View allAll Photos Tagged Kit
Cycling kit were designed for a local cycling community of riders. Illustrations depicted as parts of a bicycle and the 'Hills, Thrills, and Chills' design as the terrain of the San Gabriel Valley area. With an asymmetrical design and bright colors displaying some individuality. The black origami is for rememberance of a fellow cyclist who passed last April.
I’ve been wanting to take a city break in summer, rather than in the cold months for a while, so rather than heading for the Lake District for a week of toil on the fells when Jayne could get a week off, we took off from Liverpool for Paris. Flight times were nice and sociable but it meant we were on the M62 car park at a busy time in both directions – it’s a shambles! I’ve stopped over in Paris a dozen times – on my way to cycling in the Etape du Tour in the Alps or Pyrenees – and had a few nights out there. Come to think about it and we’ve spent the day on the Champs Elysees watching the final day of the Tour de France with Mark Cavendish winning. We hadn’t been for a holiday there though and it was a bit of a spur of the moment decision. Six nights gave us five and a half days to explore Paris on foot. I had a good selection of (heavy) kit with me, not wanting to make the usual mistake of leaving something behind and regretting it. In the end I carried the kit in my backpack – an ordinary rucksack – to keep the weight down, for 103 miles, all recorded on the cycling Garmin – and took 3500 photos. The little Garmin is light and will do about 15 hours, it expired towards the end of a couple of 16 hour days but I had the info I wanted by then. This also keeps the phone battery free for research and route finding – I managed to flatten that once though.
What can I say – Paris was fantastic! The weather varied from OK to fantastic, windy for a few days, the dreaded grey white dullness for a while but I couldn’t complain really. We were out around 8.30 in shorts and tee shirt, which I would swap for a vest when it warmed up, hitting 30 degrees at times, we stayed out until around midnight most nights. It was a pretty full on trip. The security at some destinations could have been a problem as there is a bag size limit to save room in the lifts etc. I found the French to be very pragmatic about it, a bag search was a cursory glance, accepting that I was lugging camera gear, not bombs around, and they weren’t going to stop a paying customer from passing because his bag was a bit over size.
We didn’t have a plan, as usual we made it up as we went along, a loose itinerary for the day would always end up changing owing to discoveries along the way. Many times we would visit something a few times, weighing the crowds and light etc. up and deciding to come back later. I waited patiently to go up the Eiffel Tower, we arrived on Tuesday and finally went up on Friday evening. It was a late decision but the weather was good, the light was good and importantly I reckoned that we would get a sunset. Previous evenings the sun had just slid behind distant westerly clouds without any golden glory. It was a good choice. We went up the steps at 7.30 pm, short queue and cheaper – and just to say that we had. The steps are at an easy angle and were nowhere near as bad as expected, even with the heavy pack. We stayed up there, on a mad and busy Friday night, until 11.30, the light changed a lot and once we had stayed a couple of hours we decided to wait for the lights to come on. This was a downside to travelling at this time of year, to do any night photography we had to stay out late as it was light until 10.30. The Eiffel Tower is incredible and very well run, they are quite efficient at moving people around it from level to level. It was still buzzing at midnight with thousands of people around. The sunset on Saturday was probably better but we spent the evening around the base of the Tower, watching the light change, people watching and soaking the party atmosphere up.
Some days our first destination was five miles away, this is a lot of road junctions in a city, the roads in Paris are wide so you generally have to wait for the green man to cross. This made progress steady but when you are on holiday it doesn’t matter too much. Needless to say we walked through some dodgy places, with graffiti on anything that stays still long enough. We were ultra-cautious with our belongings having heard the pickpocket horror stories. At every Café/bar stop the bags were clipped to the table leg out of sight and never left alone. I carried the camera in my hand all day and everywhere I went, I only popped it in my bag to eat. I would guess that there were easier people to rob than us, some people were openly careless with phones and wallets.
We didn’t enter the big attractions, it was too nice to be in a museum or church and quite a few have a photography ban. These bans make me laugh, they are totally ignored by many ( Japanese particularly) people. Having travelled around the world to see something, no one is going to stop them getting their selfies. Selfies? Everywhere people pointed their cameras at their own face, walking around videoing – their self! I do like to have a few photos of us for posterity but these people are self-obsessed.
Paris has obviously got a problem with homeless (mostly) migrants. Walk a distance along the River Seine and you will find tented villages, there is a powerful smell of urine in every corner, with the no alcohol restrictions ignored, empty cans and bottles stacked around the bins as evidence. There are families, woman living on mattresses with as many as four small children, on the main boulevards. They beg by day and at midnight they are all huddled asleep on the pavement. The men in the tents seem to be selling plastic Eiffel Tower models to the tourists or bottled water – even bottles of wine. Love locks and selfy sticks were also top sellers. There must be millions of locks fastened to railings around the city, mostly brass, so removing them will be self-funding as brass is £2.20 a kilo.
As for the sights we saw, well if it was on the map we tried to walk to it. We crossed the Periphique ring road to get to the outer reaches of Paris. La Defense – the financial area with dozens of modern office blocks – was impressive, and still expanding. The Bois de Boulogne park, with the horse racing track and the Louis Vuitton Centre was part of a 20 mile loop that day. Another day saw us in the north east. We had the dome of the Sacre Couer to ourselves, with thousands of tourists wandering below us oblivious of the entrance and ticket office under the church. Again the light was fantastic for us. We read that Pere Lachaise Cemetery or Cimitiere du Pere Lachaise was one of the most visited destinations, a five mile walk but we went. It is massive, you need a map, but for me one massive tomb is much the same as another, it does have highlights but we didn’t stay long. Fortunately we were now closer to the Canal St Martin which would lead us to Parc de la Villette. This was a Sunday and everywhere was both buzzing and chilled at the same time. Where ever we went people were sat watching the world go by, socializing and picnicking, soaking the sun up. As ever I wanted to go up on the roof of anything I could as I love taking cityscapes. Most of these were expensive compared with many places we’ve been to before but up we went. The Tour Montparnasse, a single tower block with 59 floors, 690 foot high and extremely fast lifts has incredible views although it was a touch hazy on our ascent. The Arc de Triomphe was just up the road from our hotel, we went up it within hours of arriving, well worth the visit.
At the time of writing I have no idea how many images will make the cut but it will be a lot. If I have ten subtly different shots of something, I find it hard to consign nine to the dark depths of my hard drive never to be seen again – and I’m not very good at ruthless selection – so if the photo is OK it will get uploaded. My view is that it’s my photostream, I like to be able to browse my own work at my leisure at a later date, it’s more or less free and stats tell me these images will get looked at. I’m not aiming for single stunning shots, more of a comprehensive overview of an interesting place, presented to the best of my current capabilities. I am my own biggest critic, another reason for looking at my older stuff is to critique it and look to improve on previous mistakes. I do get regular requests from both individuals and organisations to use images and I’m obliging unless someone is taking the piss. I’m not bothered about work being published (with my permission) but it is reassuringly nice to be asked. The manipulation of Flickr favourites and views through adding thousands of contacts doesn’t interest me and I do sometimes question the whole point of the Flickr exercise. I do like having access to my own back catalogue though and it gives family and friends the chance to read about the trip and view the photos at their leisure so for the time being I’m sticking with it. I do have over 15 million views at the moment which is a far cry from showing a few people an album, let’s face it, there’s an oversupply of images, many of them superb but all being devalued by the sheer quantity available.
Don’t think that it was all walking and photography, we had a great break and spent plenty of time in pavement bistros having a glass of wine and people watching. I can certainly understand why Paris is top of the travellers list of destinations
Seen at a local auction.
If you want to use this image, ask permission PRIOR to use. Don't be a thief - under most circumstances, I'm quite reasonable.
Copyright 2011 - Alan B.
Kit's Coty House or Kit's Coty is the name of the remains of a Neolithic chambered long barrow on Blue Bell Hill near Aylesford in the English county of Kent. It is one of the Medway megaliths.
Kit's Coty with the Medway valley in the background.
Although badly damaged by ploughing and later vandalism the impressive entrance to the tomb still survives. It consists of three sarsen orthostats supporting a horizontal capstone with a total height of almost 3m. This would have been at one end of a 70m earthern long barrow oriented east-west. A further stone at the site known as the General's Stone or General's Tomb was destroyed in 1867 and may have come from the chamber. William Stukeley visited the site in 1722 and was able to sketch the site whilst it was still largely intact. Before this, Samuel Pepys also saw it and wrote:
Three great stones standing upright and a great round one lying on them, of great bigness, although not so big as those on Salisbury Plain. But certainly it is a thing of great antiquity, and I am mightily glad to see it.
Stukeley's 1722 prospect of Kit's Coty House with its remnant long barrow still just visible and labelled 'The Grave'
In 1854, it was investigated by Thomas Wright who found 'rude pottery' beneath the stones and further Neolithic sherds were recovered from the surrounding field in 1936. Trenching in 1956 located the silted-up ditch surrounding the southern side of the monument and further stones which had been pushed into the ditch when the monument was partially demolished. An excavation in advance of High Speed 1, which runs nearby found the remains of a Neolithic longhouse.
In 1885, Kit's Coty was one of the first sites in Britain to become a Scheduled Ancient Monument and the iron railings that surround it were added a few years later at the suggestion of Augustus Pitt Rivers. It is now in the care of English Heritage.
As only the megalithic portion of the barrow was fenced in by the railings, the long earth barrow has been continually ploughed away since, with uncovered stones dumped in woodland nearby by the farmer and the mound itself, still visible in the mid-twentieth century, now gone.
The site is traditionally known as the burial site of Catigern, brother of Vortimer and son of Vortigern following a battle with the Saxon Horsa in the mid fifth century AD - listed in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as taking place in 455 AD. In 1947, one of the stones from the kerb was removed.
The Countless Stones, also known as Little Kit's Coty House lie around 450m to the south. The name "Kits Coty" allegedly means "Tomb in the Forest" according to signs at the site, possibly related to the Ancient British *kaitom, later *keiton, meaning "forest".
San Diego, California.
I was fortunate to meet up with my old friend Kit and her husband two evenings after San Diego Comic-Con had closed for the night. These are from our first meetup, at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront.
I first shot with Kit when she was 17.The last was in 2017, the last time I got a ticket to SDCC. It was a pleasure to see her again!
Kit is an accomplished actress who was featured in the latest season of "Picard" with quite a bit of green paint applied to her!
The pride and joy of all model builders is their stash. As you can see I have a few waiting to be built.
The "Wirbelwind" flak-panzer is a commission job for the same person who gave me the M24 grenade replica.
I also have two Tiger 1 kits, one will be built as Tank 205 which was Michael Wittmann's tank in the famous Villers-Bocage battle (Tamiya kit).
The other will be built as Tiger 007, a command tank also commanded by Wittmann in which he and his crew died in action in August 1944.
The 55 Chevy has also been started, just got to take some pics of it.
last of my first packet of PX600 FF Impossible Film. This is a photo of the polaroid, don't have access to a scanner at the minute.
Out of the packet of 8 this was by far the best one. 3 failed completely (See earlier photos). This one came out almost b&w, just a slight yellowish tint. Very sharp edges, wow. It was taken with the camera flash. I hope it stays like this, my others have changed completely from when I first took them. Now waiting on my PX70 ff!!