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July 2006 Review

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1st July 2006 A Saturday trip into town for some reason, and I quick stop off to try and find something to photograph within this collection of plant life! I was trying to catch these hoverflies in flight, which is a near impossible task, the way they dart about! This one landed on the leaf and I got it quick!

2nd July 2006 Sunday was a trip back to Ipswich for a family meal out, to celebrate my Mum's 50th birthday. Her birthday isn't until the 4th, but a Sunday is easier for everyone! This is the cake, with a very cool champagne bottle candle!

33rd July 2006 Back in Stafford, and with a new clock radio (because the mobile phone alarm wasn't enough to kick me out of bed in the mornings!) with a nice big digital display on it! I thought I'd expose for a whole minute and try and capture every second on the sensor. It didn't work quite how I'd planned, but was quite interesting nontheless!

4th July 2006 Salt and pepper grinders! On the kitchen table! Did somebody say weekday?

5th July 2006 The kitchen lighting, in a sort of wide-angle, upside-down kind of way.

6th July 2006 A bit of rule of thirds practice. Next door's garage roof and wall and stuff. There's a tennis ball on the left, but it wouldn't fit in shot. Which is a shame.

7th July 2006 Epic road trip on a Friday afternoon, beginning on my own from Stafford to Northwich, only to head south again, this time in the direction of Wales, and Oakwood, which is very south Wales. Some agonisingly beautiful scenery on the way down there, but never anywhere to stop and take a photo. When we did stop, this was about the best view I got. And yes, the sky is exaggerated, there was a bit of pink in it, but not that much. I'm not quite sure why I did that really.

8th July 2006 And a CF-Live at Oakwood on the Saturday! "Speed" was their new for 2007 coaster, as pictures here, but we all know Megafobia is the reason we went! The rest of the Oakwood CF-Live photos can be found here.

9th July 2006 And on Sunday we headed over the River Severn and back up to Northwich to stay the night before getting up at stupid O'clock to go to Liverpool Airport to catch our plane to Amsterdam!

10th July 2006 Monday the 10th was the first day of our five day tour of Belgium and Holland's theme park offerings. The first park was Drievliet, a quirky little park, with probably the least to offer us, but I think it ended up being the most fun of the week! The ride in the photo is Xtreme, a standard Maurer spinning coaster, and a fairly painful one at that. I sat out to take these photos while they rode! More Drievliet photos here.

11th July 2006 Tuesday was Walibi Belgium, in... Belgium, obviously. Monday night involved a bit of a drive from Drievliet into Belgium to stay in an interesting hotel, with a nice garden to chill out in with a few beers, and have a game of Roller Coaster Twenty Questions! Walibi Belgium was probably the best park we went to in the five days. This coaster is Loup-Garou, or Werewolf, in English. A Vekoma wooden coaster, which packs quite punch! Taken from the ferris wheel, nice views from up there! And as usual, more photos are here.

12th July 2006 Wednesday and Bobbejaanland (pronounced Bobba-yarn-land), and this ride is Sledgehammer, one of the reasons we decided on Belgium and Holland this year! Fortunately it didn't disappoint either! Neither did the rest of the park! More photos here.

13th July 2006 We drove back into Holland on Wednesday night for Efteling in the morning. Efteling is a very interesting park, lots of beautiful theming, but not the world's greatest collection of rides. We did have a lot of fun though. It was a fairly chilled out day really, and we took loads of photos. I really like this photo of Python, their Vekoma Loopscrew. Nice bit of rule of thirds going on! Efteling photos here.

14th July 2006 The fifth and final day of the Belgium and Holland tour ended with Walibi World in Holland. Goliath was naturally the star of the show, although not as good as Expedition GeForce which we rode a year earlier! More Walibi World photos here.

15th July 2006 Saturday was a lazy day of recollecting my thoughts from the trip, in this picture you can see my Passport, boarding card, a few Euros, a CompactFlash card and some park entry tickets and maps. These just are just things that got pulled out of my bag and were scattered on my desk to sort out at the time. Notice the CompactFlash card at the top of the pile, photos come first!

16th July 2006 I went shopping to stock up seeing as I had no food, and there were strawberries on offer, and they were pretty damn tasty! Especially with ice cream! Perfect on such a hot day aswell! It looks a bit wrong, but it tastes so good!

17th July 2006 Thirty-six degrees? Yeah, it was a hot day today. I thought I'd prove how hot.

18th July 2006 Some condensation on the water filter in the kitchen, I'm not on holiday any more, the generic photos are back!

19th July 2006 A bit of wide angle play with the iron. And some slightly dodgy cloning around the bottom, using the popup flash with the wide angle lens casts a nasty shadow over the bottom of the pictures so I had to clone it out! It's a bit over processed, because I overused the shadow/highlight tool, but it brought the detail out in the plug, which looks quite good I think!

20th July 2006 It's still a bit warm, so it's time for an iced lolly! But no! It's a bit melted! Don't worry, it was a controlled environment, and nothing went to waste!

21st July 2006 During "the Belhol" we decided that we would get together one weekend and watch through all the raw unprocessed video footage I captured during our summer trip the year before, to Germany. There was about five hours of it overall! We soon sorted a date, and went to Mark's for the evening. Naturally there was pizza involved, and I just needed to take a photo of something! Doner meat pizza... nice!

22nd July 2006 Because we were at Mark's on Friday night, Saturday was a trip into Manchester. This is a tubey-tunnely thing in the city!

23rd July 2006 A sundog on a Sunday! Sundogs are very strange, I remember seeing my first and wondering what the hell it was. Wikipedia defines them as "a relatively common halo, an atmospheric optical phenomenon mostly associated with the refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals making up cirrus or cirrostratus clouds." So there you go!

24th July 2006 From Sundog to Sunset! Another out of the window shot, but still, don't tell me you wouldn't point a camera at that if you noticed it out of your window!

25th July 2006 Something else a bit summery, it's one of those seed things that floats around aimlessly through the entire of summer! What an effort it was to get that in focus, while it was floating! This was the best I could come up with!

26th July 2006 Another photo that people couldn't figure out what it was. As usual, I thought it was fairly obvious really, but I would say that. Anyway, to put you out of your misery, it's the ice cubes in a cool, refreshing glass of Dr Pepper! I had some people asking me if it was teeth? TEETH?! What are you on?!

27th July 2006 Another sunset, reflected on my bedroom window. Not the greatest shot ever, I've seen similar things done in much better ways!

28th July 2006 It's only looking back now that I remember how hot July was. All these pictures of ice lollys and cold drinks and fans and things are reminding me! Here's a long exposure of my desk fan. Not quite how I expected it to turn out, but it was getting late and I needed to get to bed because it was Global Gathering tomorrow, so I didn't bother sticking at it!

29th July 2006 And Global Gathering! If you don't know what Global Gathering is it's a dance music festival. This shot was taken during Above and Beyond's set, someone had a bubble gun! It was quite pretty!

30th July 2006 Global Gathering passed through midnight and into Sunday, which was handy. This shot was during Armin van Buuren's set, with some pretty fireworks!

31st July 2006 It's a can. Obviously. It's blue aswell. Because I was messing about with various white balance settings. Isn't it rubbish? Yes.

© Martyn Hoyer