or the highway

This is one of those effects that I always want to try and catch whenever I see it but which so far hasn't turned out quite right. Option B with someone walking in front of the railings didn't work as well as hoped but I'll settle for this one so that I can at least stop worrying about not taking pictures of the many-lights-fans-of-light-railings-pavement phenomenon whenever I see it which tends to be most mornings just as I arrive at the office and glance southwards up Lothian Road past the railings on the corner. Not that the railings on the corner are in a fit state to have lights shone through them at the moment; it seems they got on the wrong side of some form of motor-vehicle recently and are lying mangled flat against the pavement protected by cones. There's probably a slightly better pavement-type to catch it on (maybe the slabs whose upper surfaces are dimpled like goosebumps which would show a wider fan of beamlets) but the only one I can think of nearby doesn't attract a sufficient volume of traffic. HMMM.

It was the work photo club's start-edition AGM this evening. I was always planning to go to the meeting but (as might be expected) was mildly wary of the post-meeting-pub and post-meeting-pub-meal on the standard grounds of social-situation-nerves and two out of the three members I already know not being present. My inclination to go was not increased at the meeting by the presence of one of those sorts of people with whom I become inordinately annoyed at their mere sound. The first thing they did was start throwing terms such as "AOCB" into a perfectly relaxed and informal meeting. The second thing they did was loudly and obviously declare themselves to be a Obvious Film Snob. The third thing they did was wrongly assume that they were the only person in the world who knew anything. The fourth thing they did was make the mistake of being an arrogant fuckwit when I was attempting to make simple polite conversation. I KNOW that a £70 tripod isn't going to stay very still in a strong wind and isn't going to be made out of gravity-defying hand-woven organic carbon fibre with a 360-degree magic rotating ultra-head BUT NEVERTHELESS it is still a tripod, it suffices to hold my camera more steadily over the course of exposures greater than 1/30 than can my hands AND reaches to above my eye level despite not costing the bare minimum you suggested of £115 (without a head) to achieve such an height. AND I'm a good three inches taller than you AND what's so special about eye level anyway? The fifth thing was to display signs of Having an Attitude towards mere amateur dabbling as opposed to Proper Photography As Practised By Qualified Professionals. I've just deleted a paragraph of tangential axe-grinding about this which I will save for another time. Suffice to say: grrrrrrrrr.

What made it all worse is that he was the only other man present with a beard and (as with cyclists who skip red lights setting car drivers against ALL cyclists) I'm concerned that all beardy people with cameras will be lumped in with him. There's also a little tiny bit of revulsion in there due to the fact that were I significantly more extroverted, officious, arrogant and rich there's a small possibility that I might one day have developed into something similar.

Nevertheless...

I went along to the pub and the restaurant. I ended up sitting next to the bugger but with a smaller audience (and sitting at the end of the table) he wasn't as bad as he made out that he could have been.