2008: A Year in Pictures

Inspired by a mosaic made by one of my flickr contacts, I’ve chosen a photograph for each month of last year.

January: Flooded footpath, Milton Keynes
A wet start to the year. I was determined to get out of the office and walk each lunchtime if I could. I suffer from SAD and the sunlight will help lift my mood. When the river flooded it limited the places I could walk to in a lunch break but increased the opportunities for intersting photographs.

February: Chinese New Year, Soho
The start of my final Open University course, Film and Television History, saw me back in London once a month for tutorials. Officially, I was supposed to go to tutorials on the far side of Oxford but that’s too difficult (expensive and time consuming) to get to. Much easier and more interesting to go to London for the day. Of course, I took the camera. As it was Chinese New Year I wandered into Soho and to Trafalgar Square to take some photographs.

March: Friends with Kew
We (my OH and I) both love the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and are ‘Friends of Kew’. We love sharing this with friends. Our friends Karl and Magna wanted to see the exhibition ‘Moore at Kew’ and so did I. It finished at the end of March so we wouldn’t wait for better weather or we’d have missed it. It was bloody freezing. I did take lots of photos of the sculptures but I think my favourite of the day was this one of Karl, taken in one of those ‘out of the way’ parts of Kew you only find if you wander away from the main thoroughfares.

April: Ideal Sofa?
The OU Club arranged incredibly cheap travel and entry to the Ideal Home Show in London. Rik and I went down for a day out. I worked at this show, selling membership of a bookclub, for four consecutive years in the 1990s. We looked around the show houses, something I’d never had time to do when I worked there. I loved the colour and depth of this sofa. I’ve always been disappointed by sofas and suspect that I will have to spend serious amounts of money to get one that wont disappoint. I had a lovely, deep, comfortable blue sofa that became lumpy after a very few years. The one I have now is not as big as I thought I was buying (way too small) and wont be coming to NZ with us.

May: Eiffel Tower
Rik and I went to Paris to celebrate having been together for (over) ten years. We had a fabulous long weekend (almost a week – Friday to Tuesday) visiting the art galleries and wandering around. I had seen, but never been up, the Eiffel Tower. I expected to be disappointed by sucha a hyped up tourist attraction. I needn’t have worried, I loved it. Definitely a different experience by night!

June: Deep North
In June I travelled to the Scandinavian part of the Arctic Circle. It was a fabulous trip and my fellow travellers on the tour were a great buch, very friendly. I timed the trip to ensure I was there for the longest day. The sun didn’t set on me for over a week. It only set because I had travelled further south. There’s about six weeks of the sun being constantly in the sky in the far north. It was great being able to wander around in the daylight in late evening. I love the space and clean air. The colours of the buildings are traditional.

July: Kew again.
When we lived in London we tried to get to Kew Gardens at least once a month, even in the winter. Now we are in Bletchley it is more expensive to travel down but we do try to get there several times a year. On this visit Iplayed with the macro setting and the metering on my camera a lot more and took some photos I rather liked. We took two people who were, at the time, new friends. Unfortunately, that friendship turned bad, something that has never happened to me before. Not nice.

August: Walpole’s House, Strawberry Hill
In an effort to ensure I had a chance of pasing my course, and therefore getting an Honours Degree, I attended a study weekend organised by the Open University Students’ London Regional Arts Club.
It was held at a college in Strawberry Hill, an area of London I had never heard of. I met some interesting people, had a good recap of the course (took reams of notes) and enjoyed the break away from the distractions of home. The buildings were interesting and Walpole’s House was next door. I discovered this when I took a walk in the grounds before breakfast and found myself at the back of the house.

September: Henna Heart
In September/October I took another coach tour (I’m trying to see as much of this side of the world as I can before I move to the other side of the world). This was a ten day tour of the ‘Highlights of Morocco’ and was fabulous. I photographed this little girl’s henna-painted hand in Fes. Her mother didn’t speak English (why should she?) and I don’t speak Arabic but we exchanged a few words in my broken French. I thanked her for allowing me to take the photograph and told her how beautiful her daughter was, and gave her a few coins. I didn’t feel comfortable with the way so many people just crowded round this tiny little girl taking photographs and ignoring them as people. I found my broken French useful later in the tour when kids were insisting on ‘helping’ my tour-mates over the stepping stone’s against their will. I couldn’t think of the French for ‘go away’ or ‘leave us alone’ but finally came up with ‘ne touchez pas!’ (don’t touch!). I was amazed at the reaction as they immediately sprung away as if burned.

October: Salamanca
October was a busy month. Six days after I got home from Morocco I was off on another trip, this time to Spain for the fourteen day ‘Spanish Panorama’ tour. In the few days in between I recovered from Moroccan tummy; was reunited with my luggage (I flew Casablanca to London, it flew Casablanca to Paris I gothome on Sunday, the luggage got home on Wednesday); and took my final exam. It was my first exam for years as most of my recent courses have had an end of course assignment rather than a three hour timed exam. One of the things I really like about tours is that you get to see places you might not have visited if you were setting your own itinerary, and they can be brilliant. A very short walk from the hotel brought me to this gorgeously lit square.

November: Unexpected Beauty
I was ill in November. A particularly nasty lurgy, not quite full blown flu but pretty close to it, was doing the rounds and I caught it. We had tickets for the BBC Good Food Show that I ordered months ago. We were going with friends and I had their tickets so I had to go. I could hardly talk, couldn’t taste or smell anything (a serious downer at a food show) and spent the day dosed up with Strepsils, paracetamol, etc. On the way back to the car park, walking along with two friends, I spotted this view. I set the camera on the settings I wanted, rested it on a fence post, set the timer (so It wouldn’t suffer from camera shake / photographer shiver) and got this. I loved it.

December: Bletchley at 3.58pm
The month of the shortest day. If things go to plan, this may be the shortest day I have for the rest of my life. Why? Because their are more hours of daylight on the shortest day in New Zealand than there are in the UK. Wellington has about an hour and a half more daylight than Bletchley. This year I also had my longest longest day – in the Arctic Circle. This photo was taken near the shops just over a mile from my home, before 4pm. Yes it’s pretty, but it’s way too early for a sunset.

Do something positive every day

So I’m back from my trips to Morocco and Spain – and threw in a trip to Yorkshire as well (photos gradually going up on flickr) . I’ve quit my hated job (I didn’t intend too but I couldn’t stand it any longer) and now I have the time to get everything ready for the (hoped for) move to New Zealand.

There is so much too do:

• paperwork for the application
• clear the house of junk
• tidy the house
• clean the house
• arrange the repairs that need to be done to the house
• investigate remortgaging, letting, etc

then, if we get the okay from NZIS

• get quotes for shipping
• investigate and organize flights
• look at where, and for how long, we want to stop off on our way there
• cancelling all sorts of things
• dealing with banks, etc

plus a zillion and one things that I have forgotten so far.

And what have I done towards that goal today? Nothing really. So from now on I will do something, no matter how small each day.

Where are your details?

A couple of entries back I wrote about copyright infringement. That was merely annoying. Since then I found a more worrying example of the use of my photos and the associated data.

The flickr stats for this photograph of a Parisian shop showed that some of the views were referred from http://www.tightwaist.de. I checked it out. It’s a site run by a guy in Germany who likes to see women in corsets. As well as stories (I’m not sure how salacious they are, I don’t read German), he has a photo gallery. Or, rather, a flickr gallerie. That’s what he calls it on his site.

But, here’s the worrying thing. Below my photograph on his site he had reproduced the descriptive text, all the tags and my full name, my flickr name and my location as shown on my flickr profile!

I emailed him (once I was able to find an email address on the site) and told him very clear terms, that I wanted my photographs removed.

Then I found, via a link on his nasty corset site, that he has a flickr account in the same name so I flickrmailed the same message to him. He didn’t get back to me but my photo on his site was replaced with words in German that babelfish translated as ‘This picture is subject to rights third and may not be indicated from there’. But he still had the rest of the details there.

He ignored my request to remove my info so I contacted flickr. They told me they could do nothing about stuff on an external site so I uploaded the photo again and deleted the original so that all my info was removed from his site.

I am not a happy bunny.

Copyright infringement – it’s bad manners (and illegal)

© All rights reserved = don’t use this without the owner’s permission. That’s not such a difficult concept to grasp, is it?

The other day I was explaining to a friend how to set up a Google alert to see, among other things, if your photographs are being used by others without your permission. I explained that it isn’t foolproof and it’s wise to occasionally do a Google search (and Yahoo search, etc) to see what it turns up. I’d not checked myself for a while so ran a check.

Now, before I go on, let me say something about me and photography. Almost all of my photographs are on flickr. I’m not a fantastic photographer. I’m keen and enthusiastic. I enjoy it. I am rather proud of some of my photographs. Most of them are for memories, or fun, or other non-artistic reasons. But they are mine. I keep an ‘all rights reserved’ copyright on all of them, because they are mine. Occasionally I get a flickr mail from someone asking me if they can use one of my photographs for an invitation, or an exhibition about bicycle parking or some such. These people usually tell me they can’t afford to pay for the use. That’s fine. I’m just pleased they respected the copyright and were polite enough to ask. I tell them they can use the photograph so long as I am credited as the photographer.

I was also approached by a UK university who wanted to use some of my photographs (of Beamish) in an educational video about the building of nineteenth century houses. They offered to pay and, as they clearly had a budget for this, I took the money. They got the photos for less than it would have cost them to travel from the West Country to the North of England, and I got a little bit of money and the thrill of being paid for my photography.

So, I ran a check on my flickr name and found that some guy who runs a French website about Pink Floyd was using this photograph of Camberwell College of Arts:

It’s mine and it is clearly marked ‘© All rights reserved’ on its flickr page. Apparently this means nothing to the guy who stole it. I know this because when I mailed him and said

‘You have used one of my photographs (of Camberwell College) without my permission. Please remove it from your site.’

He replied telling me

I’m sorry for the inconvenience. I can’t write a mail for all the photos that are on my website. I think it’s fair use to put a low resolution version with a link to the author’s website. Lots of webmasters don’t even credit authors… Anyway, I’ve removed your photography. That’s a pity ’cause it’s a beauty !

What nonsense. If he can search for the photos, he can drop a flickrmail asking if he can use it. Just because others also break the law doesn’t make it right. So I replied with

‘Fair use’ is to respect the legality of ‘all rights reserved’. If a photograph has a creative commons license then you can use it in accordance with the license.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED means just that. Just because other people also break the law does not make it right.

Thank you for removing it, and thank you for the comment.

It might interest you to know that I have never yet refused a REQUEST from any one who wanted to use one of my photographs. Just ASK in future.

The cheeky so-and-so came back with

‘I think you should write an email to the english Wikipedia, they have tons of copyrighted matérial on their pages… qualified as “fair use”
They also have lots of my content stealed directly from my own website. But that’s what Wikipedia is : a giant copy-paste of the World Wide Web !

Well… you’re absolutely right, and I was wrong. Please excuse me, again.

I’d like to ask you something : can I use your Camberwell College photography on my website?

Apart from my not having seen any photographs on wikipedia that weren’t either ‘creative commons’ licensed or had some other indication that permission had been given, he seems to be complaining that someone has stolen from him the images he has stolen from others. No, I will NOT be giving him permission to use my photographs. Cheeky sod.

Today, I found this, even more annoying, instance of photography theft. Some woman, who has a design company making notecards and calendars (so she should certainly understand about copyright – not that it’s a difficult concept to grasp) has a blog about ‘places she’s never been’. There is a link from her blog to her website and online shop – so she’s making money from this. Her entry for the end of February includes three photographs including this one of mine

They are not linked back (ie, clicking on the photograph does nothing, doesn’t take you to the original on flickr) and the only way I knew it was there is because she put, at the end of her entry

‘The above photos (top left, clockwise) are via flickr by XianRex, saltybullfrog, & Jacqi B.’

Well, Ms Hill, that is NOT good enough. I’ve mailed her and left a comment on her blog. I’ll see if she has the courtesy to get back to me.

My flickrstream is now set so that my photos can only be printed, downloaded or shared by my ‘friends and family’. I can’t remember how recently I did that so don’t know if these people have got round that somehow.

‘Maybe you should see a doctor’ and other reactions

Yesterday I had a day school for the writing course I’m studying with the Open University. I had breakfast before I left home and took a calorie-counted packed lunch in my square lock & lock. I’d photographed both (for the photo-diet project) that morning.

Helen, our tutor, had made delicious chocolate covered macaroons for us all to have during coffee break. I took one and remembered, before I took the first bite, to get out my camera and photograph it. Not surprisingly, I got a few strange looks from the others in the room. So I explained a little about the photo-diet project.

One of the guys was really interested in this and asked all sorts of questions about how it affected my eating patterns, did I make different food choices, etc. He’d been a fat child and a fat teenager and had dieted and exercised. Like me, he had already given up sugar, deep fried foods, etc many years ago.

One of the women said ‘that is really interesting’.

‘You think so?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘very interesting in a “perhaps you should see a doctor” sense.’

Perhaps she meant to funny (as in ha-ha) but I actually thought this very rude. However, I didn’t waste my breath pursuing the remark with her.

An older lady there asked, when I mentioned the weekly mosaic, ‘do you spread them all out on a table, or don’t you bother to print them?’ It’s easy to forget that many people, even those who use email and the Internet, just don’t think about not having to print everything.

I’m thinking of printing this badge

and maybe adding some kind of ‘promise’ on the back.

The other reactions I’ve had so far – outside of flickr where people have commented positively or not at all – have been mostly good. At work I mentioned it to one person who has lost a couple of stone and sent her the link to the flickr group and to the weightlossresources website. She said she’d take a good look at them.

My friend, Sue, thought the photo-dieting an interesting idea.

The only other place I’ve mentioned it so far is on the message boards on weightlossresources. Where some of the responses have been ‘sounds really good but I would feel silly/don’t have the time‘ and two people were openly hostile. One said

Well, I’d have to say I’m glad I’m not going to be asked to join you for a meal. Sorry but photographing your food is just not a way to learn a healthy lifestyle.

Someone else asked her ‘why so judgemental?‘
My reply (to the rude message) was

What a strange response.

You said
“Well, I’d have to say I’m glad I’m not going to be asked to join you for a meal.“

Why? I don’t tell other people what to eat or insist that they photograph their food.

You said
“photographing your food is just not a way to learn a healthy lifestyle.”
I disagree.

Through doing this I have learned that although on paper (or WLR log) my meal appeared healthy – lots of veggies, lean meat – I was putting far too much of it on my plate. Getting out of the habit of eating too much, even if it is healthy food, is a very important thing to learn and this has helped me.

I don’t say it would work for everyone, but it does for some.

I wonder what the reaction will be when I can show that I have lost a stone, two stone, etc?

Photo-diet Project – I’m not alone!

Hey, the group has got members! And photos and discussion postings that are not mine! Only five of us so far but I’m really pleased.

I’ve been much more careful about how much I’ve put on my plate this week and I’ve managed to avoid the calorie table completely, despite there being tasty looking stuff on it each day this week. I just tell myself ‘it’s nothing to do with me’.

Now to get my poetry TMA completed to submit by Friday (which will be another step closer to goal two).

New Flickr group for the Photo-Diet Project

I’ve created a Flickr group for anyone who wants to try this.  Hopefully some people will join and we can support each other. I think it’s easier to keep going if other people know you are doing it.

If you want to take a look, or join, it’s at http://www.flickr.com/groups/photo-diet/

One week on – photo-diet project

Well I’ve just completed my first week (you don’t need to check your calendar – my photo-diet weeks start on Tuesdays) and it’s certainly been an eye-opener.

I haven’t really been ‘dieting’ this past week. More like doing what I usually think of as ‘being reasonably good’ which means no fried food, no take-aways, eat some fish, lots of fruit and veggies and not as much cake, chocolate and biscuits as I would like. As I posted previously, I knew I’d had too much of that sort of stuff earlier in the week. Too many visits to the calorie table (that really is what we call the table in my office where calorific offerings are placed).

Now that I’ve completed a week and made the mosaic I can see exactly what I did eat.

Apart from the obvious cakes an biscuits and chocolate I can see that my portion sizes are too big. I’m also wondering if I eat too much fruit. I know it’s quite low in calories and very healthy but can you have too much?

For week two I shall use portion control for meals but wont cut down on the fruit yet. I’ll see what difference the portions control makes first.

I’ve weighed my cereal and blueberries this morning – 30g of Dorset Cereal muesli and 60g of blueberries. I’ve not measured the milk but it will have been about 100ml.

For lunch I’m using a square lock’n’lock and can only have what will fit in to that (semi-inspired by looking at the bento lunch box and laptop lunch groups on flickr). Today’s lunch is

stuff I prepared last night while cooking dinner. The piece of tuna is left over from last night’s dinner. I will add some fruit and a yoghurt to that.

So, how will I fare this week?

The photo-diet project

As I think I mentioned in my opening post where I said I wanted to be slimmer, I’m photographing everything I eat. It makes me think about what I’m eating. Do I really want to take just one biscuit if it means I have to take a photograph? And, no, that doesn’t mean I should take four, to make it worth the trouble. Leave them alone!

Of course I don’t have to take photos every time I eat. I often have two yoghurts at my desk in the afternoon. Having taken a photograph of two yoghurts once, that’s stored in the ‘photo library’ to be used again. I’m making a photo-mosaic of each day’s food and will make a weekly mosaic to replace the daily ones at the end of each week.

Update – October 2007 – I’ve now set up a separate flickr account for my photo-dieting.

I’ve already discovered how quickly I can forget what I ate on which days. So here’s what I’ve eaten so far today:

Dorset cereal fruity porridge (apple & cinnamon) with blueberries.

Three mini pork pies and some tomatoes. This is an example of ‘eating stuff because it it there’. I’d worked out that a box of soft fruit was not enough for lunch – it left me feeling hungry. I need something extra. My partner had been shopping yesterday and bought three six-packs of mini pork pies that were reduced-to-clear. It says on the wrapper ‘not suitable for home freezing’ so I brought a packet in to work and ate three. They tasted okay but nothing special. That was a waste of calories. He can have the rest, I’ll find something healthier.

Later this afternoon I will eat my box of fruit – strawberries, raspberries and cherries.

Well, I at the fruit and then had a banana as I left work because I was going straight to aqua-aerobics. This evening I had sesame chicken stir-fry with spinach. I only ate three-quarters of what I put on my plate. How to document that? I guess I will have to crop the photograph to show three-quarters 😉

I also had a chocolate liqueur which turned out to be one of the old-fashioned kind with a sugar coating inside.

In just under 83 weeks time I will be fifty …

I don’t want to dread this, I want it to feel positive about it. With this in mind I have some goals.

By my fiftieth birthday I want to be:

• slimmer,
• have completed my degree,
• living in a different house,
• more organised

I’m going to keep this blog to track my progress. My aim is to update it at least once a week.
A bit more about the goals and how I plan to achieve them:

Slimmer
In 83 weeks I could lose 83 pounds (just under six stone). Now, I don’t want to lose quite that much – about five stone would be good, maybe five and half. So it’s a good thing that a pound a week, while quite realistic, is easier said than done. Some weeks I wont lose anything. Some weeks (not too many I hope) I might actually gain a little – particularly if I am on holiday. So let’s settle for four stone. I would be very happy if I could lose that amount by 2009.

How am I going to do it?
I’ve tried all kinds of diets, but I’m not very good at sticking to them. Sometimes it’s because something tempts me (the calorie table at work); sometimes it’s because I’m feeling low; other times I’ve been really good all day but something happens in the evening to prevent me from having my nice, healthy, planned meal on time and I am too hungry to wait and have to eat whatever is to hand.

I toyed with the idea of using the VLCD (very low calorie diet) meal replacement plan ‘Lighter Life’ which an acquaintance has found worked for her. However, I really can’t justify the cost (about £66 per week). So the plan is to eat a low number of calories (between 1000 – 1500 per day) of healthy food.

Keeping track of what worked is useful. No, actually, it’s essential. Because last summer one of my diets worked and I dropped a dress size. But I now can’t remember if I lost the weight when I was following the Tesco GI diet or the Australia CSIRO diet.

Lists of what I’ve eaten are boring and a picture paints a thousand words. So, with thoughts of the images of groaning tables of food shown in the kind of TV programmes where a busybody tells someone what a terrible person they are; and with the far better inspiration of the flicker group ‘a week of food’ I’ve decided to keep a photographic log of my food. If I’m going to eat it, I have to have a photograph of it. I’ll do a mosaic of a week’s food to keep it sensible – that should be 83 mosaics. A bit like this one I made of the food on our recent holiday to Russia.

I will post them on my flickr pages and possibly on

Next entry – Goal two: complete my degree