Not blogged for a while, so here is a sunset:

Yesterday it rained hard with flash floods.

Just the day for work to organise a lunch time barbecue (bbq) for the engineering department. As one colleague put it, “it hasn’t rained so much at a bbq since Noah discovered that he had three pigs.”

I was giving one of my colleagues a lift to the bbq. The bbq was at a pub in the middle of rural Berkshire. It was like driving through a river, with several inches of fast flowing water on the major roads.
The minor roads (some single track) were hazardous with many deep puddles, like crossing fords.

Crossing one of these ‘puddles’ my car stalled, and we were left stranded in over 12 inches (30 cm) of water. The only thing that we could do was to get out of the car and wade to the ‘river bank’. It was still tipping it down with rain.

Here is the puddle after it stopped raining.
Doesn’t look that deep does it!

One of the strange things about rural Berkshire, being so close to major towns with hi-tech industries, is that mobile phone signal coverage is pants. Just when you need to make an emergency call you are in one of the few places were your phone won’t work.

To our rescue came some ladies from a near by day nursery (kindergarden). I never knew they were so strong. They helped push the car out of the water. Car still wouldn’t start.

It is at this point that my (nameless) colleague decided that he had had enough and hitched a lift home from a passing Land Rover, so I was left alone, no car, no phone, in the pouring rain.

I walked up to the day nursery and they kindly let me use their phone, gave me a cup of tea and a dry towel. I called the AA (car breakdown/recovery service). Understandably they were very busy with lots of people in trouble that day. They called me back and hour later saying that no local garages were willing to come out to help me. I was stranded.

During this time another vehicle had bumped into the back of my stationary car and left a dent:

I don’t think any of the people at the bbq had noticed that I had not arrived. My wife (who I had phoned earlier from the nursery) managed to get hold of one of them and they came to rescue me.

It took over two hours to get the 10 miles home since lots of roads were closed because they were impassable. I never had any lunch, but was home just in time for tea.

Today my wife and I set of to try and returned to the stranded car and get it sorted out. We tried several roads that were still flooded. In the end we had to go a long way around and approach it from a different direction. Once we had got to the car and checked that it still wouldn’t start, we then drove around until we found a spot that had a mobile phone signal and called the AA again.

It was another four hours until the AA arrived. The man examined the car. Water was in the air filter and thus in the pistons of the engine. Probably means a new engine. We were towed to a local garage. They don’t fix cars at weekends so we’ll have to wait until monday to find out how much it will be!

To see more pictures of yesterdays flooding in Berkshire, here are some links:

Flickr

BBC Berkshire

I have been attempting the Strobist assignment on “apparent light size”. Here are my efforts with a toy mini and an apple:

I think with the apple I “got it”. The idea is that the bigger the light source the softer the shadow. On a sunny day the sun is a small (relative to the rest of the sky) light source and you get “hard” shadows. On a cloudy day the who sky is the light source (very big) and you get soft shadows.

I’m struggling with my equipment (I know, a bad workman always blames his tools). My cheap Chinese imported “ebay triggers” just don’t want to work with my Canon flash. I attempted to fix this with tin foil and a short sync lead - a little improvement but the camera has to be close to the receiver for it to work. I shall have to go “wired” until I can affort some Pocket Wizards. Any donations welcome

Flickrvision: A fun site to see what photos are being uploaded where in “real time”.

Five weeks of the studio still life course are over. Basically this was how to light “product” shots.

I found this course trickier than the other studio photography courses that I have done. Composition was the most difficult - bottles and fruit just aren’t that exciting!

To see more of my efforts check out my Flickr photos.

A few of high lights for the coming week.

I’ll be taking my first shots on the new photography course “Product Still Life”.

Hopefully I can improve on the above photo.

On Saturday I’ll be going to the Interesting 2007 conference. I’ve no idea what it will be like. I was encouraged to attend by Dave who is also one of the speakers at the conference.

And finally…

Diet starts this week

On Friday night/Saturday morning one of our two cats died. Lil was ten years old. We suspect she had a heart problem. She was found by one of our neighbours dead in their garden.

We still have her sister Phil. Phil and Lil were completely different cats. Lil had short hair, very active, and very friendly. She loved to sit out the front and wait for all the school children passing by so that she would get lots of strokes. Phil has long hair, is fat, sleeps all day and is very shy.

The girls were upset at the news of Lil dying, and there were lots of tears especially when we buried her in the garden yesterday. Thet seem to be getting over it now. I find that I am missing Lil more than I expected. Mainly because she was always on my lap as I watched TV.

Obviously the death of a pet does not compare at all to the death of a friend or relative. I’ve been planning to blog on death (jolly chap that I am) sometime in the future when I’ve managed to get by thoughts together on the subject. This has been prompted by my experience as a Christian vs non-Christian friends of mine that have recently been bereaved. How do you comfort those who mourn, both Christian and non-Christian? And how do you do it without being patronising and with genuine compassion? More when I’ve brave enough to seek the answers….

Just been playing with 360 degrees panoramas at CleVR:

Not a very pretty garden, but you get the idea. Link if you can’t see it.