So, What Else Do You Do?

I make a living as an engineer and i am married with two children
I am into most sports having played rugby football and cricket at club level and now coach rugby and play golf, I am also a
qualified scuba diver.
 
you know saying that we do get a Alot of groups of togs staying with us throughout the year :)

Also we are situated under the main flight path of of the "Mach Loop" a very popular military low flight training area for the RAF and USAF. These jets, Apaches, Chinooks & other military planes come flying down this valley a few hundred feet above the hotel

Check out youtube for the "Mach Loop", at the top of the valley you can climb onto the hills a steep 30 mins walk / climb (cad east or cad west) and literally be on eye level with Tornadoes, Hawks, typhoon euro fighters, c130 & the crazy crazy & very loud USAF F15s. A mere 200mm lens will get you up close and personal to the pilots if you so wish & your panning is up to scratch.

This plane spotting has a massive following and most days through out the week as many as 50 people can be sat on top of the hills waiting to get that perfect shot

Some pic taken by our guests can be found here


Daz
 
Nice thread.

I'm an actuary, working for a life assurance company based in Birmingham.

Apart from photography my hobbies mainly revolve around music, including hifi.
 
Hi

My name is Jim, I am working on a PhD, researching on advancements of parity game (NOT party game) solvers, design synthesis, automata theory, and LTL model checking, at Imperial College London. Before that, I was a Java/Scala developer, working in various industries, including banking, telecom and publishing, for quite a long time.

In my spare time, I like to play with my cameras. I first got into photography due to my love of gadgets (DSLRs) and their technical aspects, so I spent a long time paying a lot of attention in "how" (camera settings..etc) I shoot, rather than "what" I shoot.

Consideration of what makes a better picture came much much later (after I discovered RPF). I am looking forward to continue the photography journey with the rest of you on this site. :)
 
I work for a small company that exports spare parts and equipment to the places like refineries, power stations, oil fields etc. Been doing it now for nearly 14 years and started after dropping out of my 2nd year of uni in order to move to Suffolk from London. I did plan to take a year out and then enroll at another uni to finish my degree but I enjoyed what I was doing too much so I stayed. I studied Fine Art, absolutely nothing to do with what I do know. Although I was taught how to use a camera and how to develop films and prints at college I never really got into photography until quite recently. The creative juices started to flow and I needed an outlet.

I also play the guitar infrequently and badly and I like to make stuff. Last night I made a DIY version of a Black Rapid camera strap with some stuff I had laying around.
 
Rob MacKillop said:
Fascinating stuff.

Chris - a PhD in colour robot vision?! I can imagine that comes in handy when editing shots.
Click to expand...

Well, some of the image processing stuff is useful - most of my research got taken-up by the Ministry of Defense, which isn't what it was intended for, but apparently it was something they needed at the time.

Apparently they can blow things up more effectively in color! :D
 
I heard about that ... It was around the time the world became colour
Did you know, little bits of Color started appearing as far back as 1855.. Before that everything was black and white ... Sometimes brown ... In just a hundred years blowing things up in colour was becoming quite popular and by the 1980s black and white bombs were pretty much a thing of the past ... Blowing things up in black and white has become very much more popular these days again though ... And thanks to computers, hyper realality bombs are are now easy to make even by the ameteur!
...
I wonder if this post will be spotted by the government?
If so ... Hi government people :)
I'm making a joke about bombs, comparing them to photography and suggesting that the world was once in black and white ... No need to worry ... But whilst I have your attention ... Stop picking on photographers yeah ... Cheers ;)
 
Haha!!
What a laugh to read first thing in the morning!!
Made my day.... Nice one H !! :D:D
 
Excellent Hamish!

Well, as some of you will know I run a small company called IMSL (IMSL Director) and employ 9 people in the UK where our laboratory and main offices are based. I also have an office / studio in Babelsberg (part of Potsdam) on the outskirts of Berlin, where I live half of the time. I formed IMSL in 1996 after leaving ICI where I was the company microbiologist for ICI Paints and acting as the technical specialist for a number of the other businesses within ICI. IMSL, as you will see from its website, specialises in the microbiology of materials and industrial processes. I started down this route in the late 1970's when I took a job as a microbiologist for a food company. Two years later I moved to ICI Plant Protection (pesticides) and worked in the microbial ecology section of their regulatory support group looking at the impact of pesticides on non-target microorganisms and the control of fertility (mainly carbon and nitrogen cycling) in soil and freshwater and the preservation of pesticides. And from there to ICI Paints.

Although I have ended up as a professional scientist this was not originally the plan. My first love was (and probably still is) architecture and, more specifically, interiors and I had planned to go to art college and pursue interior design as a career. Somehow though I got interested in entomology and went to university to study that. I hated University and left to go back to architecture (I had an apprenticeship lined up) but in the mean time took a job as a technician / trainee microbiologist with a local food company. And that was that...

Taking pictures has long been a passion and I started in my teens although with cine. I moved to stills in about 1981 and have not really looked back although cinema and the lighting and composition of movies is still a great inspiration to me. I recently bought a digital cine camera and want to go in that direction again (but not in place of stills) when I have time and now that you can achieve a cinema-like look on a digital system. Although I shoot a lot of digital stuff, my main interest is in B&W film and I find myself more and more drawn to alternative processes. This is also probably reflected pretty much in the way I tend to process digital files also.

Other than photography, I read incessantly (mainly fiction although I obviously need to absorb technical information for my job) and listen to music (mainly when in the UK) - it was through a casual interest in Hi-Fi that I came across Hamish and so RPF. For a few years Ina and I also did ballroom dancing which was great fun but we just don't seem to have found the time in the last 18 months - I'm sure we'll go back to it though as it is one of those activities that just lifts the spirits so much. Like Paul, I also like to make things and used to list cabinet making as a hobby when I had time to pursue it - I still have the tools. For the first 25 years of my adult life I only rode motorcycles (originally British ones from the 1950's) and so the restoration and maintenance of those took up quite a bit of my time. I still own a 1975 BMW R90S but it is awaiting restoration. Who knows, maybe I will even ride it again in a few years. I didn't bother to even learn to drive a car until my late 30's but decided I'd better and only bought a car when I formed IMSL. I guess because of my interest in historic vehicles and lack of interest in modern cars I ended up buying a rather unusual first car - a Series 3, 4.2 litre XJ6 Jaguar Sovereign (well my driving instructor did tell me I should buy a British car when I said I was thinking of getting an Audi or similar - probably not what he had in mind though). A complete money sink and it is just undergoing the final stages of (another) complete restoration and will on the road again in time for the summer - so the Nissan Micra will be neglected for a bit I suspect!

And that is that (for now)!
 
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Pete Askew said:
Excellent Hamish!

For the first 25 years of my adult life I only rode motorcycles (originally British ones from the 1950's) and so the restoration and maintenance of those took up quite a bit of my time. I still own a 1975 BMW R90S but it is awaiting restoration.
Click to expand...


I'm also a fan of 2 wheels but with a slightly different taste, up until about 5 years ago I was a member of a traditional skinhead scooter club ( I myself had a lambretta GP200 and a Vespa P210 Streetracer) and i've won many furthest travelled trophies due to going to rallies in woolacombe bay and Lagenthal in Switzerland on my lambretta and i loved nothing more than sitting on the scooter for 8 hours going to club meetings in Doncaster lol
 
Hamish - I'm always joking with the old man, that the America he knew from the 50's was all black and white - Then when he came over after I moved here in 2003 it had all gone color, and the cars had become a lot smaller! :D
 
Not very interesting but here goes.
I work for the local council the last twenty three years as a refuse recycling technician, aka Binman.

When I was younger I was addicted to video games, mainly Sega Megadrive, Saturn and Dreamcast, then started to grow out of it. Then the Guitar Hero games were invented and now I'm addicted to them:eek:.

I've loved rock music since I was a little kid in the seventies listening to my brothers Purple, Zeppelin, Sabbath and Floyd albums then graduated to the noisier stuff like AC/DC, Motorhead, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. As I've got older I've started to listen to other stuff which could be anything from Classical to Greenday to "Pop" but still go back to my first love of "Heavy Rock":).

I've had Guitars on and off since I was in my teens but never learned to play properly and at the moment I have two Electric an Acoustic and one of those strange Casio Electronic Guitars from the eighties, and only now and then pick up the acoustic to annoy my wife;):D.

About seven years ago I started to get interested in Bird Watching, which at the time was rather difficult as I went for an eye test and discovered I had Cataracts in both eyes and had to get them operated on:(. But once they were done it was like seeing the world in a new light:).
Shortly afterwards while at a bird hide I met a wildlife photographer and decided to get a Camera to record what I was seeing.
The first Camera was a Fuji Finepix s5600 zoom, which I was very happy with then graduated to my Canon 450D.
So now I'm mainly shooting wildlife but when I joined Darren's old "Finepixels" forum then RPF I've started to take a few other bits and pieces now and again. There are other styles of photography I'd like to have a go at, like street photography and portraits, I just don't have the bottle and most of all I'm not particularly keen on people:p:D:D.

Oh!!!! BTW I love Beer and whisky too!!!:cool:
 
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