conference, how to perform under pressure (still have a lot to improve in there!), and how important team work is (not that I wasn’t aware of that already! 😉 ).

A shame that I couldn’t make the best usage of the scientific program in there, though – with too many things to sort out, I barely saw any posters, and I had to miss some of the sessions to help out elsewhere. But I can’t really complain, as I attended the conference for free… 🙂

And now, it is time to get back to the UK… and work like crazy in the lab, as I need “publishable” results before I can actually go on holidays! And also make up for the time lost in terms of trainings, as I have an half-marathon to run and this past week was a big step backwards in my progress (no time for anything!), I ended up bringing my gear home just to fill my suitcase… 😛

Everything ready!

The conference is approaching!

Something is quite wrong here!…

Can you tell me what it is? 🙂

Tricks of the light

Yesterday I had some fun with my DSLR camera and tripod. I stood in almost complete darkness taking some long exposure time photos, here are the results:

This first one actually was not in complete darkness, as the house has a big halogen projector triggered by a motion sensor to illuminate the drive at night. Quite clever, but I wanted complete darkness – and since I couldn’t find the switch for it I had to wait until the timer went out, and then move surreptitiously without triggering the sensor again… 🙂

I like this one in particular – the projector went off, and I took this with a 30 second exposure time, F/4 aperture and ISO cranked up to the maximum (1600 or 3200? Can’t remember). It looks very grainy, which gives it quite a cool effect.

And then I played a bit with my car (my neighbours probably think I’m some sort of a nutcracker, standing just in shorts (it was quite hot outside) in complete darkness, photographing my car with various light settings. But I did have fun :).

This last one turned out to be quite nice – and this was only with the position lights on, no headlamps! (I could probably have set the f/# to a larger value…)