Giles Shaxted

At the end of October Sam and I went on a driving vacation through some of the south east side of the USA. We flew from Grand Cayman to Miami and the hired a car for a quick drive up through Georgia.  Here’s a quick run down of the route we took.

Fly drive to Miami and up to Atlanta

We  drove over 1700 miles and saw a whole bunch of awesome places. We got to hang out with our the Vetters and see some live music thanks to Plain Jane Autmobile.

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South Celestial Pole from Martin Whipp on Vimeo.

For the last 5 days I have been driving arund North Georgia, taking in the sites and sounds of the Appalachian Mountains. I have seen plenty of new things as well as experiencing parts of the USA I probably normally wouldn’t.

By far the most unique place I have been is Helen. This Town / Village is nestled in a very scenic valley by the Unicoi Forest.  Helen is a Bavarian style village, and I kid you not the buildings are apline looking and the names like Hansel & gretel Candy Kitchen and the Hofbrau where I stayed.

I have taken quite a few photos which you can see here on Flickr. One of my favourite is this panorama which was all done rather quickly and I would have liked ot get multiple exposures of each shot, but I still kind of like the dark shadows and the lit up trees with all their clours on display.

These are some of the photos I took today that I may possibly enter into the Cayfest competition along with some of my underwater Photos.
I will also take some more as there are a few categories I would like to enter: Landscape, Portrait, Animals, Underwater, Closeups and Lifestyles. I am not into the Digital manipulation so I will not enter that .. unless i change my mind !!
Anyway .. I will go through and enter some and hopefully I will win a prize, which is normally cash .. so yippee .. I think I will probably enter myself in the adult amateur category, its not like i make money from photography so thats legit. Although I don’t know who here that is professional would bother entering it .. I guess I will see !

Gannet diving for Sardines.

finally got around to posting here about the sardine run. excuse the lameness i just had a hard drive failure and i’m pissed i haven’t backed up in a while. i won’t have lost much information bur it’s expensive now to buy a new hard drive and the get a proper back up system. anyways click to go see the rest of my photos at flickr.com. some people have even been asking if they can get some prints. if you are interested contact me and i will decide how to do it with the hi res images which are not online.

Feel free to leave comments or notes on my flickr account about any of the images you enjoy.

UPDATE: Hard drive failure of My Docments is going to cost me some headaches if they can’t repair it, or clone it. I do have a backup, but I will also loose some recent stuff. Please Clone work ! then I can cry from how much it costs !

It’s been a while since I posted and images photos or whatever, mostly because I had no way of getting my images from camera to crappy old laptop, I;’ve done that after investing in a card reader, but will still take photos sparingly as i left my camera charger in Cayman.

Sunsets can still impress me

such a nice little spot

Arawak Cay Sunset

and one last one

Wilma 2005

You can see the flag is flying in Grand Cayman .. I believe warnings still stand in place even though we aren’t in any realy danger anymore .. but as you can see from these photos George Town was under tirany from the water (2 days ago)… It actually got worse yesterday and i didn’t have my camera with me most the day. I think i need to get me a smart back pack to carry everything aroud in. I only need my little SD20 with me all the time.
Anyway I hope You enjoy the photos we kinda enjoyed this storm although it has done quite a bit of damage .. Rackams may be out of action for a while. oh well at least I have a week off to look forward too.

Day at Donnington

Here is my favourite photo from yesterday at Donnington. As it isn’t the best (not very sharp) photo in the world I have done some photoshop work to distract from it. It’s actually a photo of Alex’s Dad in his e-type. It’s a relaitvely well known car I imagine amongst it’s cirle. A very old e-type that was rebuilt by the owner of Lacoste (I think) at a cost of �250,000. It was made faster and stronger than opther e-types and so won all of it’s races with great ease. All the other boys in the group at the time weren’t very happy they couldn’t win so they complained and had the car banned. There may be another bit to the story but I forget it. Alex’s dad has basically bought it and had it modified back to original e-type spec mechanics wise, but as his little off proved the car is still very strong.
I am currently making a new web site for myself as well as working on YUP. My new site will be based on new skills I have learnt and also have a lot more information on it with regards to me and stuff to do with me. I am also trying to swap over to wordpress from b2evolution, just because when wordpress is up and running how you want it it is much better than b2evo, I just don’t seem to be able to transfer my journal very easily. what I may do is just transfer over to the new site to kinda of have a new start date to signify my moving back to cayman and hopefully a more direction orientated part of mylife where I stop pissing it all up against the wall .. well every night anyway .. got to have fun, but got to also get to where you are going in the direction you are heading or wanting to head in. Oh and Jim will be amused to know I bumbed into Beaver of the ol Jame Bearne Photography while I was up there.

Moonscape

Morning View

Marina Building

Palm Tree

Here are a quick few photos from the long weekend in spain that I went on with Dad and Alan. Taken a while for me to get around to doing them as my card reader broke but it is all working good. I didnt take very many or many interesting ones as I was ill most the time. Most of the time there i was reminded why i didnt like spain that much, its not the lively part of Spain, its not a big city or a big holiday place it’s an inbetween of both. Fun when you are younger and all you want is the beach every so often a swimming pool and food and drink. When you get older thats all you want but i stopped going to spain when i was 16 i guess as it has nothing to offer someone between that age and about 30 or more.

Puerto Banus

Fuenguirola Town

Our Villa

If you’d like to go to the part of the gallery that has all the images in here is the link, I dont think i will be linking individual imagesfor right now it’s a little tideus.

Gallery Here->

Wally Lamb once wrote a book called i know this much to be true. I never read it, but the title is resounding right now. In my head right now is;

• i have ideas of things i want to do.
• i know what i will miss
• but i am looking forward to the things i have ideas about
• and i know the things i will miss here i can get back at anytime

There are some more piccies in my photo gallery of the Pirates Day Fireworks and the Beach, check em out. the fireworks were cool but nothing on a normal pirates week.

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