San Francisco

San Francisco is just an excellent excellent city. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I could just tell that there was something nice about the place that I was going to like. To be honest, I think the sunny weather had a lot to do with it!

On arriving in the USA Hostel on Post St. I immediately crashed out for a hell of a sleep after not getting enough rest on the train - I was absolutely knackered. On waking up, I made a most horrendous discovery - that I'd left my beloved black and grey stripey hoodie on the train. Thankfully, on a quick nip down the road to H&M, I managed to find the exact same hoodie on the out-of-season sale rail, the last one of its type left - a great relief. Also managed to find what may have been my closest contender yet in my quest for the perfect wooly hat.

I took this first morning as an opportunity to go up and look at Lombard Street, but I was kinda disappointed when I actually got there. I guess I should've known - it's just a wiggly road down a hill at the end of the day. Next came a bit of lens shopping, taking advantage of the weak dollar to buy me a nice Nikkor 85mm f/1.8. It got its first use in anger after meeting up with Kelley and Francis again, the couple I'd met on my first visit to Portland.

In the afternoon, Francis and I went on a little expedition to a dump. Thankfully however, the reason was that there was an art show on at the dump with a bunch of works made from found objects. It wasn't great in terms of the artwork, but it was quite an interesting setting and did a good job of saving me from getting trapped in tourist hell! That evening, I was invited up to a pleasant wee dinner party at their flat, where I mostly admired Francis' extensive collection of horror movie memorabilia.

The next day, I had decided to just go for the tourist thing and make a trip out to the golden gate bridge. The bridge itself was pretty impressive, but I found the area around the bridge to be a lot more interesting. There was a pretty cool old historic fort at one end of the bridge, and a pretty cool pier where a whole bunch of old guys were out fishing. I even managed to catch sight of a Sea Lion out for a wee swim, which was pretty cool.

That evening, I met up again with Roxanne from the train journey, and she showed me around some of the cooler sights in the city by night. The next day, Roxanne, her friend Meredith and I would go on a nice wee adventure to what I'd definitely call the highlight of my trip so far - the Pet Cemetery in the Presidio. It was a totally surreal experience, with the majority of the ex-pets belonging to servicemen and women who had been stationed there when the Presidio was still a big military base. Although the cemetery had officially closed in the 70s or something, there were still a lot of "new" burial sites, implying that the cemetery lived on!

After the bizarre joys of the cemetery, we carried on down to a lovely wee beach on the Pacific coast and sat for a few nice hours in the sun.

I have to stop writing just now, but I'll carry this on in another post soon!

Portland (Slight Return)

After the many joys of Seaside, I was glad to make my way back to Portland for one more night before hitting the train to San Francisco. The plan was to arrive back mid-morning, spend the day just hanging out in the city, spend one night there, and have a nice lie in, catching the train early the next afternoon.

Unfortunately however, I was without the experience of one of the most vital lessons I've learned on the journey so far. The simple lesson being do not rely on people you've only ever met in the pub when very drunk for a place to stay the night!

You may recall from my previous blog posting from Portland an episode involving drunkenly dancing in my kilt. Well that night I'd met some people in the pub who'd offered me a place to crash on my return to Portland, knowing I'd be going down to Seaside for a few days. Arrangements were made the day before I was due back up, and all seemed rosy until I ended up in Portland, when all of a sudden phones were ringing out and text messages were going unanswered.

With no place to stay, I got in touch with the HI Hostel where I'd been staying previously, and thankfully managed to get me a bed there instead. While I was there, I met some excellent people - Roxanne, Ramon, Douglas, Jessica and Jennifer. We all went out for a stroll around the streets near the hostel, and ended up at the Blue Moon for a few beers and found out that all of us but Jessica would be travelling down to California on the same train the next day.

The train journey was a bit of a beast, 21 hours in total, but thankfully the good company made it a whole lot more tolerable. The train had plenty of legroom and comfy seats, so it was a nice relaxing journey, even with the woman sitting behind us whom we were sure was trying to communicate with ghosts. Jen left us at Sacramento, Roxanne at Martinez, leaving myself and Douglas to carry on to Emeryville, then making the short bus transfer across the bay to San Francisco.

Seaside

After spending lots of time in the cities, I decided it was time for another slightly more remote spot to visit. On the recommendation of a traveller in Seattle, I made my way from Portland to the Oregon coast, ending up in the aptly-named town of Seaside. Definitely a perfect case of "does exactly what it says on the tin".

I arrived in the dark, unpacked my bags in the HI Hostel there, and spent what little was left of my evening sitting around a pleasant campfire with some cyclists from Chicago who were making their way down the coast. It was a pretty good start to my stay, so I went to bed hoping for more of the same over the next couple of days.

When I woke up the next morning, I realised I'd definitely got the wrong impression. Everything seemed to turn to that soul-sucking grey colour that I thought I'd left behind when I left Glasgow, and the rain meant that my North Face waterproof jacket had to be brought out in anger for the very first time. After taking a brief wander around the town, I decided that Breakfast/Lunch was in order and I dived into a nice wee cafe, for shelter as much as anything else. It was if some guy upstairs was trying to say that life becomes instantly better after a good meal, because after yet another helping involving melted cheese, I emerged from the cafe into glorious sunshine.

Despite the fact that glorious sunshine makes everything just look a lot more appealing, the one thought that kept running through my head was how much Seaside was basically an American version of Largs. Tacky tourist shops and hamburger joints were in plentiful abundance as I walked down the main drag, but nothing could've possibly prepared me for what I saw as I reached the beach.

A Dog Long Jump competition. Yes - you did read that correctly. Much like that spotted in the olympic games, only with dogs instead of humans and a big swimming pool instead of a sand pit. The owners would throw a toy, the dogs would run along the runway, leap, and splash into the water, aiming to cover as long a distance as possible. I'm not entirely sure if the dogs were aware of this objective, but they certainly enjoyed chasing the toys and splashing around.

Unfortunately however, my experiences in Seaside seemed like a giant anti-climax after this event. My days were mostly spent sitting around on the beach getting pretty bored, and my evenings were spent either hanging out in the uber-white-trash bars in the town or trying my best to avoid some of the old weirdoes in the hostel.

The hostel was pretty rubbish. The rooms were tiny for the number of people they tried to cram in, the staff were either annoyingly pushy or just plain village-idiot-stupid. I got especially tired of the one staff member whose sole experience of Scottish culture was the fact that Braveheart was his favourite movie of all time, and he proceeded to ask me all kinds of questions about whether we still have clans and live in little shanty villages and like killing English people. I mean, come on, Braveheart!?!

So aye, to sum up, don't bother with Seaside. Just go to Largs instead - the ice cream's better and most people realise how stupid Mel Gibson's accent really was.

Portland

When I first started saying to people all the places I would be visiting on my trip down the west coast, Portland was mostly met with reactions along the lines of "oh" or "where's that?". After visiting, people asked me what kinda fun stuff I did in Portland and what I went to see, all I could answer was that I just sorta hung out in the town centre, and visited a pretty cool book shop.

You'll probably also be thinking that this is gonna turn into one of those blogs where I go on about how disappointing some place is, but in fact, it's gonna be quite the opposite... I loved Portland.

There's just something about the city that I seemed to really latch on to, and I certainly wasn't the only one. The HI Northwest Portland was populated by a lot of people moving from cities across the US trying to find places to live and work in Portland. I must also comment that the HI in Portland definitely wins my award for best hostel so far, it'll take a lot of beating!

Powell's book shop was just something else. It occupied an entire city block, was three floors high, and had books on just about every topic imaginable. Me - I was just happy to spend hours and hours browsing their many photography books. To put it into perspective - they had a section just of Ansel Adams books that was bigger than the entire photography section in Borders in Glasgow. Despite my wanting to limit my carrying weight to as great an extent as possible, I couldn't resist the allure of the shop and ended up buying four books - one exploring creative approaches to photography, a little book of photographs by Lewis Baltz, a collection of Ray Bradbury short stories, and The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

The people in Portland were the one thing that made it my favourite city, and that attitude also seemed to rub off on everyone at the hostel. On my first night proper I met a cool texan guy called James, and Kelley and Francis, a couple whom I would later catch up with in San Francisco. After they left, things got kinda quiet around the hostel, and the inevitable "table for one" meal at a local bar had to be done. Anyways, in the rather excellent 21st avenue Bar & Grill, the waitress Evie must've felt sorry for me and started chatting to me, and before I knew it, I'd been invited along for a few beers with her and her friends Amanda and Joe. Of course, one beer led to a few more, and before I knew it, I was dressed in my kilt dancing like an idiot in a tiny little funk/soul place. I also managed to score a free pedicab ride which was interesting, especially as kilts aren't particularly renowned for their aerodynamics!

If there's one thing I loved most about Portland though, it was the bike culture. It was certainly a very cycle-friendly city, and I enjoyed having a nice perv at all the lovely old steel-framed Bianchis chained to the city's lamp posts. I loved them so much, I've put together an entire dedicated set of photos, which I'll hopefully get round to sticking on my flickr page pretty soon.

So I had lots of fun in Portland, and my next destination would be a small town on the Oregon coast called Seaside.

The Battle of Seattle

After Vancouver, I made my way down to Seattle - home of Jumbo Jets, Frasier, and a bunch of famous dead people. My plan had been to take the Amtrak train, but on arriving at the railway station and realising I'd massively misread the timetable, I opted for the Greyhound Bus instead. It turned out that there was only one train per day from Vancouver, and that the service noted on the timetable was in fact the Greyhound bus that I got on anyway. After navigating my way to what looked like the main downtown area, I quickly hunted down the ferry terminal from where I would get the ferry over to where I was booked in for the night - the HI Hostel on Vashon Island. Little did I know at the time just how out-of-the-way Vashon Island really was, or the fact that there were only three ferry services per day, and those only being around 8am, 5pm and 6pm.

So I decided to abandon Vashon Island and seek alternative accomodation. I arrived shortly after midday, and the next boat to Vashon wasn't until 5pm, so I started asking around to seek alternative accommodation. It turned out that there's only actually one hostel anywhere near the middle of Seattle, and of course, it was totally booked out. I was directed around a couple of hotels, and eventually found myself in the Panama Hotel, a grand old building in the International District. The hotel was nice and cheap, but as such, needed a good lick of paint, and had a slightly spooky air to it. Turned out it had a pretty interesting history, and it was definitely a lot more interesting than your average Travel Inn! I also made a friend in Jade, an American woman who was incredibly upset to see the Seattle Seahawks get beaten by the San Francisco 49'ers in the first NFL game of the season.

Seattle was a bit of a weird city. I didn't quite manage to figure out what its "vibe" was. It was definitely pretty to look at in a lot of places, but much like Vancouver, there were a lot of homeless people around, and a lot of strange bylaws in place to try and disrupt the homeless community. For example, it was illegal to sit or lie down on any public pavement in the downtown area. I watched one very bizarre scene as one guy sat on a wall outside a shop to wait for his friends to come out, causing no obstruction or harm to anyone, but within a few seconds, one of the city's "downtown ambassadors" (that's the "community police support officers" to any British readers) threaten the guy with arrest and having him registered as an official vagrant. Definitely one hell of an over-reaction if you ask me.

Anyway, as for activities in Seattle, I took an underground tour, went up the Space Needle, and did a lot of running back and forward to various camera shops! The underground tour was a bit of a disappointment, despite a personal recommendation from the cool Russian guy who worked in the pizza shop. The deepest it went was about ten feet below ground level, and was basically to illustrate the fact that Seattle was built in a stupid location. The Space Needle was pretty cool - I loved watching the sun setting behind the Olympic Mountains and watching all the planes fly in and out over the city. I even managed to pick up a mega-naff souvenir t-shirt out of the bargain bin for a couple of dollars. But, the big problem when I got up the space needle, was that I discovered my wide-angle lens had decided to stop auto-focusing on anything at any distance.

Seattle was weird for camera shops. Most in the city were useless (think Jessops but worse), and the one that was any good was a hell of a walk. Glazers (the good one) had a really nice range of stuff, but it was pretty expensive. I first needed to run up there looking for sensor cleaner (I had mega dirt on the D700), then went up on a mission to replace my shoddy Sigma 18-35. I was very very close to buying a second hand Nikon 20-35mm f/2.8, but decided against it at the last minute, and ended up not replacing the lens until I got to Portland.

So anyway, to sum up, I was mostly unimpressed by Seattle, although I think in different circumstances it could've been a really enjoyable visit.

Late Update

First off, let me apologise for not keeping this blog too up-to-date. It's a kinda funny thing - for once in my life, I actually have something worthwhile to write a blog about, but of course, I'd much rather be out and about doing stuff than sitting in and writing a blog! To be honest, the only reason I'm writing this is that I'm stuck on a train between Seattle and Portland at the moment.

So the trip since my last update:

I made it to New York and had a great time there. I stayed in the New York Loft Hostel over on Varet Street in Brookyln, near the "hipster" Williamsburg neighbourhood. On my first night arriving, I met up with the ace Simona and went for a wander around the city, mostly not knowing where the hell I was going. I got me a mobile phone for very little money, and I began on one of this trip's other big outcomes - the eating of lots of giant hamburgers. The weather was amazing, but the heat pretty stifling in the city. A nice wee trip down to the beach at Coney Island was pretty pleasant, it's a very strange place. Lots of seeing the sights in Manhattan, one of the highlights being the International Centre For Photography, where I saw an exhibition of some pretty amazing Japanese photographers. On my last night, I managed to get in touch with Carol Finnie, my Dad's cousin, and we went to her local for a few beers. Of course, a few beers turned into a lot of beers, and I ended up leaving the pub at 3:30am. Which, y'know, would be fine, except that my flight was at 7:30am. I hopped in a cab over to the hostel, although having to give the cab driver directions with my knowledge of NY was definitely not reassuring. Quickly packed my rucksack and managed to jump in a cab out to JFK airport with an English guy who was flying out too. Unfortunately however, the cabbie was even less good with his directions, actually taking us to LaGuardia airport first, and when we finally got to JFK, getting lost on the road between terminals. I made it in just on time for check in, still pretty drunk and very very tired, so of course security went to town giving me the full "step aside please sir" treatment and a pretty thorough interview on the origins of the packet of sweeties I had in my pocket.

The flight sucked. I maintain that using the reclining seats on economy class flights should be made a hanging offence.

Landed in Vancouver - weather was just as grey as I'd kinda expected. My first hostel turned out to be more of a hotel. The individual bedrooms were good for sprawling out and catching up on sleep, but the location was in one of the roughest areas of town, with junkies, meth-heads and alkies all over the place. That was just during the day, you should've seen it at night! Thankfully after two nights there, I was able to move up to the Hostelling International hostel on Granville Street. I met a lot of great people there - Beppe, Marie-Eve, Jane, Sean, Vasiliki, Sadie and Alicia were all a bunch of sound people, with the ladies in particular loving my kilt the one night I wore it to go out. The HI on Granville Street has been the best place so far, and I'd definitely recommend it if you're in the city.

Next was a real fun part. From Vancouver, I jumped on an old rickety DeHavilland Beaver floatplane out to Salt Spring Island, about 25 minutes flight from the centre of Vancouver. Salt Spring reminded me a lot of Arran, only with good weather and no midges. I couldn't find accomodation, so I grabbed me a cheap tent before I left Vancouver and camped at the Ganges Campground, just outside of Ganges, the main town on the island. The tent was pretty cramped, but the ground was good, and I had the entire campsite pretty much to myself. Thankfully, the weather was excellent the whole time, otherwise the outdoor showers wouldn't have been much fun. There wasn't a great deal to do on Salt Spring, but that suited me just perfectly - needed a bit of relaxing-in-the-middle-of-nowhere time after New York and Vancouver. Made the mistake of tryin to cycle the southern half of the island on a clapped-out Specialized Expedition hire bike, but thankfully the bus was able to take me home from the bottom of the island. Had to wait two hours for the next bus, but got chatting to a really sound English chick called Kate, and spent those two hours having a few nice cold beers looking over the harbour. Coming home relaxed, if a little sunburnt, meant another floatplane ride. We had to pick up passengers from another island on the way back - we were experiencing some turbulence, so on the way from Maple Bay back to Vancouver, the pilot decided to stay low, actually flying UNDER some electricity cables between two of the islands. Pretty scary stuff, but really good fun.

I got back to Vancouver again, only this time staying in the Cambie Hostel on Seymour Street. Bedroom was pretty good, just sharing with one pretty cool French guy called Cedric, but the hostel wasn't all that great. The people weren't all that cool, although I did enjoy a few beers with two (unconnected) Aussies called Kate and Chak. I did however, discover an excellent gameshow called Hole In The Wall. Caught a bizarre sporting event in the form of the Red Bull Soapbox Race, saw a Grouse at the top of Grouse Mountain, and found a really good pub that played Slayer - those things made the second vancouver visit pretty nice for me.

Right, anyways, the train is approaching Portland now, so I'd better stick the laptop away. I'll hopefully get back on shortly to tell of my experiences in Seattle!

In Heathrow

The journey's started off pretty nicely so far. Just sitting in Heathrow killing some time at the moment, which is nice. Main things on my mind at the moment are wondering what I'm going to have for lunch, and how much my inner five year old is enjoying watching all the big aeroplanes flying up into the sky!

Flight down was pretty uneventful, which was exactly what I was hoping for. Apart from a mildly annoying kid in the seat next to me, all was nice and calm. I was quite amazed in Glasgow airport this morning though. I got in at about 7:20, got through check in, and went upstairs to the wetherspoons for a fried breakfast. At 7:30, I was amazed just how many people had started their drink intake for the day. I mean, a pint of Stella before most of the world is even awake... what's that about? Don't fancy being sat next to him on a long-haul!

But anyway, nobody's stolen my camera yet, I even managed to get the standard out-the-window shots from the plane of some nice fluffy clouds and the wings. Just hoping now that I'll see my rucksack when I get to the other end...

Jobless Über Alles!

As you may or may not be aware, I used to work for BT, then decided to take a redundancy package and go away to New Zealand for a while with the proceeds. I thought the limbo period between quitting and actually getting on the plane would be incredibly tedious and boring, but in fact, I can't remember having quite so much fun for a long time!

At first there was a lot of photography getting done, which was very enjoyable. Meeting up with the similarly jobless Sara and spending whole days just snapping away is excellent fun. She got herself a nice new Nikon D80, and she's been getting some pretty ace results with it so far.

Of course, not having to get up for work in the morning has meant that trips to the pub have been coming thick and fast. On one of these nights, we'd been having a few cans of the almighty Super T at John and Dunc's flat, and decided it'd be a really good idea to go camping the next day. The next day, as promised, we managed to haul our sorry behinds down to Ardrossan and jumped on the Calmac boat to Arran for what turned out to be a pretty ace wee holiday. We spent two nights camped at the fantastic Glen Rosa campsite in my trusty Black's tent, complete with high-tech LED lighting system. Activities participated in included regular walks to the Brodick Co-op for bacon rolls, Crazy Golf, and a bus journey round the island, broken up with a few beers in Blackwaterfoot.

The Crazy Golf didn't stop there though, as just a couple of days ago, I had the opportunity to play on what is supposedly Europe's largest crazy golf course, out at Xscape at Braehead. The courses maybe didn't quite have some of the craziest features on offer (whit, nae windmills!?!), but with 36 holes to play, we certainly got a fair bit of playing done. Of course, fresh from my experience on the infinitely more difficult Brodick course, I gave Sara a bit of a thrashing, coming in at one under and three under in the two 18-hole games we played.

Scanner Has Arrived

I'm very very happy now, because yesterday, I went and picked up my new Epson Perfection 4490 Scanner, which means all those little silly images that I uploaded to flickr as poor-quality contact sheets, can now be seen in their full glory. It makes me happy!

I scanned my first roll of 35mm last night, which was kinda nice. Thankfully it was one of the rolls I'd made a bit better a job of in the developing stages, so the scans all came out pretty nicely. I think the plan for tonight is to try and get another roll scanned, and just keep gradually builing up a nice wee archive. At the moment, I'm only scanning at half the maximum resolution to keep times and file sizes down for scanning everything, but I reckon I'll just crank it to max for anything where I need that wee bit extra quality.

The developing's been going mostly OK so far, I had a wee bit of a worry when I changed developers from Ilfosol to Ilfotec HC - the methods of mixing are a bit different, but thankfully the Ilford data sheet came in very handy. I'm just hoping my Ilfotec "stock" mix keeps OK in its current container. I'll also have to get my backside in gear and develop the backlog that's currently building up of films that I need to process. And to think when I first got my developing gear, I actually rushed out the house and shot off a roll just for the sake of having something to develop!

Next challenge is to see about maybe moving outside my HP5 comfort zone. So far I've decided to shoot nothing but HP5, due to it being very widely available and a lot of people saying it's quite a "forgiving" film to work with. Last night I was shooting a gig, so I decided to pop a roll of Fuji Neopan 1600 through, so we'll see how that turns out. Also very tempted to try experimenting with pushing HP5, although I've heard it's pretty bad at 1600.

I'm sure there'll be plenty of photos on my Flickr Page (www.flickr.com/photos/twentyhertz) coming soon for anyone who cares to read this to see how I'm doing :)

DIY SOS!

As much of a fan of Nick Knowles and his team of merry workmen as I am, I'm focusing more on the photographic rather than home improvement side of DIY! Recently, I've been growing ever discontent with the service from photo processing labs - having to spend the best part of £10 every time I finish a roll, just for the lab to give me the wrong prints, not scan all of the pictures, and in the worst case, even completely ruin a set of negatives.

• (Name and shame corner: Jessops on Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow managed to put a deep scratch through an entire roll of film that effectively rendered it unusable after the first set of prints.)

I decided I'd be a lot better off taking matters into my own hands. Seeing how I love shooting on XP2 monochrome film most of the time anyway, I decided it'd be quite cool fun just to shoot on proper black and white film, and develop it myself.

The grand plan as it stands runs in two stages: firstly, learn to process the black and white film, then scan it into my PC for the full joy of digital working. So far, I'm in the process of working with the film, and hopefully by next pay day, I'll be able to afford a decent scanner. My reasoning for thinking like this was that when I get a film processed, I usually flick through the prints a few times then stash them in a box under my bed, and use the negative scans on supplied CD on my PC for any future printing/publishing to Flickr etc. Rather than get bogged down in the extra hassle involved in making my own prints, I decided a decent film scanner would be the easiest way to go for creating a "finished product" so to speak.

So I took the plunge and invested in a developing tank and some basic chemistry to get me started. I'm currently using the following:

• Paterson 600ml Developer Tank (2x35mm or 1x120 film)
• Ilfosol Developer
• Ilfostop Stop Bath
• Ilford Rapid Fixer
• Jessops thermometer

I've been a big fan of stuff shot on Ilford HP5 film, so that's been my main material for practicing with. My choosing Ilford stuff through and through isn't due to some big brand loyalty by the way - it's just a simple case of it being the most commonly available b/w stuff in shops in Glasgow. I'm just sticking with HP5 at the moment, as it's a reasonably decent all-round performer, and sticking with one type of film makes it a lot easier for practicing my developing skills.

My setup at the moment is somewhat primitive - my chemicals are all mixed/stored/poured from 750ml Irn Bru glass bottles, and my darkroom is the bathroom with the light off! My biggest challenge has been trying to keep everything at the required 20degrees C.

The first attempt at processing film was a bit of a disaster - with passable, but not great results. I think I was in too much of a rush and got too shaken up by the whole experience, not to mention shaking my tank up a bit too much in the process! After taking my results and going back on the web, I managed to find some sites telling me exactly what I'd done wrong.

Since this roll, I've processed another three rolls, the following all having been done using 120 film rather than 35mm due to both of my 35mm cameras dying on me. They've all turned out pretty well as far as I can tell. Sadly one of them is mostly ruined due to a shutter failure on my Seagull. The last one I did, I'm not entirely sure what went wrong with it, whether it was overdeveloped or whether it was overexposed - I thought it had all been shot at 1/125 sec, but the motion blur on a lot of the pictures would suggest it had been much slower than this, and my Seagull had been having shutter difficulties that day.

Anyways, that's it so far. Hopefully the other OM-10 I bought from ebay should arrive soon and allow me to keep shooting 35mm stuff, and hopefully next month I'll have a shiny new scanner to allow me to put proper big pictures on Flickr for the world to look at!

It Snowed Today

Kelvingrove Bandstand
Originally uploaded by follow the waves

And I managed to miss most of it, and for that, I am most upset. I've been waiting on some decent snow all winter, and only now in March do we finally see anything worth calling a snowfall.

Of course, I'm still off work ill due to not being quite recovered from my recent tonsilitis just yet, so I wouldn't have got much enjoyment from wandering around in the freezing cold anyway.

My friend Sara caught this really nice image of the Kelvingrove bandstand, at some horrible early hour of the morning when I was all nicely wrapped up in bed feeling sorry for myself - rather her than me, but I guess her getting the image kinda paid off in the end.

I can't wait to be back fit and able to get out and take pictures again, I'm getting serious cabin fever in here!

Winner

Magic Sandwich
Originally uploaded by twentyhertz

I think this will be the image I send in as my entry for the Guardian competition, despite it not even making my initial shortlist.

This photo was taken in the morning at my sister's flat in Dundee - I was awake but everyone else was asleep, so I took these photos. This is my sister's boyfriend Jamie's nice mac laptop. I try to carry my lego men in my bag everywhere I go these days, because you just never know when you're gonna have some time to kill, and a good photo opportunity!

Technology

As I end up doing every week, I've looked in the Guardian's Weekend section to see what the photo competition for the week is. Every week, on the last page of the Weekend supplement, they give out a single word, as a theme for a photographic competition, and show the results from the word given out two weeks previously. The deadline is very short - the word is announced on Saturday, and the competition closes on Tuesday at noon, so although there's not usually enough time to fit in a new photo, there's usually enough time for a quick trawl of my archive on my flickr page. As you may have ascertained from the title, this week's theme is Technology - and I think I have a couple of potential entries on this theme.

Here are a couple I'm thinking of posting in:

Viewer - My flatmate's lovely old TV, viewed through my lovely old Seagull TLR Camera.

Overview - Work colleague Angela taking a picture with her phone from the top of BT Tower, London

1-2-4-5-7-8-*-0 - Dust and cobwebs cover this phone box in Bentpath, Dumfriesshire, largely outdated now by the widespread use of mobile phones

Tagged - Old-fashioned MDF Block at Colintraive Telephone Exchange, Argyll.