Old Dive's Motorsport Photography School

Speedway, being Queen of Indy Circuit high speed car porn photography, will back me up on this: when a car is travelling at well over a hundred miles per hour; no matter how good your panning technique …

… no matter how pin-sharp your manual focusing; no matter how spot-on your shutter speed (that magical and very narrow window that stops the car dead but keeps its wheels moving - something that your camera's "sport" mode will never achieve, so leave it switched to manual) …

… No matter how good you are …

… that fucking post will always get in the way. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn!

Nothing that a bit of Photoshop wankery can't fix, however. What the hell did I do before Photoshop?

Beautiful Thing

Isn't this just the most beautiful thing?
Just keep on clicking and dragging …

Saturday Statuary - City Flower

Style

Aha!

The solution to yesterday's Union Jack poser becomes a little clearer.

Which is more than can be said for the instrument panel.

Sat-nav? iPod dock? Climate control?

Bollocks!

Climate control comes courtesy of the weather.

Yes, it's a glorious Bentley beast from 1930.

These monsters ruled the Jazz Age, roaring around the banked curves of Brooklands.

It may or may not have been a Golden Age, but at least the cars, the clothes, the architecture, the music; they all had style … something the modern world can never be accused of.

Jack

A much cooler Union Jack than the one in yesterday's photo …
But where is it and what does it adorn?

Wednesday Window

Old Red Eye is Back

As Petrea didn't believe me (see yesterday's comments box) I thought I'd better post some corroborative evidence.
Here you go … Old Red Eye is sitting right there on the first span of the bridge.

Complete with gas lamp spigot, rivets and tourists, HMS Belfast in the distance and the Tower down to the right.
I can't believe that the photo fooled you guys for so long. I'll have to do more of those "Where Am I?" posts.

Where Am I?

Recipe of the Year

Just got this off the Guardian website.
Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart … and kidneys …
Holy fuck! I am so gonna eat this until I burst.

BLACK PUDDING FAGGOTS AND STOUT GRAVY

A traditional faggot is wrapped in caul fat to hold it together. Increasingly difficult to get hold of, this thin membrane of fat is replaced here by an outer casing of bacon.

pork belly 125g
an onion
lamb's liver 250g
black pudding 100g
garlic cloves 2
white pepper
fresh white breadcrumbs 50g
streaky bacon 12 rashers
cocktail sticks
stout, or other dark beer 500ml

DIRECTIONS

Set the oven at 180C. Peel and chop the onion. Cut the pork belly up a little and drop it into the bowl of a food processor, then blitz with the onion and lamb's liver till coarsely chopped. Add the black pudding and blitz very briefly, then tip into a large mixing bowl. Crush the garlic and add it to the meat, together with a generous grinding of salt and white pepper. Mix in the breadcrumbs.

Divide the mixture into six equal amounts. Place them on a work surface and roll loosely into balls. Wrap each with two rashers of bacon, overlapping, around the outside of the meat, leaving the top of each open, then secure each with a couple of cocktail sticks. Transfer carefully to a roasting tin or baking dish.

Pour the stout into the roasting tin and bake for 35-40 minutes, till the tops are lightly crusted. Check the seasoning of the liquor in the pan before serving.

Saturday Statuary A Day Late

Don't ask, because I really have no idea …

More Arthurian Filler (too busy to post properly)

Chanson D'Armour …

… Ya - da-da-da-da, etc.

Just a quick filler post (on an Arthurian theme to tie in with Petrea's Camelot Contest).

I'm frantically dashing around to learn a new 3D Building Integrated Management software thang from scratch as I'll be teaching it around the office in a week or so; as a result of which I'm not going to be around much in Blogville over the coming days.

Those of you who hate photos of cars and girls at Goodwood can breathe a sigh of relief, but rest assured your respite will be short-lived as I'm going to ace this fecking thing in record time and be back posting car porn and crap before you know it.

Pedal To The Metal

Yes, it really was pedal to the metal at Goodwood this year with the inaugural Settrington Cup, a race featuring vintage Austin J40 pedal cars.
This is the winner of Sunday's finale, warming up in the paddock before the race. One up for women racing drivers!

There's always so much going on at the Revival Meeting that - unlike yesterday's post - you're often in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the Settrington Cup saw us walking up the Lavant Straight to get in position for the next race. We did, however, get to see the action through binoculars, which brought us a whole lot closer than my feeble zoom lens (click to blow this up and you can just see the cars heading for the chicane).

The kids (not only the drivers, but kid mechanics and pit crews, too) did a le Mans style start, sprinting across the track to leap into their cars and put pedal to the metal. The course saw the kids hurtle, nine abreast through the chicane (most other drivers only dare take this in single file) and then dash frantically up the home straight to the finish line, accompanied by Murray Walker's breathless Grand Prix commentary.

Here's a much better set of photos from the first heat on Saturday that really give an impression of the atmosphere. Goodwood is more fun than can be decently crammed into a weekend, with lashings of extra fun heaped on top.

Look Out! It's Goodwood Again

Phil and I were at the Goodwood Revival Meeting at the weekend

and a splendid time was had by all.

Here's a sweet little sequence of pictures, featuring the gravel-trap mayhem above.

Being at the right place at the right time is essential if you want to see boffo slidey action.

We like to hang around the fast double-apex Lavant corner

as that's where even the finest racing drivers tend to get it wrong.

Like this …

You can tell when a driver hits the first apex on opposite lock that something is not going right.

This beautiful car came out of the first part of the corner with the back end sliding left

in an attempt to overtake the front end.

The driver is steering hard left to try to counteract it but …

… there's only so much tarmac and suddenly he's going sideways across the grass.

Very fast.

Ka-pow!

Actually, more of a loud crunching sound as the car hits the gravel trap.

For once I got my pan and zoom technique just right. Yay!

A good racing driver doesn't stall when he hits the gravel trap;

he puts pedal to the metal and strives to keep the car going until it reaches the grass run-off area.

Hence all the smoke.

Hoorah!

Back on track and racing off down the Lavant Straight as if nothing had happened.

More motoring mayhem to follow.

And maybe some girls, too …

Enjoy!

WTF Monday - Captions, Please

Not that anyone will have noticed, but I've been away over the weekend and having a … er … marvellous time, as you can see from the photo.

As to what I've been doing: I'll leave that to your somewhat feverish imaginations …

Saturday Statuary - Ravens

Cityshapes - Birchwood

Hokay, so we're still in central London, within sight of the Thames, but where precisely are these birches (and there are rather a lot of them in neat, regimented rows)?
Do click and blow this one up to get its full yumminess.
It was a bastard to get the focusing just how I wanted it.

Cityshapes - Crosses

As seen here.

That Thing

Yesterday, Katherine quite rightly asked "What the hell is that … thing?"

Rather than give her the all too obvious reply, I thought I'd post photographs of it instead.

Ahem …

So now you know.

That thing is merely the "stack of tin cans" fire escape stair on the back of Richard Rogers' Lloyds Building (he's the guy who gave Paris the Pompidou Centre … he has a thing about pipework and ducts).

Cityshapes - Ribbed For Extra Sensitivity

Worlds Apart

Cityshapes - Cock

Well, another September 11th rolls around and let's see how we're doing …
Bin Laden's dead and we're still building ludicrous skyscrapers; I'd say that's a pretty fair start.

Meet The Shard, London's latest "fuck you" to al Qaeda.
Of course, it wasn't built for so noble a cause; it is merely - as I described it earlier this week: "a braying monument to crass commercialism with no æsthetic merit whatseover" but it does - willingly or no - flip the bird at those who think terrorism can help their cause.
After all, Hitler bombed London flat but look at it now.

Anyone fancy a job as a window cleaner?

WTF Monday - Pimp My Ram

Yes, it's a dead ram; yes, it's on wheels, yes, it's a drinks dispenser, yes, it's Monday.
Eat your heart out, Skymall.

We Can Be Heroes

So farewell then, the most wonderful eight weeks this country has enjoyed since … well, probably since the end of the last ice age.

Eight short weeks of scintillating Promenade concerts and brilliant Olympic and Paralympic endeavour that have battered down the walls of my cynicism and left me really quite pleased to live here.

 I'm about to watch the closing ceremony of what has been beyond all shadow of a doubt the greatest Paralympics in history: two and a half million seats sold out and filled, leaving the unlucky remainder of the country glued to the TV to cheer every athlete to the rafters.

Last night was the end of a wonderful Proms season (there is no other sort) and saw the traditional Last Night of the Proms' ludicrous excess of Pythonesque jingoism hit new heights of ecstatic insanity when the stage was lined with gold medal winning Olympians and Paralympians for the bonkers, country-wide (hundreds of thousands of people packed into parks and waving giant flags at giant screens) repeated choruses of Rule Britannia and Jerusalem by the biggest and most breathlessly berserk choir ever assembled.
It seems so long ago that we all cheered and stamped and shouted ourselves hoarse at the Olympics.
Wow!
What a summer!
The sun even shone after six months of rain.

And now it's all over …

 Except that it's not.

This country has changed over the past eight, glorious weeks of culture, music and sport. It has actually BECOME a country for the first time since the war.

We have witnessed the ordinary people of this overcrowded little island becoming extraordinary. We have witnessed their common spirit, their compassion, their intelligence, their ability to distinguish Patriotism from Nationalism, their exceedingly vocal support for every athlete - not just the British ones, their heartfelt embrace of - indeed their hysterical shrieking adulation of - the world's greatest Paralympians, seeing not the disability but the ability of each and every person taking part.

This wondrous summer has changed the country and it has changed me. Now all we need to change is the government and its financial institutions (in the middle of the Paralympics the Tories blithely announced benefit cuts for the disabled) and we might just be able to glimpse some hope for the future.

Bereft as I feel now that the whole thing is over, I know that - whatever's to come - we will always have this wonderful summer, these eight short weeks of euphoria and hope, of decency and humanity; of eighty-thousand people roundly booing our innumerate Fascist chancellor when some idiot let him into the stadium.

Remember it at the next election. Let's build on it. Let's take back our country from the greedy and corrupt and bring it back into the light.
We managed it for eight incredible weeks. We can manage it again and again.

Cityshapes - Angle Tangle

Especially for Vanda, our first - somewhat arty-farty - glimpse of London's latest thrusting phallus,

The Shard.

More overcompensation to follow.

Cityshapes - The Big Pickle

It's the Gherkin again …

Neetzy wants to know whether the building is curved or if it's an illusion.

I think I can safely say it's gherkin-shaped.

It's rather lovely in its own way, though it does make for an incongruous neighbour to the little house beside St.Helen's church.

Spiffy, huh?

Cityshapes - How The Gherkin Sees Itself

Following on from yesterday's post, this is how the Gherkin actually sees itself, reflected in the mirror of the Tokyo Marine building. It must think its diamond panes are all curvy like the reflection. I wonder if we see ourselves distorted the same way.

Cityshapes - Vanity Mirror