Saturday 27 December 2014

Boxing Day Meet

Had a nice morning out with the Cambridgeshire Hunt and Enfield Chace - a very welcoming lot of supporters and followers.

Home for Christmas

Family Portraits...

Suitably bizarre from Emily...

 

Monday 3 November 2014

Huntingdon Races


It has been a Hunting sort of week, following an introduction by a friend to the local hunt.  Sunday, though, we went racing.  I tried to capture some of the dynamics of it, with a slower shutter speed, to blur movement.  That kind of worked.  Here though are two favorite photographs of the day, one developed using NIKs Silver Efex Pro 2, and the other with Color Efex Pro 4.   I think we came out of the betting about even, which is as much as you could wish for.  A few more photographs here.

Wednesday 29 October 2014

Equine Portraits - Horses and Owners


I had a couple of hours with two friends of mine, and their horses, which gave us some nice portrait shots, which I must get around to printing up. 

Following the Hunt


It has been a fun half term with the children, getting up early twice this week to follow the local hunt after an introduction from a friend.  They are a nice lot, and I have managed to shoot some decent photographs.  I have set up an account for commercial retail of photographs.  No idea if it will come to much.  Not without marketing I suppose.  Some more hunting shots here.

Thursday 23 October 2014


With the right lighting even a modest mirror-less camera can return some nice images - here boy child and dog, with my Samsung NX300.

Monday 22 September 2014

Horses for Courses


I was riding in Dubai last year out at a Desert Resort off the Dubai to Al Ain road.  We got up early to be there for a sunrise get go before the heat of the day.  I snapped a few photographs afterwards, of the horses and camels.  Most have just sat in a file since, and I came across this the other day.  The groom has a face with character.  There are more snaps of horses at home and far away here.

Friday 1 August 2014

Rear Gunner, Helmand

Wow, this all seems such a long time ago...  Flying fast and low level out of LKG over the Green Zone, then popping up to high level at the edge of the desert.  Interesting times.  Fun times.  Worthwhile times, mainly.  Aviation in Helmand

Mountains and Sea

This could be mountains in the mist - but is not:  Muscat to Dubai revisited

Beauty and the Beast

At home for a while.  My neighbors are a really talented bunch.  This is a customer car they have more or less re-built from scratch.  It is Beauty and the Beast; AC Cobra

Saturday 19 July 2014

Desert Dunes

This is the view North East from the Al Ain to Dubai motorway.  Much of the desert between the two towns is flat and unremarkable, but in the last 20 miles there are some big dunes, favoured by off roaders.  At the right time of day and the right time of year there are dozens of 4 x 4s charging around the dunes, and families camping out.

Wednesday 16 July 2014

Muscat to Dubai Revisited



I took a car last week from Dubai down to Muscat, via Al Ain, Nizwa, Ibri, Al Hamra, Jebel Shams and Somail, retracing the route of my 400 mile solo walk for Stu Kyffin back in March.  At the time it seemed like a long plod, which it was, but driving it reminded me of the distance.  I remembered most of the landmarks along the way, but much of it also was completely new.  I guess I spent a long time, particularly in the last week, just with my head down and making slow but steady progress.  Not sure I will be doing anything similar again in a rush, although.....

Sunday 29 June 2014

Dubai

Back in Dubai for a few days catching up with old friends.  Dubai, like life, will offer you what you are looking for, but perhaps to a greater degree than other places.  It is expensive, and can be hi-octane, but beyond the glitz and the glamour of the newest developments there are other lives, good and bad.  I would not choose to be a migrant worker here.  Although perhaps the stories of their abuse may be overdone I am sure there is some substance too them, and it is only by a chance of birth that it is they who are out in the heat building the glitz and me on the other side of the glass enjoying air conditioning.  There is a third life, one that some of my friends enjoy, which is a relatively normal family life. For me for now it is another week in my favourite hotel, being well looked after, finishing a short period of consultancy, and hopefully making some further useful connections along the way.

Gallery:     Dubai MarinaOman and Dubai Revisited

Thursday 19 June 2014

Migrant Workers

If ever you feel life is not too great, spare a thought for the guy who escaped to Tripoli and stands on the side of the road with a bucket and a roller hoping to be hired.

There are more snaps from Libya at this link:  Tripoli

Tiger Cats

 
As cats go... very pretty, very bright, loves to play games, very curious.  Great cat...

Monday 16 June 2014

Tripoli

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells
When shadows pass gigantic on the sand,
And softly through the silence beat the bells
Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.


Tripoli Visit

Friday 16 May 2014

Insomnia

Woke up at 4.30 am yesterday.  Joy of joys.  Enjoyed walking the dog over the fields and around the lakes. This is a fairly tranquil place to be.  Off to Libya next week.  That will be different.

Thursday 8 May 2014

Wedding Revisited


I was looking back yesterday through some photographs taken in Feb at my pal Nel's wedding, sorting out some to send over to her.  I found some that I really enjoyed, not sure why, which had not caught my eye the first time around. Some of the others, which made the first cut, are here:  Wedding

Wednesday 30 April 2014

Riding


Took my boy riding after a 6 month break.  Straight into jumping.  Good lad!



Monday 28 April 2014

Family shots - Samsung NX300


I bought a little Samsung NX300 to go to the Lebanon with in January, having left my Canon and kit at home.  I am really enjoying using it.  It has all sorts of clever features which I am only just starting to understand.  So far it has produced some great results.  I bought it because it has a full manual mode and a fairly fast lense.  I'm enjoying the other gizmo's.  One touch on the back of the screen gives auto focus, exposure control and shutter release.  A couple of more touches and photo's can be uploaded to the internet, so long as there is a wireless connection.  Good lenses too.  Just bought a converter (about £12) online which will enable me to use my old FD lenses too.  May buy a converter for my EOS Lenses - let's see how we get on with the FD series for a start.


I like these family snaps - my boy and youngest walking the final mile home after a good leg stretch with the dog.  And below - getting ready for a portrait shot with the children and Pippa.  We never did get a good portrait!  The Samsung can shoot multiple shots in very quick succession - faster than my 5DII for sure.  It can be fun just shooting a blurr of photographs and seeing later what has been captured.  I like this:


Thursday 17 April 2014

Morning Sky in East Anglian

I arrived home last week from my most recent stint in Dubai.  I wanted to capture the feel of the skies here, so different from the almost constant blues over the UAE.  I took Pippa out for an early morning walk and was really looking to photograph the fields.  I had my Canon, a new wider angle zoom and my tripod.  This photo' was almost a chance shot, in that I had finished looking east over the fields towards sunrise, and was just sorting my gear out.  I brought the dog in and made her sit in front of the camera and this was the result. 

The tripod enabled a slower shutter speed and so a deeper depth of focus.  I ran this through Lightroom for some post processing and upped the colour and clarity a little, lightening the foreground and darkening the skies with separate graduated filters.  I also lightened and sharpened the dog a little.  This photo drew some really positive comments on FB so I thought I would drop it up here.  Arguably it is over processed, with a close to HDR feel, although it is one shot and not a combination of exposures so not an HDR photo. 

This and a few other photographs I have taken are close to accurate representations of what I was seeing, although clearly 'sparked up' a bit with post processing.  What it gives is not so much a 100% accurate representation of what I saw, but a 100% accurate representation of how what I saw made me feel.

Nel and Keiran's Wedding - 15th Feb 2015


I went to a friends wedding on a flying visit to the UK in February.  I served with Nel in the summer of 2009.  She is exceptionally bright and fun and we were very privileged to be invited.  I took a bunch of photographs at the reception and particularly like these two for their busyness and the range of expressions.  It would be fun to be the second camera man at a wedding, but I would not want to be the main man.  You only get once chance at the right formal shots, and I'm just not that consistent.

The Shrine of Hazrat Ali

I'm printing a few photographs and, for the first time, using mount boards to package and display them.  Really pleased with the results.  I took a few to a local crafts shop and the lady there has agreed to carry some.  Everyone seems to like this particular photo of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif.  There is more on the Blue Mosque here:  The Blue Mosque: The Shrine of Hazrat Ali - More at Wikipedia


Thursday 20 February 2014

French Landscapes

View from my Brother in Law's place across the fields in France.   A great place to stay for a few days.  More photographs here.

Monday 10 February 2014

Herat

08 March 2013:  I visited Herat as a part of our bid for airport security in Afghanistan.  The City is very different to those in the South and East of Afghanistan.

Herat is some 100km from the Iranian border and has a strong Persian influence.  Ok, it is still Afghanistan, and so a fundamentalist Islamic town, but hey, they have a Ferris Wheel and a sense of fun.

The Minarets shown here are unstable and have been the subject of much engineering work to ensure they do not topple.  More information on the history of this district of Herat, and these minarets, is available from the Lonely Planet website here.

Our security on this trip was provided by the regional head of border police, a guy we had looked after and vice versa when he ran security at the Kabul International Airport.  (We gave him $1,000 for cricket kit so that his Afghan National Policemen (ANP) could play in a local league.  We never did see a game - maybe I was naive?)  A little good will goes a long way and he came to pick us up from the airport in Herat.

The airport road is frequently bombed, and our soft skinned unarmoured ANP Toyota's would have provided little protection.  On the other hand, the two guys in the back with the Dushka Heavy Machine Gun, who were wearing motorcycle helmets to protect against the dust and the cold, gave us a certain 'Mad Max' look and were certainly a strong deterrent to any ground attack.


Sunday 9 February 2014

When you go home...


This is from the top of the memorial to the fallen taken in Nad-e-Ali, in 2012, during a visit to G4S staff working there in support of the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team.  It was shot hand held, at night.  I did think of cleaning the memorial before taking the photograph, but it seemed more poignant not to.  When we are done there I wonder if this will remain, or be brought back to the UK, much as some of the memorials in Iraq have been.

The military have been working hand in glove with the civilian administrators in Helmand since 2007.  The mission has civil primacy, and the Head of Mission, always a senior career British diplomat, was usually the equivalent of a 2 star general, and so outranked the British brigadier (a 1 star post) running the military aspect of the civil / military mission as Commander Task Force Helmand.

There are a lot of men on this plate.  Some from my own Regiment and others that I have known.  We paid a brutal price for clearing the Taliban from this area.  The Welsh Guards had a particularly vicious tour here in 2009, losing their Commanding Officer, a Company Commander, a Platoon Commander, and dozens of other men.  I knew these first two.  In fact I lived opposite the Company Commander, and we shared lunch shortly before he was killed.  I came away from lunch thinking that he had seen his future and it was bleak.  I also knew Dan Shepherd, from the JF EOD Group, who had spent some time with us in Musa Qala helping to clear improvised explosive devices from the town and neighboring countryside.  He was a good man.  They were the best of times, they were the worst of times.


Swayambutha Stupa - The Monkey Temple

In late 2012 I visited Kathmandu to see the homeland from which almost half our staff in Afghanistan are recruited, and to meet the small team there who recruit and select former Nepalese and Indian Army soldiers for service with us in Afghanistan.

Having visited Kathmandu I can understand why our Nepalese and Indian staff feel relatively at home in Kabul.  Both are busy cities, with worn infrastructure, although of course the security situation is very different in each.

The Nepalese army does have some operational experience, having spent ten years fighting a Maoist insurgency / civil war which began in 1996 and concluded in November 2006.  It is estimated that 15,000 people died in the conflict, with 100,000 to 150,000 becoming internally displaced persons.

All those that I met in Nepal were most welcoming.  They seem to be the most cheerful nation, and as is often the case those with the least seem to be the most content.  If I wanted to elect a religion based solely on the happiness of it's devotees I think Buddhism would be hard to beat.  This photograph was taken during a sight seeing trip to the Swayambutha Stupa - the Monkey Temple - in Kathmandu.  This photograph is cropped out of a much larger setting.  It was taken hand held at waist height as a candid shot.  More information on the temple is available at Lonly Planet here.

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi

I visited the Sheik Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi late in 2013 with friends from Sweden.  The Mosque was built by the late Sheik Zayed and the first service to be held there was his funeral.  He is now interred in a small mausoleum in the grounds.  The best time to visit is late afternoon, just before sunset, when the light is striking and just right for photographs.

I was not set up for architectural photographs - no tripod or timer, and in any event I was sight seeing with friends.  I did manage to snap a couple of worth while images along the way though, including this Indian family trying to make a baby smile for a group photograph.



Ladies are allowed in the mosque, but must wear an Abaya to cover hair and the form of the body.  My two friends are modeling the Abaya below....  These can be borrowed at the mosque.  More information on the Mosque may be found here:   SZGMAD






The Blue Mosque at Mazar-i-Sharif

The Shrine of Hazrat Ali, also known as the Blue Mosque, is located in the heart of Mazar-i-Sharif. It is one of the reputed burial places of Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in law of Prophet Muhammad.

It is very pretty and very blue.  We traveled to Mazar-i-Sharif to recce the airport for a security contract.  The Afghan Ministry of Transport were tendering a security contract for the regional hub airports of Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar.   I joined the trips to Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif simply to see something more of Afghanistan than Kabul and Helmand.

Both were good trips.  Mazar was the first (and at the time of writing last) place that I have seen a Leper, sitting outside the mosque in the street, missing fingers, nose, lips.  Quite grotesque.  Leprosy is alive in the mountains and towns of Northern Afghanistan, a medieval disease in a country that is still medieval in parts.

Afghans come to feed the doves in the grounds of the Blue Mosque.  Catching wild birds is something of a national pass time and it is interesting to see how tenderly they treat them.




Training Bodyguards

We ran a series of short training courses for the bodyguards of influential Afghans - or at least those who were important to us.

These included the team who looked after the Afghan Minister of Finance and, more locally, the Police District 10 Police Chief.

Both were important to us in different ways, and both were equally delighted that we ran some training, which included minor tactics, weapon handling and skill at arms, shooting, first aid, and fitness training.  Bodyguards in Afghanistan tend to be drawn from the tribe, clan, village of family of the principal.  They are chosen for their loyalty, and not necessarily their professional skills.

We aimed to provide, so far as is possible in a short course, a small amount of training which may just possibly help to keep the principle alive in future.  We provided this training gratis, in a spirit of friendship and brotherhood, rather than for any immediate financial gain or political capital building.

These, friendship, brotherhood, are traits that the Afghans admire and respect.  Respect and admiration go a long way in a country where the rule of law is tenuous at best, and where personal relationships matter more than any centrally driven decree or direction.

The Bodyguards enjoyed the training, and we enjoyed delivering it.


Range Work


Range work played a large part in our training in Afghanistan, with each team attending ranges on a regular basis.  Our Afghan Close Protection Team also had the opportunity to shoot, alongside their British and Commonwealth partners.

Shooting is definitely a skill which can be honed through practice.  The more you shoot, quite simply the better you become.  Well, with good coaching too.   You could liken the role of a Close Protection Operator to an Olympic Sprinter.  4 years in the preparation, then the event, when it comes, lasts only 10 seconds... but you have to put in the 4 years of work up to make it count.    You could stretch that analogy too far.  At least the Olympic Sprinter knows when his event is.  Our team lived their live on the starting blocks, and there are no Silver Medals in a gunfight.

Fortunately, throughout my time here, none of our CPO's were put to this test.  We did have incidents, and very nasty ones too, and the response of our Afghan and Gurkha Guard Force was a testament to the selection and training of our staff;  British Council Attack


Female Staff and the Absurd

Our female staff were the longest serving employee group on the books.  I remain uncertain if this is a reflection of their loyalty, or of the difficulty for a woman of obtaining employment in Kabul.  I am guessing the latter.

We quietly opened a creche for the children of our staff, as mandated under Afghan Employment Law.  This was an act one of our female Close Protection Operators describes as 'absurd'.  She was right, but I am a lover of absurdity, and doing the right thing, and this was a great combination of the two.  Unfortunately the uptake was poor, and after 3 months we had to close the creche down.  At least we had tried.

Fixer


This man was our fixer in one of the outstations.  Good humored, he could come and go as he pleased in the local town, and so performed a valuable service obtaining the small necessities of life that could not be passed down through the civil or military supply chain.

He was the enabler of weekly BBQ's, at which our staff hosted the military in this particular base, giving them the opportunity to break away from military operations for a few hours, and our guys the opportunity to develop the relationships necessary to enable their work.

The relationship between our staff and the military at this base became so strong that our guys were invited to the USMC welcome home ball in the U.S. an opportunity they took up, attending with their wives.

We had ordinary people doing remarkable things, and they were a pleasure to work with.

Saturday 8 February 2014

Afghan Trader

This chap used to come to our base in Kabul with other traders every Friday, where they set up stalls outside our dining room to sell jewellery, art work, carpets and clothing.

I bought a silver and Lapis Lazuli necklace and ring.  'How much' I asked.  '$60' he said.  So I gave him $60 and he gave me the look.

He then went around his stall filling my bag with various trinkets to make up the value to $60.  Clearly I had not played his game, and he wanted to make it right.