Some minor housekeeping: after meaning to for years, I’ve finally added an alternative index to Detail that groups its galleries by region, bringing back some of the functionality of earlier designs.
Did I say I was finished with photos for Detail? I forgot about these natural maps from our trip to Shetland six years ago. Now I’m finished.
It’s over five years since the last collection of Scottish castles at Detail, so here are six more, represented in collages compiled from trips over the past few years to Galloway, Glasgow, East Lothian and Perthshire. This gallery brings me up to date with my photos at long last, apart from the unscanned 35mm negatives, although some travel I’ve got planned for the rest of this year will no doubt bring some more.
At the beginning or end of half of the sets of travel photos collected in Detail are a handful of photos from the air, either of countries I’ve visited or places I’ve flown over. Window Seat gathers together over thirty years’ worth, taken first on 35mm film and then on a succession of digital cameras, and in one case on a phone. I haven’t recorded every flight, and some of my most memorable views from the air, like the snaking Thames after dark or the islands of the Pacific, are missing, but there’s enough here to evoke a lifetime’s travel.
Looking back at these now leaves me with some feelings of environmental guilt, and one day when air travel is again out of reach I’ll no doubt look back with nostalgia... but in the meantime, come fly with me.
The State of It
Evidence that the Home Office should be abolished, part XVII: The Home Office have privatised the visa system and made it even less accessible. The Home Office detained a trafficking victim for five months because it insisted he was somebody else.
Evidence that the US is lost, part XVII: The youngest child separated from his family at the US border was 4 months old. America’s new concentration camp system.
How Rupert Murdoch’s empire of influence remade the world.
Canadian permafrost is thawing 70 years early. The reality of melting Greenland sea ice. Antarctica has lost as much sea ice in four years as the Arctic lost in 34. Planes are even worse for the climate than we thought. #ShowYourStripes
Finally, a sad development in a country close to me: Cocaine and meth fuel crime and chaos in Fiji.
Permission Denied
I mentioned a while back that my 2012 iMac’s hard drive finally died, which led to some tricky choices: to replace it altogether, or replace the hard drive with an SSD, or with another hard drive (not recommended nowadays), or a fusion drive where the system treats a dual SSD and HD as a single drive, or—my eventual choice—a 480GB SSD and a 4TB hard drive installed as separate drives, with system and everyday files on the former and archival files on the latter. That way I got the full speed boost of running my system and apps on an SSD, with the space for archives of a honking great hard-disk. I got some extra memory installed while I was at it, so that the revamped Mac would last me at least a few more years and save having to spend two grand on a replacement.
Everything went fine, and I had a recent enough backup that I lost no files worth worrying about, although there were the usual software updates after the transition to macOS Mojave. But in copying stuff over from my backup, I made a couple of mistakes that led to some month-long headaches. This post serves as warning and solution, if you’re ever in the same boat.
Local Views
Last year I finally started doing justice to a large backlog of photographs intended for Detail, chipping away at sorting, resizing and arranging them into galleries. I’m now near the end of that process, with only a couple more to go. Here are some featuring my everyday surrounds, with photos taken in and around Edinburgh.
Out West
The next batch of galleries at Detail looks closer to home, recording trips to the west of Scotland going back over a decade. It’s a beautiful part of the country, with plenty of out-of-the-way places little-known to tourists.
Rust in Peace
We lived in Edinburgh for nine years without a car, but when our son came along the merits of having one again became hard to resist, so in June 2010 we bought a second-hand 2002 Ford Focus.
To Helvetia and Back
One of the most significant gaps in Detail has been a series of trips I made at the beginning of the decade to Switzerland, mainly to Geneva but also to Zurich, St Gallen, and other towns around Lake Geneva. I had so many photos of the place building up so quickly, and so many thoughts about them, that I could never quite get them together.
I’ve finally dealt with the photos, at least, if not all of the thoughts. The result is a series of new galleries, only six to nine years late.
A few years ago I posted two galleries of Scottish Sand, with close-ups and wide shots from several different beaches. Here’s a third instalment, with photos from Gullane in East Lothian and Port William in Galloway last year.