....optics ground with cotton wool soaked in babies tears and love....

I am back and you would not believe how happy and relieved I am about that, yep, today I managed my first run since my sprain. I did try a run mid last week but had to hobble home after a few hundred yards but this morning I managed a gentle mile and my ankle, whilst feeling very vulnerable and sensitive held out very well and actually felt better at the end of the run. It has been fine all today so I am hoping for 2 miles tomorrow and I intend to run 3 miles at the weekend and build up to 5 miles late next week.
Bear in mind that I am actually meant to be running 13 miles every fortnight with a view to ramping that up before the Summer to aim for marathon distances. I am woefully behind on my schedule, partly due to the running layoff and partly due to the huge quantities of food that I have been pigging out on, part greed, part to keep me from smoking. I now have weight to contend with as well, damn!

I had last week off but didn't do much. I started the week with all good intentions but the lack of running has been difficult and I missed it so much and moped around for most of the week.
I did manage some experimental photographs. We spend most of our time saving for the perfect lense, with optics ground with cotton wool soaked in babies tears and love to ensure perfect glass and then we spend the rest of our time changing perfection for imperfection, introducing filters to subdue, bringout, reduce, increase, mask and blur every aspect of our vision.
I went a stage beyond as I had an idea. I can't remember if the original idea was actually mine or whether I saw it somewhere first. Anyway, it turns out that my original idea isn't possible as there isn't a paper that is thin enough to look through with reasonable visibility that can be torn easily by hand. I know
the effect can

probably be
mimicked using
Photoshop but
I am on a binge
to see how far
you can create
in the camera.
With that in
mind, here are
my current
experiments, the
first was taken
through a
window.
The next was a flower taken using a macro filter.

Finally, on saturday, I got to try my experiment in public and it has given me a few ideas on how I can improve and actually tailor my preparation for each specific shot. I don't want to give away more than I have to until I have tried it but whether it works or not, I will share the results.

To finish with, something more traditional. I had to take my daughter to the Roundhouse near Camden for a gig on Friday night. As I was designated driver and not welcome at the gig, I had a few hours to kill around Camden and got this one shot that I am a bit partial to.

Hopefully I can now get on with my life and not feel so in limbo, not a great start to the year but in the words of Joey Ramone, Hey ho, let's go.