Between December 5th and 9th 2013, I spent four days in Tromsø, Norway, with friends Sue and Simon, hoping to see the Northern Lights. This is a photo album of our trip. This is the first 100 photos in the gallery. To see the other 36, go to the Flickr page here. Related articles Everything you need to know about visiting the Arctic
Photos of Kilnsea, Easington and Withernsea taken 12 days after the tidal surge of December 5th 2013.
While I was on holiday at Seahouses in Northumberland, I visited the nearby railway station at Chathill, arguably the smallest and least used terminus on the railway network. The station has only two arrivals and departures Monday to Saturday, with no service on Sunday. Although on the East Coast mainline, there are no services from Chathill heading north. Both services leave heading south to Newcastle or Hexham. The photos in this gallery show my visit on July 7th 2016 to see the arrival of the 18:49 from MetroCentre, and its subsequent departure at 19:10 to Hexham. Chathill railway station on [Read more]
In early July 2016, I made two trips to the Farne Islands to see the bird colonies, especially the puffins. As these photos show, I wasn’t disappointed.
Photos taken during a visit to the Severn Valley Railway on Saturday 6th June 2015.
On Saturday 18th April 2015, I visited Llandudno for the first time for seven years. I had driven eldest son Jamie to Crewe so he could do some work on a Railcam project and I had eight hours or so to spare. What better way to kill time than take a ride along the North Wales coast rail line. The route took me through Chester, passing the famous racecourse, before heading along the North Wales coast. The line runs through the seaside resorts of Rhyl, Abergele and Colwyn Bay, before branching off to Llandudno. The resorts along this coast are no longer [Read more]
This week has been an exciting week for astronomers and skywatchers in the East Midlands. Within the space of four days, we saw a display of the Aurora Borealis, normally reserved for higher latitudes, as far south as Derbyshire, and a partial solar eclipse with 90% coverage. March 20th was also the spring equinox, the day when the Sun crosses the equator and moves above the Northern Hemisphere. The action started earlier in the week when a geomagnetic storm on the surface of the Sun produced a massive solar flare which collided with the Earth’s atmosphere on the evening of March 17th. The [Read more]
Since I purchased my first Apple device, a MacBook Pro, over six years ago, I have used iPhoto and latterly Aperture to manage and edit my extensive photo collection. Having over 32,000 photos, I relied heavily on Aperture to sort and search my collection. Imagine my shock when I heard that support for Aperture was being discontinued and iPhoto was being replaced by a new application, Photos. Needless to say, I was upset to hear that an application that I use almost daily was being fazed out, although Aperture will continue to work after the release of Photos. I received [Read more]
Photos taken during ‘Our Railway Adventure’ weekend on May 2nd – 5th 2014, celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of the Ffestiniog Railway restoration era.
Photos taken during a holiday at Portmeirion Hotel and Village between May 2nd and 6th 2014.
Since I bought a webcam for my weather station a couple of years ago, I have been interested in time-lapse photography. My weather station software uses still images taken by the webcam and makes them into a video. Every ten minutes, hour, day and year, a video is produced and uploaded to my weather site. Bracken House Weather videos page While these videos show some interesting weather events, I have recently been experimenting with creating my own time-lapse videos. For my first experiments, I chose the island of Herm in the Channel Islands. I downloaded an application called Webcam Time [Read more]
This gallery of photos were taken at the wedding of Jamie Rowley and Alice Hawkins held at the Midland Railway Centre, Butterley with the reception at Eastwood Town Football Club. Photos were taken on Saturday 8th June 2013. [AFG_gallery id=’3′]