Category: Black & White.

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.

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. 

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.

 

 

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.

UK Weather.

Getting better at keeping warm after being back in UK for a few months now; had snow, rain (lots!) wind & what purports to be sunshine.
The grass is always greener on the other side, I remember Shams on the day this was made.

Shams – Fog & rain.

Love the new house, although still a few boxes that need emptying, that is the trouble with merging two houses into one.

Got all my camera & darkroom gear unpacked and apart from one problem with some marks on the 35ti (seem to have come off the bag I packed it in, almost like a dye staining some of the metal). Everything else seems ok, which is a compliment to the packers & shipper in Oman,  especially as they stored it for 5 months. More than I can say about the ones in UK, very slipshod in their packing & a lot more expensive!
Lots more unpacking and I forgot how many books we have, although after years of wishing for a room dedicated as a library, we now have one  🙂  I will even (eventually) have a new darkroom. Will also find time for some pictures of Driffield & the surrounding area, the canal looks very photogenic.
One thing I do find strange is the pace of life, far more hectic here than Oman, not sure I like it very much, not to mention the background noise everywhere one goes. The best thing though is no longer being required to have my phone with me all the time and no alarm clock. Must escape to the mountains this summer; Wales, Scotland or the Lake District, somewhere tranquil.