Spidre Doux

Tried out my +4 close-up lens on a spider in the bathroom. I had it fixed on my Sony 50mm f1.4 and it worked pretty well. Annoyingly I misremembered the f stop that the lens is at it's sharpest (I thought it was 2.8 but it's actually 3.3) so the photos probably aren't quite as sharp as they could have been, but then I didn't have a tripod either so it's probably not that significant. And so, without further ado, here he is.

I think it's come out OK, you can make out his (or her) hairy legs quite well. It's far from perfect of course but it is my first go.

...gehog News...Hedgehog News...Hed...

We saw Harriet again today, with one of the little ones, which means of course that she wasn't run over. Hurrah! She was clearly it's mother, it was running round her and following her all over the garden. Very entertaining, although I couldn't help wondering what had happened to the other one. Let's not speculate about that. Both young 'uns have been seen wandering round on their own so the other one was clearly just off on it's own somewhere...

Leonardo's Machines

Spent a wonderful afternoon at the Lightbox visiting the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. The main displays were scale models of some of his major 'firsts', such as his tank, his machine gun, his diving suit and of course his flying machine. I'd seen many of them before in the excellent TV series a while back when they attempted to make full scale versions and actually test them. Most of them worked perfectly, perhaps most surprisingly even the diving suit and the glider. Well, I'm not sure if the glider was perfect, but still, it wasn't bad. Most impressively though, upstairs in the life and times portion they actually have one of his original notebooks. Wow. Annoyingly you can only see two pages of it, which is just mean.

The most incredible thing for me, is to see just how damn clever the man was. It's truly humbling. I can't help wondering what he could have achieved if he had today's knowledge to build on, instead of having to figure everything out from first principles for himself.

Martial Chi

I spent last weekend at an excellent "Internal Strength" seminar given by the legendary Mike Sigman. He's a superb teacher and has managed to distill the basics of the internal martial arts into a few simple concepts and drills. Most importantly he emphasised that although the word "Chi" is used to describe the strength and power that can be developed using these methods, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the wishy washy mystical Chi that you often hear people wibbling about. In fact it's much better translated as connection to the ground, or solidity, rootedness, etc. Essentially what you are striving to achieve is the ability to contract and release your fascial net and elastic tissues of the body to store and release force like stretching and pinging an elastic band. You're also striving to maintain correct structural alignment to allow a sort of effortless solidity and strength. That's all, although of course, it's easier said than done. He described it like your body was covered in a rubber suit metaphorically speaking, so for example, if you contracted the suit across the back and shoulders it would pull up your arms. You can apply this to all parts of the body although the bits that connect to what aren't always entirely apparent.

So in essence all of the Tai Chi forms are really just ways to practice this stretching and releasing and a complete form should cover stretching "the suit" over all the bits of the body. He's also restored my faith a bit in the martial arts in general. Interestingly as well, he commented that martial Chi not understood that way in China so it's a uniquely Western misconception probably caused by poor translation - people without a martial background translating martial texts - which has been passed on and become institutionalised. It's also a sad fact that all the people who are practising forms without understanding the underlying concept of stretching and training the elastic parts of the body have been wasting their time!

Harry The Hedgehog II

Here's another (much better) shot of Harry. I've decided to stop trying to photograph the little things because it was disturbing them a bit.

In related Hedgehog news we had another two little baby ones in the garden a few days back. So that's four visiting our garden (that we know about) although we've not seen Harriet for a few days and there is a hedgehog squashed on the main road not too far away... :(

New Lens For Old, New Lens For Old

Well, not exactly, more like Old Lens for Money, but that made a better title. I picked up a second hand Minolta AF lens which will fit my camera in Harpers very cheaply (it's slightly damaged.) I've taken a few test shots and I can't see anything wrong with the pictures at all, in fact they look significantly better than the ones taken with the (more or less) equivalent kit lens. The guy in the shop said it was "the bees knees" in its day and it's certainly looking that way. Fortunately lens technology doesn't change nearly as much as the technology in the bodies does, so a good Minolta lens is a great buy at a fraction of the cost of the equivalent Sony ones. I might be haunting the second hand camera shops a bit more!

Police Van Fakery?

Something a little unusual happened on the way home from work last night. I was just through the Dartford Crossing in the usual heavy traffic when I heard a faint police siren. Naturally I started looking around too see if it was behind me. Sure enough I saw a white transit van behind me with it's headlights alternating. It was moving along the middle lane so in fact I didn't need to move over, it just swept past me on the inside. As it went past I noticed a few odd things. The first was that the siren was very quiet even when it was right beside me. The second was that it didn't have a blue flashing light anywhere in evidence. The third was that the back of the van was full of what can only be described as electrical junk. And the fourth was that it was quite an old and fairly dirty van.

So I started to wonder, was it really a police van or was it just some bloke who had rigged up his headlights and a siren to get through traffic a bit quicker? It certainly seems like it was the second one! And it certainly seemed to be working, everyone was getting out of his way! Unfortunately I have no way of telling.

Shame.