Boardom

The reason I haven’t been blogging lately is completely due to my boardation. In the past two and a half weeks that I’ve been home, my board hasn’t spent more than 4 consecutive days locked away in the storage room. So at a minimum, I owe you guys a few shots of my winter break:

More to come.

Rollfest.

Last Hurrah

Hello dearest readers (or at least dearest remaining readers who continue checking this blog after my recent blogging drought).

So it’s been awhile. A long while. My computer has been officially declared dead, thus the lack off blogationing from me. I have way too many awesome stereotyping portraits, London visuals, branding ideas, and drug-busting stories to post up here, but they’re all delayed until either my computer is repaired, or I visit the Apple store for a new addition the the Mactopian family. It’s up to my insurance to decide which it will be. Either way, it probably won’t happen until Christmas(ish).

My term at Roehampton University is over. Fine. Finito. Donzo. I’m ready to go home. See my friends, my family, my snowboard. I wish I was coming back though. Not to Roehampton, I’m not a fan of the school here, but just to London in general. It’s such a freaking sweet place. And I’ve made some bomb-diggity friends over here as well. To the Londoners: It’s been fun. Thanks for everything guys. If you ever venture out to the west coast, hit me up.

Tomorrow is roll out day. Our flight leaves at 7:15pm and we get in to Boston at 9:45pm. How’s that for trippy time traveling? I’m pretty sure British Air isn’t going to like me when I show up with my ridiculously heavy bags, but we’ll see what happens I guess.

That’s about it for now. Not much of a blog post I’m afraid, but I needed to bang out some type of semi-formalized, pixelated goodbye while I was still on this continent.

Bostonbound.

Peace.

My Apologies on Behalf of Apple

Hey folks. I would like to sincerely apologize to you on behalf of MacDaddy, the lovely MacBook Pro that normally handles my life for you all to enjoy in a visual manner. The past four days, he has not been listening to me. No matter how hard I pound on the keyboard, no matter how sporadically I click on the mouse, no matter how many times I take it apart, the laptop refuses to respond to anything. It just sits there. Smugly taunting me by running its screen saver and automatic back ups perfectly. Such is life when you work a computer to the bone. It was only a matter of time before it staged a revolution against me.

All that to say, sorry that the Scotland shots aren’t up yet. They’re just chillin’ on the hard drive; edited, exported, and ready to be thrown up on here. Just as soon as my computer decides to cooperate again. Apple store appointment is scheduled for tomorrow, so hopefully it’ll be up and running by tomorrow night. Until then, these library computers are suffering under my keystrokes.

Speaking of revolutions, we just happened to witness one today. Ok not a real one, but an acted out one. Us lovely Biolans went on our final “field trip” today that involved the Charles Dickens Museum, more food than I’ve ever seen, and a legit showing of Les Mis. A beauteous day in my book.

London is truly an amazing city. Every single time we go out we might as well be in a different country. Today we popped out of the Tube (subway for the non-British folk) and Bam! We were in a huge mall district that I’d never seen before. There is literally something to see here every single day of the week. I could easily spend another year here and only visit places I haven’t been. Crazy.

Rollout.

Scotlanding [teaser #2]

Awesome day today. Here’s a quick screen shot of some of the video I took today. Straight out of camera.

Peace.

Scotlanding [teaser]

Still traveling through Scotland. Currently on the Isle of Sky. Sick sights, but bad weather, limited daylight and 13+ hours of traveling have left photo ops few and far between. Tomorrow’s our first (and only) full day to just go get lost in Scottishness, so that’ll be fun.

Roll.

Scotland Bound.

Going up north. To Scotland. Tomorrow. In the morning. Stoked. Hardcore. Gonna get me a kilt or two.

Party.

No Touchdowns Here

We’ve been busy this week.

Guy Fawkes Day (folks are still setting off fireworks every five minutes). Then yesterday Beth, Kels, Lee, and I went down to the Tate Modern for the night. It was a pretty sweet museum, but I’m quickly discovering that I’m not much of an art person. Slightly ironic since I do the whole photo/video deal? Probably. But that’s how it is.

There were a couple exhibits that I thought were really cool (including one by Andy Warhol), and I definitely enjoyed my time there, but after an hour or so I was ready to roll.

Today we visited the National War Museum, which I actually thought was very, very cool. We only spent an hour and a half there, but I could’ve easily stayed there another two hours. Someday I’m going to have to find a good book on modern (1900-2000) European history  (that isn’t a text book), because I really dig it.

Then after museum numero dos, we headed on over to Reading to catch a “football” match between Reading and Ipswitch. It was a fun time and fulfilled one of my London goals of going to a soccer game while here. Good times indeed.

Rollout.

PS…
Sorry about the video quality. MPEG Streamclip apparently doesn’t compress videos as well as Compressor. Oh well. Also, try not to get motion sick watching it. Let me just say there’s a reason I don’t normally zoom while recording.

Life at 24mm

Today was a good day.

Kelsey, Lee, Taylor, and I all roadtripped, err… traintripped (?) it out to Salisbury and Stonehenge. It’s awesome being 20 minutes away from Central London, which is a very cool place in its own right, but man the English countryside here is like a set out of a movie. You just expect a horde of kilted Bravehearts to come barreling down the grassy hills any second. It’s just about exactly how you would imagine it.

I’m also still waiting for some “terrible” UK weather that I keeping hearing about. It’s sprinkled on and off in the mornings and evenings, but other than that there’s been nothing but deep blue skies, huge puffy clouds, and brisk 60’s temperatures. Tough life.

Due to my broken 35L, I busted out my old and not-so-trusty Sigma 24-70 to drag along the countryside with me. I definitely need to send this puppy in to be re-calibrated, but I rediscovered my love for 24mm. So it looks like the 24L will be going on my to buy list. Along with the 45 ts-e. And 7D. And 70-200 2.8L IS. Oy. I hate that list. Anyways… On with the show:

And Salisbury Cathedral:

Rollout.

Fording the Ox

Class field trip. Yay.

Two things you should note about this pictures above:

Oxford looks (and feels) like it came out of a Harry Potter movie. They did draw a lot of inspiration in the movies from it, and even recreated Oxford University’s Great Hall for the dining hall in the movies. But even the people, country, other buildings, it all feels like a fantasy land. The whole trip (for our class) was about C.S. Lewis, and it’s easy to see how much inspiration that he, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien, were able to draw from this crazy little college city.

The other thing you should note about my photos is that anything that is in focus past 10 ft was shot with my 135L telephoto lens. Why? Because I dropped my 35L (wide) lens. Now it refuses to focus past 10 ft. Grand. We’ll have to see what Canon UK has to say about that. It made for an interesting shooting day, that’s for sure.

Peace.

prague.

This post has been a long time coming, but I’ve just been so slow to finish the video for it. Likewise, the Bruges post will probably take awhile to put up here since I haven’t even started editing that video yet. Anyways, on with the show:

We spent a good amount of time (3 days) in this laid back, very fun city. I think this took the groups vote for “best part of the trip”. Kelsey didn’t wanna leave.

Peace yo.