This weekend was certainly an education when it came to insects and plants. Who would’ve thought that taking a photo of a moth would’ve doubled or tripled my knowledge of the animal kingdom?

Hot on the back of the HAWK MOTH, I now have some photos of peacocks. Originally, I thought I had some peahens too, but as it turned out: it was just an albino peacock. How about that. Where did I find peacocks? Roaming around the garden of one of our local ‘little cottages that sells cake and tea’ — is there a better name for such places? It really is a little cottage in the middle of no where (2 or 3 miles from any neighbours) that looks down over Ashdown Forest (the ‘Hundred Acre Wood‘, if you’re a Winnie-the-Pooh fan) with fantastic gardens and, seemingly, lots of peacocks.

So without further ado, a series of photos entitled ‘Cocks at Sunset.

What with all the excitement of my holiday on Monday I have to admit that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write. Which is annoying because I really like writing! And I won’t get to write properly until after my trip. I hope I can survive (and satisfy you guys) with just lots and lots and lots of photos. Here’s hoping!

Anyway… I caught an episode of a fantastic series that’s airing in the UK on Channel 4 at the moment: Inside Nature’s Giants. The first episode featured an elephant (which I missed!) but this week they autopsied a massive Fin Whale (second only in size to the Blue Whale, the largest creature on the planet) — and as the Faroe Islands have lots of Fin Whales, I was obviously very interested! This poor girl had beached itself in Ireland and died — but not to waste such a golden opportunity, a crack team of biologists and veterinary scientists flew in to cut the beastie into little pieces –  in the name of science and commercial TV! (Here’s a video clip which I hope you can view outside the UK.)

I won’t lie: it was pretty damn grim to see the whale’s coroner knee-deep in whale bits (there’s no other word or words that can suitably describe the pink, wobbly mass she was wading through). ‘If I can just reach a little bit further up here into this cavity I can free its heart, but it’s tied down by all of these blood vessels…’ She’s hacking away with a machete! Chopping away at a dead whale!

The heart of this leviathan is a cubic meter! The main scientist (the one with the sharpest knife) held up a segment of its aorta (the main output artery of the heart) and it was about the size of your head! And its heart only beats three times a minute! (Which is how it stays underwater for so long.) The whole whale weighs 60 tons (55,000kg) and is 65 feet (20m) long! When feeding it swallows 70 cubic meters (18,000 gallons) of water and then spits it back out through its filters, capturing fish and crustaceans. It can empty and fill its 3000-litre lungs in one breath — which it only needs to do once every 40 minutes!

But the amazing bit? They’re mammals, just like you and I! They originally started off as dog-like creatures with hoofed feet. 53 million years ago these ‘pakicetids’ jumped into the water and never looked back. It took 15 million years for them to lose their legs and become fully marine. 8 million years more and they had learnt to echolocate (the ’sonar’ that they use to locate food and obstacles). 10 million years later they diversified into dolphins and porpoises — and that’s where we are today.

‘Just’ 53 million years to mutate from average-sized land-dwelling mammal to the largest species this planet has ever known — the Blue Whale (which are bigger than commercial jets, by the way). Their new-born children weigh 6,000lbs (2,700kg) and drink 400 litres of milk a day! But as weird and foreign and huge as they are, they’re still mammals. These monsters are genetically more similar to a mouse than a fish.

And that made me think about where we’d be in 53 million years.

Humans are incredibly young in the grand scale of things. We — Homo habilis, our very, very primitive ancestors — started using tools around 2.5 million years ago, which set us apart from our chimpanzee brethren. And look how far (or not?) we’ve come in just 2.5 million years! In another 51.5 million years what could we possibly evolve into?

I’ve talked a tiny bit about the future of the human race but hardly touched on the topic of evolution.Will we even live long enough to experience tangible evolution? And if we do evolve significantly, what form will it take? Looking at that little dorky dog-like creature above, and then at the Blue Whale it’s almost impossible to fathom what we might become if given enough time! What environmental condition or external stimulus will have the biggest impact on our evolution? Will we develop a 6th finger on each hand to help us type faster? Will evolution instead take the form of transhumanism: bionic arms and eyes, and cybernetic implants?

The problem is, evolution is slow. You can forget ruggedised skin to survive global warming (or impending ice age if you’re that way inclined). You can forget wings to fly around with (though that might happen if we move to a planet with less gravity!) In fact… I really have no idea what we might evolve into. It’s like being asked ‘what do you think the world will be like in 100 years?‘ but exponentially more difficult to answer.

Looking at history we’re actually more likely to wiped out by a meteor before we evolve into something new and exciting. With us obliterated, the whales might sneak back onto land and spend another 53 million years transforming back into dogs:  speaking dogs with opposable thumbs capable of using tools.

Hmmm…

Hi!

I’m way behind, aren’t I? And this will be the first blog entry that I’ve written before 4am so it might even make a little more sense than usual! I might even use a few long words, if I’m feeling saucy.

Today I ate puffin! I won’t go into too much detail as some people might find it disturbing (let’s face it, they’re really cute). It tasted awesome. The best meat I’ve ever tasted; like duck, chicken and pigeon all rolled into one delicious, delectable package. And the GRAVY! God knows how it was made — probably from the fat of the puffin and the love juice of 42 vestal virgins — but it was so good. On the side we had a portion of boiled-and-gently-roasted potatoes which were also divine. After covered in puffin gravy of course.

In other news — went to G! Festival yesterday. Left around 6pm, got home at 5am — and the best bit despite the great music from Teitur (the closest thing to ‘international pop artist’ in the Faroes) and Frændur (one of their ‘legendary’ rock/folk bands from the 80s) — and the best bit was that we got both another sunset and, this time, a sunrise too! The beautiful Nordic sun slipping out of the Atlantic and into a glacial valley, illuminating the lazy, deep-purple fjords. And then the light as it begins to crest over a nearby cloud-topped hill creating shades of pinky-grapefruit that I thought impossible to find in nature.

Anyway, two photos — first sunset and then dawn.

(Note the seagull in the top left!)

There’s a huge national holiday coming up on Tuesday so I might not be around a lot; I don’t even know if there’ll be lots of photos to come either. There’ll be lots of stories though I am sure… If I am sober enough to remember them…

We’re off to Tórshavn, the capital city, for Ólavsøka!

The Leaf Ninja & ‘Yes, they’re real’

Seb: Oh, look, it’s a… a… er… SOMETHING! Hiding in the trees!

The original concept for this photo was to have me laying on the ground, my face covered in leaves, with just my eyes visible.

Turns out the big-leaf trees aren’t shedding yet. And covering a head the size of mine in beech leaves is pretty hard…

So I did the only thing a man can do in such a situation. I rubbed leaves into my hair and torso until I looked like a tree! I’m topless, but sadly you can’t see — you’ll have to trust me that I looked very ‘Tarzan’.

And ta’da… stealthy, leaf ninja!

The ‘look’ is meant to be kind of ‘I could kill you with just my thumbs.’

But Abi thinks it looks more ‘creepy stalker in the garden’. Hmpf.

If you’re bored with the tree theme: I have a feeling that next week will be wildly different.

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Abi: I remember seeing makeup similar to this on a fashion shoot a while ago and always think about it. This is a play on nature versus natural beauty and how we try to emulate what is natural, often by the most false and synthetic means.

Incidentally, my eyelashes are really quite freakishly long. They are the first thing people comment on when they meet me and probably the most commented upon aspect on all my flickr photos.

In the words of Sir Walter Scott: “What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.”

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Click the images to visit our Flickr streams. Feel free to comment here or there!

South Downs Sunset & Celebration

Seb: Ah, back to my comfort zone of landscapes. I thought I was doing rather well, having not done one since week 1! But here I am… chasing the perfect landscape yet again.

This one’s of the South Downs (I think). At least, it’s south of where I am now, and north of Brighton, which I think is the South Downs. Basically there’s a bunch of roads that run across the tops of these lovely valleys, looking down and across some sweeping, rolling hillocks.

I had intended to go out and photograph Ashdown Forest, which kind of leads into the South Downs, but instead decided to go and chase the sunset from the top of the hill.

And… I think I got the killer shot: heather, ferns, birch, sunset, clouds… what more is there? I even have my signature bit of blue…

Sadly a lot of the detail is only really visible at full size… but you’ll have to trust me: this one’s really beautiful.

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Abi: My life is in a period of upheval at the moment. When everything seems uncertain to us it is quite easy to forget that what could be described the worst day to some can be the happiest to others. My friend Laura got married this weekend, I’d be a bad friend if I couldn’t forget my worries for just one day.

In other news, I think I had my first proper falling out with the other 50% of this project this week. It sucked. Sorry Seb.

This photo was something of an accident. But I liked it so I’m ok admitting it.

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Click on either photo to visit our Flickr streams.

[Lots of pretty photos if you just scroll down. But there's only 400 words or so, if you fancy it.]

The last couple of months have seen me trying to use my 50mm and 100mm lenses a lot more. I don’t know why — probably because I used my landscape lens almost exclusively for the first half of the year. I guess you can get bored of one particular style of art, if you do it enough and don’t mix things up?

For those of you that aren’t photographers, a little lesson on lens ’sizes’: your natural eyesight is about equivalent to the view arc/angle of a 50mm lens — i.e. the photos that were taken with a 50mm lens look most like you would see with your own eyes. We call the 50mm the ‘normal lens‘.

If you go wider than 50mm you approach ‘wide-angle’ and ‘landscape’ lenses. At 35mm things still look fairly normal, but towards 15-20mm things become very ’stretched’ or distorted, because you are trying to focus almost 180 degrees of view onto a flat plane.

If you go narrower into the telescopic range — anything over 80mm — the field of view shrinks to just a few degrees. Telescopic photos feel very ‘condensed’, or even just ‘dense’ or ‘thick’. It’s all an effect of the light, and quite hard to explain — but just remember that depending on what kind of lens you use, you can get a very different feeling in the photo. There’s a reason portraits are taken with 50 or 80mm lenses. If you ever see a portrait that feels ‘weird’ it’s usually because they’ve been shot with a weird lens (alien-head is a classic example, if shot from above with a landscape lens)

Anyway, after shooting lots of very compressed and tight photos (at least by my standards, as I’m a landscape kiddie really) with the 50 and 100mm lenses, I whipped my landscape lens out (which is 16mm!) and headed into the countryside to take some photos. If you’ve seen yesterday’s 11 of 52, you’ve already seen one of the photos in this set, but I’ve included it for a sense of completeness. The whole set will eventually find its way to my online gallery, if you wish to buy a print (or two). In my humble opinion, I think the entire set would look rather spectacular on YOUR wall.

Without further ado: It was Autumn, the last few leaves barely clinging to the boughs. It was sunset and there were actually pretty clouds for once. I think the results speak for themselves. I bet you had no idea England could be so pretty but without being GREEN. So, with hints of orange, russet and pinky hues, I give you Tuesday’s Landscape Photogasm (#1).

Note: Titles or extra details can be found by hovering over each image.

That’s all for this week. Tomorrow… hm, I’m not sure yet. Oh, and if you’re interested in buying a print of one of these, let me know — I will be offering some kind of Christmas/Festive Season discount soon, so I might as well start it with your purchase…!

I think it’s kinda little funny that I didn’t actually get the ‘prejudice’ part of the book’s title until I finished it. Then I put it down, lay back, and actually thought about it: ‘Ohhh! Darcy was prejudiced!’ Or maybe it’s meant to be more over-arcing than that — an observation of society at the time — who knows.

You’ll have to bear with me, because I never really learnt how to dissect books. School was a bit backward like that: I learnt how to speak Elvish, but actual critical textual analysis… not so much. I also never learnt how to ‘grammar’ either, by the way (which is why you might sometimes see some ‘odd’ idiosyncrasies in my writing style). It’s kind of fun though, inventing your own grammar as you go along, not held back by rules nor regulations or run-on sentences! [... -S]

Anyway, back to Pride & Prejudice, a book about smouldering, slow-burning passion. It’s all about Darcy and his interactions with Elizabeth — it’s told from her point of view of course, but the entire chemistry relies on the catalytic import of Mr Darcy. I dog-eared every ‘fiery’ exchange (of which there are many) and about 90% of them are between Elizabeth and Darcy. The rest of the book, when Darcy isn’t about, actually falls a bit flat.

There’s a period of about 50 pages, half way through or so, where not much at all happens. Well, stuff happens, but it doesn’t involve Darcy — it’s the few chapters after Bingley and his entourage return to London. We’re suddenly thrust into a life of… mediocrity. Lydia hits on some boys. The other girls help their mother. Blah blah blah — I was actually bored until I realised that Pemberley is in Derbyshire: so Elizabeth is going to bump into Darcy on his own stomping ground… here we go then!

The rest though; the rest is magic — from the moment Darcy delivers that fateful letter to Elizabeth while treading the grounds of Rosings. Elizabeth’s growing love for Darcy is so damn smooth and delivered so naturally (or realistically) that we soon find our love for him equal to hers. Yes, by the end I was nursing a serious crush on Darcy. Surely I am not the only boy to experience, as the final exposition takes place, some rather intense, er, feelings? If I had to fault their love (I suppose many would call this one of the greatest love stories?) it would have to the forced circumstance or mitigating factors of their relationship: Elizabeth’s hatred for Darcy at the beginning of the book is completely over the top. Sure, Elizabeth is meant to be ‘wild’ (another point that is really driven home early on), but it just feels forced. I guess Jane Austen needs to get us to a valid ’start point’ for the love story as quickly as possible — perhaps she wanted to write the falling-in-love portion, and didn’t want to simply start the book with Elizabeth already hating Darcy? At least with the introductory meetings/balls at Netherfield we get a lot of the Jane/Bingley storyline — actually, after Netherfield, the story makes way for Elizabeth and Darcy, so I GUESS the story is actually crafted rather well.

How about that, you were just treated to an internal monologue.

Something should be said about the ye olde English too. Chuse, shewn, staid, to-morrow, twelvemonth! Then the grammar and punctuation — God, it’s pretty crazy. Em dashes everywhere (and double em dashes, which I’d never seen before), semi-colons used as commas or periods, depending on the clause (see, I make it sound like I know grammar, but I don’t really) — and my personal favourite, exclamations not marking the end of a sentence: God! if only Darcy had shewn his true colours in the first twelvemonth of our mutual acquaintance. I haven’t seen sentences like that since Shakespeare — not that I’ve read many classics mind you.

If I felt authoritative on the matter, I’d give this one 9 out of 10 — as I don’t, and I’m not, I will simply recommend you read Pride & Prejudice.

I’m going to try and share a few of my choice snippets from the book (I’ve already done a few on Facebook). Maybe I can ‘microblog’ them, not on Twitter, but here… hmm!

Next book: Catch-22

(You can click either to get a larger, zoomed-in view… if you really want that…)

First, I just wanted to clear up some issues. Yesterday, when I ‘leaked’ (sorry) the first picture on Twitter, I had a lot of responses questioning the colour (and consistency?) of my urine. No, I do not have anything wrong with my kidneys. I’m not taking any vitamin supplements. I did not drink a lot of orange juice. That’s just the natural, slightly-radioactive hue of my urine. Sorry. That’s just how it is.  [And if you want more too-much-information, hit up Lilu's blog. Can girls write with yellow snow as well as boys...?]

Would it make it any better if I said my entire family were out and about enjoying the snow on our estate today, as I defaced our lawn? I think my sister’s off to the left somewhere, making a snowman. Also, after I had done up my fly, we made snow angels. My mother’s up the drive, shaking snow from the trees. I think my dad was off in the other field making a ramp to practice his snowboarding.

Anyway, it’s still snowing here in the UK. It’s really, really crazy. It’s easily the most snow I’ve ever seen — apparently it’s the most we’ve had in 50 years! The first half of it fell during the Christmas holiday, but this latest batch has effectively shut down the country. Really, really crazy.

If you’ve been stalking me on either Twitter or Facebook, the next piece of news probably won’t come as a surprise. Truth be told, I’m going a little crazy here in cold, grey, snowy, dismal England. I don’t ever recall having this much trouble getting through the winter — something has changed within me, something is not the same. It’s like… the rules of the game have changed and I’m no longer satisfied with sitting here in front of my computers.

So I’m going to NORWAY, baby. Middle of March through until some time in April. I will experience the FJORDS and… er… I don’t know — cute, blonde inbred Scandinavian Übermensch? (That’s a Google Images link by the way — I’m not going to go and pick favourites, sheesh.)

(Photo not mine — just showing you what a fjord can look like…)

But yes, despite the brief moments of testosteronic superiority, the real reason I’m going is the fjords. Often described as the most beautiful natural wonders of the world, the fjords of Norway line the entire coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula and make up 7% of Norway’s total area. For some reason, Norway has one of the lowest densities in the world with only 4.8 million people in the entire country. Considering they have one of the best standards of living, and a huge income from oil, I really have no idea why no one lives there. Maybe there’s a disease (like the Faroe Islands), or maybe it’s the ol’ ‘it’s too damn cold for 80% of the year’ thing.

My friend in Bergen has a house on (by?) Hardangerfjord, which is one of the biggest. Have a look at Svein Ulvund’s photos of the fjord and nearby — insane, eh? March is when they’re meant to be at their finest, after most of the snow has been and gone. I hope I can do them justice — and I may need to buy a new camera before I go…

Anyway, I’ll be going to Bergen and Trondheim — here’s a map:

I actually had no idea they were so far north… Trondheim is further north than my trip to the Faroe Islands! At this time of year, there probably won’t be much sunlight — but by the time March rolls around, it should be at least 4C or 39F… so not that cold, really. Yet again I’ll miss the Arctic Circle by a few hundred miles, dammit!

We’ll try to drive around a bit, but I think only one of my hosts has a car — we’ll likely stay close to Bergen and Trondheim. Maybe they have skidoos that we can buzz around and churn snow with? Our plans are still in their formative stage, but I’ll be booking flights in the next few days… so there’s no going back.

If anyone’s been to Norway (Chele?), now’s the time to throw in any advice. And does anyone live in Norway? Maybe I can pay a fleeting visit!

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Because it’s Tuesday, I have photos; mostly alternates for yesterday’s 52 Weeks. They’re not amazing, but perhaps they’re interesting — you decide!

(You might not be able to see it on your screen, but the leaf is reflecting a pink sunset — if you can’t see it, trust me! It’s pretty!)

(Again, there’s some lovely pinks and blues in this photo, but you might not be able to see them! I chased the birds around for ages, but they finally settled down in the tree for a photo. So kind of them.)

The last two are obviously a bit ‘experimental’ — my favourite bits are the golden ‘halos’ where the sunset hits the water at an odd angle. Very cool.

How better to celebrate the day after Valentine’s Day than with the discussion of WAR?

I’ll let you in on a little secret, something I’m rather ashamed of: my knowledge of history is really lacking. I blame it on my schooling: basically, we studied the Romans, the Tudors, some Jurassic/dinosaur stuff… and that’s it. Seriously, I left school not knowing a thing about World War 1 and 2, or any contemporary political history. Oh, I forgot: we also studied the Normans — so, millions of years ago — then a huge gap — 2000 (the Romans), 1000 (the Normans) and 500 (the Tudors). And that’s it.

Obviously my knowledge of history has improved now, but there’s still some huge gaps from the last 500 years or so — Napoleon? I know that ended in Waterloo… I think. And there was the Crimean, but I don’t know anything about that. World War 1 was started in Serbia or something… but Vietnam? I haven’t a frickin’ clue why there was a war in Vietnam — and Burma too?

There’s a huge block of wars that occurred in colonial times, between 1600 and 1900 — not least of all the War of Independence (which I only found out was America vs. Britain recently!) Britain has been at war with Spain, the Netherlands, France… in fact, I think the only power we haven’t been at war with is the Portuguese. The colonies (i.e. everywhere except Europe) have basically been in a constant state of flux for 500 years, until the relatively-calm period of the last 50 years.

You probably know that New York was originally New Amsterdam — it was handed over to the British Empire, as part of some peace treaty with the Dutch Empire. Did you know that, after the First World War, Iraq was part of the British Empire… for more than a decade! Ah, the Middle East… for more than 2,000 years it has been the most contested part of the world. First for religious reasons, then exploration and trade, and now energy (with a bit of religion).

That’s the bit I get a little bit hung up on. History is full of war. Peace can be described as ‘the time between two wars’. Is there really a difference between terrorism (the instilling of terror within a given populace), and war? ‘Terrorism’ is usually used to describe acts by small groups upon entire nations — paramilitary, guerillas, etc. Is it any better if you declare war beforehand, and then send five guys in a B-29 to kill 100,000 people in Hiroshima?

Then we have ‘the crusades’, a rather fancy term used to connote a religious war. Crusaders are, by definition, religiously sanctioned warriors — you are killing in the name of a god. A crusade, generically, is an attack on some kind of lifestyle or ideology. You can have a crusade against drugs, or drunken behaviour, or Islam. A crusade, in essence, is righteous — its instigators firmly believe that what they are doing is right.

And therein we have a problem, because I’ve just described every war, religious or otherwise. War, from the protagonist’s point of view, is right. You don’t march into another country for fun, you do it because you must. War is a necessity for long-term survival — it is rational in that sense. (Well, OK, war — after diplomatic means have been exhausted — is rational.)

This is quite a hard thought to get your head around, but hang in there. Islamic terrorists declared war on America for ideological reasons — as an American, you probably can’t comprehend their rationale, but the terrorists believe they are right. Seriously, just as the Nazis wanted a world without Jews, they want a world without Americans. Look at it from the opposite point of view: George Bush declared war on Iraq, because he thought it was right. It’s as simple as that. The calculations leading up to that decision might be infinitely more complex, but it ultimately boils down to ‘it’s us or them’ — our way of living, or theirs.

It’s kind of funny, but obviously very sad at the same time: war will always exist. Fortunately, with the world explored and colonialism out of the way, we don’t war over land — but it was never about land anyway; it was about resources (food, slaves, oil, etc.) And guess what… (those of you that know me will know what’s coming) — until we get off this planet of ours, until we reduce the strain on our natural resources, war will always exist. We can build upwards into the stratosphere and down to the Earth’s mantle, we can synthesize materials and use ‘greener’ manufacturing methods, but ultimately we’re going to run out of resources.

Imagine for a moment: we have space travel. We can jet around from star to star, planet to planet. Can you imagine a war occurring back on the home world? No. Try to visualize the extent of the universe and the trillions of planets that can support life. Do you think we would ever need to war again? No — at least not for a very, very long time.