wingpig

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About wingpig

34-year-old bearded short-wearing male human. Immediate male progenitor of wingpiglet.

LIKES: Fresh air, walking, thought, bicycling, Attenborough programmes, photographing, human behaviour, carrots, garlic, coffee, vitality, outsideness, science, chocolate muffins, Mini-Eggs, books and things.

INDIFFERENT TOWARDS: Almost all television, alcohol, fashion-electronics, excessive personal grooming, excessive popularity and the pursuit thereof, most computer games (except Descent, Bloxorz, DTD, HL2 and Portal), the consoles upon which such games are played and tea.

LOATHES: Oafishness, twattishness, chavviness, pikeyness, mushrooms (as a foodstuff), the military, inebriation, football (and related activities including homophobia, racism, xenophobia, violence and needlessly gobbing all over the pavement), ITV, bigotry, the Royal Mail (including their subsidiary Parcelforce (and even more so their equivalents such as CityLink (and especially Home Delivery Network Limited, the leaving-valuable-items-under-plantpot-scumbags))), Dabs.com, buses, taxis, vans, SUVs (singling out the BMW X5 for particularly concentrated despisement (as both a cyclist-targeting beemer and an SUV and (effectively) a van)), most other cars (especially when revved when stationary or driven flamboyantly, aggressively or needlessly swiftly), climate change denialists, creationists and the ID brigade, homeopaths, chiropractors and any other proponent or practitioner of any other system of treatment based on wishes, magic or fairies rather than thoroughly-reviewed experiments and verifiable/repeatable evidence, other cyclists who wear headphones/skip red lights/ride on the pavement giving the rest of us a bad name, people who walk too slowly in the middle of the pavement (especially when they ebb slightly but significantly from side to side in time with your attempts to overtake), lecherousness, chauvinism and misogyny, non-white or stripey shirts with white collars (and in fact all office-clothing, politics and the stilted and unnatural language of the modern office) and people disrespecting the planet.

***

In the past I tried and failed to text-blog persistently; I registered on a couple of blogsites but did very little except a bit of sub-editing for h2g2 in 1999 when I should have been revising. Since getting back into medium-to-heavy picture-taking in 2004 I managed to upload fresh pictures to Flickr and caption a few reasonably regularly though an upload-backlog developed when I switched to RAW processing and there are far too many uploaded pictures sitting there with no tags.

This place is a nice balance: only one picture need be processed each day (theoretically; in practice, there's usually a choice) and the words can be a simple description of what's in the picture (or what's in the head at the time of writing) to a multiply-paragraphed and heavily-detailed account of the day's happenings, the filtered output of the brain over the course of the day or a mixture, or nothing. After ramping up a bit from the initial a-few-words-about-the-image I sunk to emitting lengthy whines about the incapabilities of my cameraphone when my (at the time) proper camera went away for repair. When it was returned the length of entry remained and the whines partially disappeared, though resumed until I replaced that proper camera with a proper proper camera; despite the length of the Loathes list above I don't despise the entire world: only the bits (usually some of the people) which make bits of it less pleasant for the other bits and occupants thereof.

Prior to posting a picture of my own every day I spent a bit more time posting photoshopped results of other people's images to b3ta and tattyworld which has since proved useful as Photoshop-practise.

Currently using a Nikon D80 (a close call with the 400D on features but it fitted my hand better rather than due to any brand loyalty) after nine months of Fujifilm Finepix s9500, two years with the s5000, eighteen months with a crap plastic-lens 1.3Mpx four-second-shutter-lag battery-compartment-held-on-by-tent-elastic thing (fortunately stolen from the car) after a couple of years of cameralessness since my Praktica BX20 started getting shutter issues after ten years or so. It's still in a bag on top of a cupboard a: just in case, b: because of crappy wishy-washy sentimentality and c: because it's worth absolutely bugger all secondhand but has been superseded by a Nikon F80 from eBay which has the advantage of a: not being completely shite and b: compatible with the same lenses as my D80. Detailed whinging about the limitations of the s9500/9600 are available on request; I'd hate anyone to have to suffer as I did. Currently using a 50mm f/1.4D (8/10), 105mm f/2.8 micro VR (10/10) and a 24mm f/2.8D (6/10). Previously used the 35mm f/2D (8/10), 60mm f/2.8D micro (8/10), 50mm f/1.8D (9/10), 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G DX (6/10) and the failed-experiment 70-300mm f/4-5.6G (non-ED version, 2/10) which was a wobbly piece of substandard garbage.

I would like to be able to just post pictures of something-happening-which-I-saw no matter what the quality but part of the reason for doing this is to try and improve my picture-taking so I usually end up posting whatever gets the visually-preferred result. There's probably some kind of internal image quality/interestingness of depicted event (or (early on) object/thumbnail snappiness) algorithm in operation but I've given up trying to second-guess it and have thus generated a pile of second-choice and overflow edits, some of which ended up as links (though some may no longer work following webspace-upheave) and most of which will end up on Flickr when I catch up with my backlog. It would be nice if the posted picture either illustrated or prompted the accompanying words but there are already too many where there is little or no connection.

Permanent link

http://www.blipfoto.com/
wingpig