Nikon 35Ti. Kodak Tmax 400 @ 320 iso, toned & diffused.

Abandoned.

Made with Yashica 124G on T-max 400 @ iso 320.
From my files back in 2010.

En garde.

Decorated old door.

Decorated for luck & welcome.

Tombstones Musandam.

A rework of an old negative from my days at Khasab:
Nikon F4 T-max400 @ iso320.

Unfortunately a number of these negatives got irrecoverably damaged when Cyclone Gonu hit Oman in 2007.
I was working on Jebel Shams at the time, needed stuff from Muscat and had a rather traumatic encounter with a deluge of water hitting the road we were on. Eventually got back to my house, only to find rather a lot of water in the rooms; one of my files got wet with rain coming through the window edges – it was all my Khasab negatives. Managed to save a number by rewashing in Kodak Photoflo solution, but some had gone beyond even the wonders of scanning and fixing in Adobe Photoshop. I was a lot more fortunate than many people, I’m only complaining about negatives while others lost their lives, houses, belongings and some businesses never recovered.
Hay-ho such are the tribulations of life.

Not much information about these tombs, rather a lot of them with no real indication of which village they came from, even their age was in doubt; I got a lot of conflicting answers for that question.

Driffield canal in fog No4.

Another, with the hope of not being repetitive 😉

Fog No3.

Another fog image from my last walk.
I must admit that I have been inspired by the work of John Todaro who does a far better presentation of fog than I can.
Please take the time and look at his work. https://johntodaro.wordpress.com/

Salalah/Muscat via Route 31.

It’s approximately 1000 km from Muscat to Salalah and this must be about halfway.

At least 2/3 of the journey is across desert and in the summer the temperatures can be upwards of 50 °C (122 °F) which takes its toll on both car & driver. Travel is best done at night in the summer months, but this has the added danger of Camels walking in the road. Sometimes there is very little if any cell phone signal, so don’t breakdown otherwise it’s a long walk. Although phone coverage is a recent worry for some people; it’s not very long ago that there was no communications at all outside the few towns that were en route. People forget that up until the late 1970’s there was no tarmac roads outside Muscat, so phone coverage was the least of travellers worries.

Jebel Shams en route Jebel Misht.

A panorama taken one misty day from Jebel Shams en route Jebel Misht.

Last rays of sun in 2017.

Portents of a cold winter.

Trees.

One of these has a crow as sentinel.

Spring at last !

Spring at last – it may only be a single Daffodil, but others are beginning to bloom in the garden and this one is perfectly formed. 🙂

Winter walk.

Another walk in the snow – mafi muk (no brain) 😉

Winters day – Castle Howard.

Another cold winter day walk.

White petals.

I slumbered this spring morning, and missed the dawn,
From everywhere I heard the cry of birds.
That night the sound of wind and rain had come,
Who knows how many petals then had fallen?

Spring Dawn, by Meng Haoran (689 -740)

Checking stored backup files.

Checking all my backup files after the external drives had been in storage for about five months and the long sea voyage.
I did bring one drive home in hand baggage which was fine, two others packed separately from my computer (PC) along with two 1TB hard drives which hold a complete ghost image of everything on both my laptop & PC. not taking any chances with lost boxes.
A lot easier with my negatives; a good thing because I have rather a lot and all filed (not very logically 😉 ) in ring binders & archival storage sheets.

Riverhead mill – Great Driffield.

Riverhead mill built in the mid 19th century of brown brick with a pantiled roof.
It was used as part of Great Driffield’s corn-trading centre & is now a grade II listed building.

A little snow.

Dark, cold & wet.
We have snow again – where is global warming when you want it ? although I remember some years back that there was a scare (sorry serious in-depth report) that we could go into a mini ice age again. Skating on the River Thames and Ebenezer Scrooge or stepping out of the wardrobe and seeing a gas light.