Archive for June, 2011

Londons East End Street Art

2 years ago

in My Blog

Last weekend we visited a few friends in London, we had found out about a tour around the east end of London, I’m not big into tours being a photographer (I like to take my own time to look at things) but this was said to be an alternative tour so thought it was worth a try.
The tour started around 11:30 from Spitalfields Market with Gary our tour guide. Gary is an excellent guide, he knows his area very well, artistically, culturally, politically, it’s good to see people that still care about preserving the uniqueness of London. 2 hours went by very quickly, never dull, always something cool to look at, plus not too much walking around. I hadn’t planned on taking many photos but in the end I fired off about 100 shots of the street art around the area, below are a few examples.

by Viktor Kaifas

Huckers by Pablo Delgado

Triangle type thing by Narcelio Grud

ROA’s Crane

To see the full set of photos click Matt Debouge Street Art Photos

This is the tour we did http://alternativeldn.co.uk/

Skomer Visit – Crazy Puffins and other island inhabitants

2 years ago

in My Blog

It’s taken us 2 years to get to Skomer! We booked time off work to go last month but the weather was too bad in the end; didn’t want to travel 5 hours for nothing.
We travelled down last Friday afternoon and stayed in a camp-site just 5mins away from the boat – all very last min plans.
After a nightmare night in a tent I was up at 7:30 getting ready to queue for the boat.
Queued for 45 mins only to be told the boat wasn’t going due to expected high winds later in the day. I was gutted! I asked about weather for Sunday and was told the forecast was the same We tried again on Sunday morning anyway and at 8:30 we were greeted with good news – the weather was fine and boats would be going. We managed to get over on the first boat of the day.

What we managed to see on the island in 4 hours:

GUILLEMOT
CURLEW
Many types of gull
RAZORBILL
PHEASANT
GANNET
COMMON BUZZARD
OYSTERCATCHER
ATLANTIC PUFFINS
1 x LITTLE OWL
1x WREN
Few CHOUGH
4 x GREY SEALS
2 x PORPOISES
Unidentified brown lizard

I managed to grab a photo of the Oystercatcher Family

Its a amazing how close you can get to the Puffins, I managed to get about 2ft from a puffin nest to get some excellent close up photos. You have to respect the Puffins space though and allow he/she pass by to go fishing for sand eels. I captured a short video so you can hear the funny noise puffins make.

Little Owl

After watching the Puffins for some time we ventured in land to try and see if we could get a glimpse of the owls on Skomer.
We only had to walk 5mins and I noticed this little owl on the wall.