Five years ago I bought a scanner capable of scanning 35mm negatives, and started working through my oldest rolls of film. It takes a while, and once I paused I didn’t come back to them for years, as we had started travelling again and my digital photos were mounting up. Recently I went back to them, though, and kept working my way through the 1980s, beginning with my first trip to Europe with my family in the winter of 1985–86, after our time in Japan.
British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine.
When I posted my backlog of Switzerland photos earlier in the year, I mentioned that we had another Swiss trip planned. Last weekend we were in Basel for a few days, and this time I’ve turned the photos around in record time.
After hanging onto an 8GB iPhone 4 way beyond the point of practicality, I finally have a new one (a 256GB iPhone 7, only a few years behind the curve), which means I can finally take properly decent photos when I’m out without a camera—like the sunsets over the Meadows on my ride home from work at this time of year.
Brexit, a study in politics versus law.
Johnson has destroyed what is left of the UK’s credibility.
How Johnson could deliver No Deal on 31 October despite the Benn Act. 30,000 refugees in the UK are at risk if there’s no deal. Even a deal would just be the end of the beginning of Brexit.
Years and Years wasn’t meant to be a documentary.
Eight of the top ten Brexit-Party-promoting Twitter accounts appear to be bots. EP Today looks like a front for RT.
Without the Beeching report there might never have been Brexit.
The Hustle, by musician and journalist Rhodri Marsden, is a disco concept album about Brexit.
If you can’t make it to the rally on Saturday, chip in to the student coach fund.
Zooming in on Trump’s notorious 2016 taco-bowl photo shows an open desk drawer full of boxes of UK-sourced Sudafed, lending weight to the claims of a former Apprentice staffer that Trump “ate UK Sudafed like candy” and a whole lot more.
I wonder what was going on here. Or what was going on here.
Debbie Harry suspects she had a near miss with Ted Bundy. Imagine if some psycho had cost us “Heart of Glass”.
Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a science paper.
The best self-defence video of all time.
This photo from New Norfolk on our way out to the West Coast in July didn’t fit in the relevant gallery, but I wanted to post it somewhere, as like the West Coast itself it’s a madeleine for my childhood. It’s a Ford Falcon, or “chook tin” as my mates called ’em (they’re fowl-cans, geddit?), from 1972 or thereabouts. Whadda bewdy.
Mouseover that beast and you’ll see another that I photographed at Forcett in 2005. This one isn’t a Ford, or a Holden that I can tell—it looks like a 1960 Chevrolet, but might be something else from that year or a year either side. Which means it wasn’t as old when I photographed it as that Falcon in New Norfolk was in July. My mate had a Holden EH ute that seemed ancient when he bought it in the mid-1980s but was only half the age of either of these at the time. Now they’re disappearing fast, with a few hanging on in places like rural Tasmania. EJs to ashes, doomed to rust.
Now I’m missing my 1976 Toyota Corona Mark II.
Approaching Hobart, Tasmania, July 2019.
After eleven new galleries at Detail, and additions to a few more, I’ve finally finished with the photos from our summer (winter) holiday in Australia. The last pieces of the puzzle were the photos from the flights themselves, where I sat in the window seats so that the kids could take turns in the aisle. They provided a dozen-ish additions to Window Seat, which you can find at the end of that gallery, or by jumping to the first additional photo and clicking through the rest. They needed a bit of cropping and balancing, especially the ones from Dubai to cut through the dust and smog, but include the best aerial shots I’ve ever taken of Canberra and a great string of images from the approach to Hobart, which on a good day is one of the most beautiful landings in the world.
Hays Paddock, Kew, Melbourne, August 2019.
Our last few days in Australia in August didn’t yield many photos without the kids in them, but you can see a handful of them by treading clicking on the snake.
Earlier in the year I made a series of new galleries of the Tasman peninsula for Detail, catching up on a four-year backlog and five trips out there to see my folks. A year after my last visit, I was out there again in July and August with the kids, and this time took them to the most significant tourist attraction on the peninsula, indeed in the entire state: the convict settlement of Port Arthur.