http://www.flickr.com/photos/escdotdot/sets/603620/
Another very hot day to take a long walk on. There’s a story to come about how I saved a pony’s life, but it’ll have to wait until tomorrow . . .
walking around Wicken Fen
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Category Archives: Walking
to do list
Where are all the images?
After all it’s “words and pictures from escdotdot.” To do this I need to adapt the template to create space for them, rather than have them as standard blog entries. And I need to figure out the technical side of things – I’m looking at a some WordPress plugins to facilitate this.
IE
I need to work on fixing the display issues with IE.
Lolworth round trip
The walk
Another scorcher of a day.
Went out this morning, before it got too hot, and went for a walk from Lolworth, through Childerley, Knapwell and Boxworth back to Lolworth. Even at that time the heat was very intense.
This was a beautiful walk, just the right mix of country and village areas, gently undulating paths through enclosed, tree-lined routes and open fields. If I was into ranking things, I’d give it an eight out of ten.
It took about three hours which seems to be my ideal length, I find my hips start hurting quite a lot after that – not sure what that’s all about, it’s one of those things that you’re not quite sure is normal or if there is a genuine medical problem.
The self-analysis
I’ve always had this pain. I remember I used to go for long walks around London and when I was on solo holidays. When I was on my own I didn’t seem to be able to regulate myself, I would just walk, and walk, and walk. And a number of times I would get back in such pain.
I used to have this thing about turning around on a journey – I just couldn’t do it. If I was walking somewhere I’d get really self-conscious about the point at which I’d think “right, that’s enough, time to go back”, I couldn’t just stop and turn around and retrace my steps, I had to find a way to go on a round trip with no overlap. I think I felt that people would think I was odd, just stopping and turning around.
On a related note to the hips thing, I really hurt my ankles one time walking around Padua. I knew I was hurting, but I just wouldn’t stop. I guess I just didn’t feel safe stopping. I didn’t have a map and I’d walked out of the part of the town I knew and into a suburban area on the edge of the town, so I was feeling kind of out of place. I had to just keep walking until I found my way back to an area I recognized.
I still have this problem with turning around, actually, although I’ve now developed a ploy of making a show of stopping, checking my watch or phone or something, to make it look as if I’ve remembered something, or I’ve just got a message, something that would be a good reason to turn around.
That’s insecurity, right? Because I can’t do anything without thinking of what other people would think.
Technorati Tags: analysis, boxworth, childerley, holiday, hot, knapwell, lolworth, padua, walk, walking
Willingham and the Great Ouse
I got up reasonably early and went out for walk from Willingham up to the Great Ouse, along its banks and down into Willingham again. Took about 3 hours in all, 6.5 miles according to the book. Not the most interesting of walks from a photography point of view, many long straight paths, flat fields and distant tree-lines, your typical fen landscape. But I did get a few good shots that are on flickr.
I tried to make more of an effort with the flickr descriptions for these photos. Because of the lack of good subject-matter, this set became less about photography per se and more about a journey that was being documented using photography, so adding a description seemed appropriate in this case. So what I really mean is that I was being a tourist not an artist.
And here is where I have a bit of an ambiguous attitude towards my photography. I see it as an artistic expression and would like to make every shot count. But sometimes you’re just unable to find the inspiration and all you can do is tell a story in a sequence of shots, and although I am attempting to make the shots the best I can, sometimes that’s not their only reason for being. They have an information content as well as an aesthetic value.
I think that I would like to set up two concurrent streams, one for sets of pictures which are like every day life, and one for special shots, art shots if you will. On a related note I was taking a look at pixelpost which I’ve come across various photographers using. Not sure if I would need a separate database for this or if I could double-up the blog’s one.
Technorati Tags: blog, flickr, photography, walk