Sometimes I manage to surprise myself with how much my photographic vision (if you want to call it that) changes in short periods of time.

Two weeks ago Johanna dropped in for a relaxing week of hiking, climbing, canyoning, rafting and just general driving around Slovenia (with bits of Italy and Austria thrown into the mix) and with every photo I took I had the idea of cropping it to 16:9 ratio.

Ibex above Vrata valley, Bovški gamsovec

ÄŒezsoča morning

Slovenian route, Mangart

I know, it is a more than obvious nod to Scott Upton @ Couloir (definitely check out his galleries!). I am constantly amazed how he sees everything in landscape 16:9. But as I don’t have his discipline to keep it horizontal all the time and I just had to swing it around to vertical a few times.

Travnik & Sheep, Mangart

Then just as she left we had another visit which involved far less walking but much more driving. We visited many of the same places, even went rafting, but this time I just didn’t see things in a rectangular shape. It was to be black and white square format. I know… obvious Michael Kenna moments ;)

Soča

Peričnik waterfall

Unlike Kenna though I was working with Canon A80 quite honestly isn’t the most appropriate camera for long exposure work. The water could and should be much smoother.

I did sneak in one 16:9 landscape as it just doesn’t work as a square

Soča

Then I went to another concert at Trnfest

Eva Hren & Sladcore

…but rather than get the same old concert photos I soon started having fun defocusing the subjects and seeing how far I can take it while keeping the subject recognizable. Having only one, arguably inapropriate, lens available at the time I was desperate to get away from the “look” it inevitably delivers.

Eva Hren & Sladcore

Eva Hren

Can’t help but love the bokeh in Sigma 70-200/2.8…

• more photos from wandering around slovenia (included are some photos taken by Grega Krajnc and Johanna Robinson)
• photos from Trnfest 08

Here’s also a nice ad for canyoning in Sušec

I first read about climbing on buildings in Phil Ashby’s Unscathed where he writes about his participation in the long-standing Cambridge tradition of nightclimbing (or buildering as Wikipedia tells me). His stories are a funny as hell and the book is well worth reading just on that basis, but I remember thinking Cambridge seemed an odd place for such a sport to develop. On second thought it really isn’t as there’s hardly anything else in the neighbourhood to keep rock climbers occupied.

My thoughts returned to this phenomenon via Gadling via Slate articles on odd travel guides among which you can find Night Climbers of Cambridge by Whipplesnaith. Further browsing got me to InsectNation where you can read not one but two of these historic guides on classic building routes on Cambridge. As well as a few newspaper articles. All scanned and OCRed for your convenience. A fabulous resource… if I’m ever in Cambridge ;)

The shopkeepers of Market Square were the first to learn of the most famous climb in Cambridge history. Opening their stalls one day in 1965, they saw a banner strung between two of the spires of King’s College chapel that read “Peace in Vietnam”. Of the four who put it there, one would become a Labour MP, another a professor of law. The other two would soon be dead.
Sunday Times feature, June 2007

But buildering is not limited to Cambridge university. Buildering.net and Freakclimbing.com bring us some interesting photos from around the world.

The south end of the roman era wall in Ljubljana has been a popular urban climbing spot for as long as I remember as is the synagogue in Maribor, Wikipedia has more on other locations.

Aplysia depilans (punctata?), uvala Polje night dive

It’s strangely ironic that in 3 months of living on a Greek island I never managed to go on a proper dive. Just the thought of it was a constant source of frustration… here I was, on a beautiful island where scuba diving doesn’t extend beyond some locals with their own gear and 160 kilometers of coastline that is likely largely unexplored. The thought of uncovering new sights and wonders, natural or man-made, was burning in the back of my mind. Sadly though my underwater exploration of Ikaria was strictly limited to lung capacity and admittedly relatively shallow coastal waters.

I guess it’s all fine as long as the bottom doesn’t go much beyond 20 meters although I cannot help but think what lay beyond the immediate coastal waters. Surely there must be something, some wall that breaks the monotony of coastal sand flats and drops down into deep trenches that surround Ikaria. Or a wreck or a reef, or something. I guess it will remain a mystery to me until I return with my own gear (and hopefully manage to get on a boat).

AA guns of Cessare Rossarol

To finally get back into diving we went for a bit of weekend wreck diving with Vitez wrecks in Premantura, Croatia. I’ve been diving with twice them before and will surely return. I like their style, their expertise and the fact there are supposedly more than a hundred wrecks that sunk in the sea around Pula.

Wreck diving is very different from the more common coastal diving on walls and reefs as you dive into blue water in the middle of the sea and the profile will inevitably be a square. Which of course means a lot of hanging onto a rope while doing decompression stops. Which is boring…

Luana deco stop boredom

On reefs and walls you can at least spend that time doing more interesting stuff and the entire period of coming back up doesn’t seem so long. But if you spend half an hour exploring a ship that lies between 35 and 55m and return along the rope you will be waiting for what seems like eternity and is usually longer than the time spent at the bottom. Although after half hour spent at 12-13°C it feels nice to return to warmer water.

schools of Luana

We did two wrecks this weekend. One was Luana, a 72m long cargo ship that came to rest at 48m after hitting one of many leftover underwater mines in 1947. The other was Cessare Rossarol. An 85m WW1 Italian navy cruiser that sank to 55m, also after hitting a mine.

Cessare Rossarol, photo via: Vitez Wrecks

While the visibility on Luana was excellent it was unusually poor on Cessare and it’s hard to appreciate such a big ship if you can’t really see it. We’ll have to go back soon. Both dives lasted about an hour and required several deco stops on return. We actually did 4 of them. First one was a few minutes at 15m, the rest were according to the dive computer @ 9, 6 and 3m.

On Saturday we also did a night dive in uvala Polje on Kamenjak peninsula. Amazing dive on its own, even better as a combination with the wreck dives. Loads of scorpion fish and various species of crabs. Some cuttlefish, sea hare, congers… simply amazing.

Galathea strigosa, uvala Polje night dive

Scorpaena scrofa, uvala Polje night dive

more photos in the gallery