Tarn Hows Waterfalls, Lake District

Here are a few waterfalls I snapped on a quick break back up North when visiting family. I took them on the tributary to Tarn Hows, which is about 2 miles North East of Coniston. The Tarn is fed at its northern end by a series of valley and basin mires and is drained by Tom Gill which cascades down over several small waterfalls to Glen Mary bridge. I hope you like them!

Photograph Details: Nikon D7000 Focal length 55mm ISO-100 exp: 1 sec f36 Exp Bias -5 step

Photograph Details: Nikon D7000 Focal length 18mm ISO-100 exp: 1/2 sec f22 Exp Bias -5 step

Photograph Details: Nikon D7000 Focal length 18mm ISO-100 exp: 1/3 sec f22 Exp Bias -5 step

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Rainwater

Photograph Details: Nikon D7000 Focal length 55mm ISO-200 exp: 1/30 f11

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Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

Photograph Details: Nikon D40 Focal length 300mm ISO-200 exp: 1/125 f6.3

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Down The Tube

Photograph Details: Nikon D40 Focal length 70mm exp: 1/60 f5.6

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Abandoned boats, Dungeness

Dungeness is one seriously weird place. It's fantastic shingle beach is one of the largest in the world, and it has two nuclear power stations with one still active. Not just that but it's beach is pebbled with abandoned boats, beech huts, narrow-gauge railway tracks and the odd house crafted from old railway carriages. Not to mention the strange concrete "listening ears" - a precursor to modern day RADAR.

Dungeness Headland Lighthouse

Photograph Details: Nikon D7000 Focal length 18mm ISO-100 exp: 1/400 f11

Evening Lights

Here is a photo I got with my new Nikon D7000 the other night when I was messing about with the white balance settings. Just for the sake of it I popped it into Photoshop and ran the auto colour correction but I was disappointed with the results - they came out fairly boring - so I decided to keep and post this one, it's much more dramatic.

Photograph Details:

• Nikon D7000
• focal length 18mm
• ISO-100
• exp: 1/10
• f3.5

Pansy

The Pansy is a large group of hybrid plants cultivated as garden flowers. Pansies are derived from Viola species Viola tricolor hybridized with other viola species, these hybrids are referred to as Viola × wittrockiana or less commonly Viola tricolor hortensis. The name "pansy" also appears as part of the common name for other Viola species that are wildflowers in Europe. Some unrelated species, such as the Pansy Monkeyflower, also have "pansy" in their name.

Static Motion

I thought I'd post this photograph, despite its flaws. It was a 13 second exposure which shows the motion of the sky, with the landscape in the foreground being still. I think it has a quiet calm about it.

Buy the Moon film (2009) on DVD and Blu-Ray now:

Photograph Details: Nikon D40, focal length 18mm, ISO-200, exp: 30 sec, f3.5

New Forest Panorama

Photograph Details: Nikon D40, focal length 27mm, exp: 1/125-1/200, ISO-200, f/5.6-7.1

I took this picture a few weeks back in the New Forest. It is composed of 8 photographs taken just by moving the camera to the right each time, without a tripod (you can tell!) It was stitched together using autostitch and cropped in Photoshop Elements.

Sunset

Photograph Details: Nikon D40, focal length: 18mm, ISO-200, exp: 30sec, f/3.5

Fish Eye Milky Way

The Greek philosopher Democritus (450–370 BC) proposed that the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way might consist of distant stars. Aristotle (384–322 BC), however, believed the Milky Way to be caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars which were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere, in the region of the world which is continuous with the heavenly motions." The Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495–570 AD) criticized this view, arguing that if the Milky Way were sublunary it should appear different at different times and places on the Earth, and that it should have parallax, which it does not. In his view, the Milky Way was celestial. This idea would be influential later in the Islamic world.

Milky Way

One of the main reasons I have not been blogging recently is that I've taken what was once a feint affinity for the stars to a new level. I purchased a small telescope and started looking at astrophotography in a whole new way.

Turntablism

The appearance of turntablists and the birth of turntablism was prompted by one major factor - the disappearance of the DJ in hip hop groups, on records and in live shows at the turn of the 1990s. This disappearance has been widely documented in books and documentaries (such as Black Noise and Scratch The Movie), and was linked to the increased use of DAT tapes and other studio techniques that would ultimately push the DJ further away from the original hip hop equation of the MC as the vocalist and the DJ as the music provider alongside the producer. This push and disappearance of the DJ meant that the practices of the DJ, such as scratching, went back underground and were cultivated and built upon by a generation of people who grew up with hip hop, DJs and scratching. By the mid-90s the disappearance of the DJ in hip hop had created a sub-culture which would come to be known as turntablism and which focused entirely on the DJ utilising his turntables and a mixer to manipulate sounds and create music. By pushing the practice of DJing away, hip hop created the grounds for this sub-culture to evolve.

Dusk Seaside, Minster Leas, Isle of Sheppey

Photograph Details: Nikon D40, focal length 18mm, ISO-200, exp: 1/20sec, f-stop 3.5

Sheppey Rugby Club Fireworks Display, 7th Nov 2009

A firework is a low explosive pyrotechnic device used primarily for aesthetic and entertainment purposes. The most common use of a firework is as part of a fireworks display. A fireworks event (also called a fireworks show or pyrotechnics) is a display of the effects produced by firework devices. Fireworks competitions are also regularly held at a number of places. Fireworks (devices) take many forms to produce the four primary effects: noise, light, smoke, and floating materials (confetti for example). They may be designed to burn with coloured flames and sparks including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and silver. Displays are common throughout the world and are the focal point of many cultural and religious celebrations.

The Jurassic Coast – Sidmouth, Devon, England

This photograph was taken looking south from Sidmouth which is a small town on the English Channel coast in Devon, South West England. The town lies at the mouth of the River Sid in the East Devon district, 15 miles (24 km) south east of Exeter. It has a population of about 15,000, of whom 40% are over 65, and a large part of the town has been designated as a Conservation area. Sidmouth's rocks contain fossils and so this stretch of coast is part of the Jurassic coast world heritage site.

H2O/HOH

The first decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen, by electrolysis, was done in 1800 by William Nicholson, an English chemist. In 1805, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac andAlexander von Humboldt showed that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (by volume).

Gilbert Newton Lewis isolated the first sample of pure heavy water in 1933.

The properties of water have historically been used to define various temperature scales. Notably, the Kelvin, Celsius and Fahrenheit scales were, or currently are, defined by the freezing and boiling points of water. The less common scales of Delisle, Newton, Réaumur and Rømer were defined similarly. The triple point of water is a more commonly used standard point today.

Water (H2O, HOH) is the most abundant molecule on Earth's surface, constituting about 75% of the Earth's surface. In nature it exists in liquid, solid, and gaseous states. It is in dynamic equilibrium between the liquid and gas states at standard temperature and pressure. At room temperature, it is a nearly colorless with a hint of blue, tasteless, and odorless liquid. Many substances dissolve in water and it is commonly referred to as the universal solvent. Because of this, water in nature and in use is rarely pure and some of its properties may vary slightly from those of the pure substance. However, there are many compounds that are essentially, if not completely, insoluble in water. Water is the only common substance found naturally in all three common states of matter—for other substances, see Chemical properties. Water is essential for life on Earth. Water usually makes up 55% to 78% of the human body.

Surface Tension

Water has a high surface tension of 72.8 mN/m, caused by the strong cohesion between water molecules, the highest of the non-metallic liquids. This can be seen when small quantities of water are placed onto a sorption-free (non-adsorbent and non-absorbent) surface, such as polythene orTeflon, and the water stays together as drops. Just as significantly, air trapped in surface disturbances forms bubbles, which sometimes last long enough to transfer gas molecules to the water.

Another surface tension effect is capillary waves, which are the surface ripples that form around the impacts of drops on water surfaces, and sometimes occur with strong subsurface currents flowing to the water surface. The apparent elasticity caused by surface tension drives the waves.

Capillary Action

Due to an interplay of the forces of adhesion and surface tension, water exhibits capillary action whereby water rises into a narrow tube against the force of gravity. Water adheres to the inside wall of the tube and surface tension tends to straighten the surface causing a surface rise and more water is pulled up through cohesion. The process continues as the water flows up the tube until there is enough water such that gravity balances the adhesive force.

Surface tension and capillary action are important in biology. For example, when water is carried through xylem up stems in plants, the strong intermolecular attractions (cohesion) hold the water column together and adhesive properties maintain the water attachment to the xylem and prevent tension rupture caused by transpiration pull.

Heavy water and isotopologues

There are several isotopes of both hydrogen and oxygen, so several isotopologues of water are known. Hydrogen has three naturally occurring isotopes. The most common, making up more than 99.98% of the hydrogen in water, has 1 proton and 0 neutrons. A second isotope, deuterium (short form "D"), has 1 proton and 1 neutron. Deuterium oxide, D2O, is also known as heavy water and is used in nuclear reactors as a neutron moderator. The third isotope, tritium, has 1 proton and 2 neutrons, and is radioactive, with a half-life of 4500 days.T2O exists in nature only in tiny quantities, being produced primarily via cosmic ray-driven nuclear reactions in the atmosphere. D2O is stable, but differs from H2O in that it is denser - hence, "heavy water" - and in that several other physical properties are slightly different from those of common, Hydrogen-1 containing "light water". Water with one deuterium atomHDO occurs naturally in ordinary water in very low concentrations (~0.03%) and D2O in far lower amounts (0.000003%). Consumption of pure isolated D2O may affect biochemical processes - ingestion of large amounts impairs kidney and central nervous system function. However, very large amounts of heavy water must be consumed for any toxicity to be apparent, and smaller quantities can be consumed with no ill effects at all.

Oxygen also has three stable isotopes, with 16O present in 99.76 %, 17O in 0.04% and 18O in 0.2% of water molecules.

(Wonky) Photograph details: Nikon D40. Focal Length 55mm. exp: 1/60 F-stop f/5.6

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The Eagle Has Landed—Two Men Walk on the Moon

Today is a momentous day. In case you live in a hole you should know that today is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. The infamous moon landing. The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon by the end of the 1960s, which he expressed during a speech given before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

I’m a Firestarter, twisted firestarter

A flame is a mixture of reacting gases and solids emitting visible and infrared light, the frequency spectrum of which depends on the chemical composition of the burning material and intermediate reaction products. In many cases, such as the burning of organic matter, for example wood, or the incompletecombustion of gas, incandescent solid particles called soot produce the familiar red-orange glow of 'fire'. This light has a continuous spectrum. Complete combustion of gas has a dim blue color due to the emission of single-wavelength radiation from various electron transitions in the excited molecules formed in the flame. Usually oxygen is involved, but hydrogen burning in chlorine also produces a flame, producing hydrogen chloride (HCl). Other possible combinations producing flames, amongst many more, are fluorine and hydrogen, and hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.