I’m finding some time to get out with my camera lately and also enjoying playing in the ‘digital darkroom’. So it’s time to relaunch the PhotoBlog!

It’s a record of the sights, things and people I see in my daily life here in West Cork, Ireland. Occasionally there will be images from further afield.

As an amateur photographer I won’t pretend that the images posted are of particular artistic merit: Instead they are pictures that I find interesting and which hopefully impart some of the essence of the things I see. If you choose to visit the site regularly I hope that a narrative will build that will add value to the pictures. (I’ll try not to post too many family shots - you’ll find those in the Picasa web albums.)

I’m learning every aspect of photography - from composition through to developing. If you have comments on an image you see I’d love to hear your thoughts on what works and what doesn’t work. I’m hoping to post three images a week. The discipline of doing this will, I hope, lead to a gradual improvement. And it should be fun along the way!

You can subscribe to the photoblog in your news reader.

In case you’ve not come across a PhotoBlog before, there are thousands of great ones out there Three (out of many) which have acted as inspiration for me are:

• Chromasia
• InPhotos (by Donncha not far from here)
• Durham Township

And very many more at PhotoBlogs.org.

an excellent article on energy bulletin responding to Stuart Staniford’s critique of the relocalisation movement. (The comments after Staniford’s essay are well worth reading.)

i have a copy of ‘Manufactured Landscapes‘ as recommended by Graham - looks absolutely stunning - great photography of Chinese manufacturing etc. Has some footage of 3 Gorges damn… which led me to look at this graph:

Since the year 2000 China has more than doubled it’s fossil fuel produced eletctricity! For comparison Ireland produces about 24 TWh per year which would hardly register on this graph! However, what is more amazing to me is that China’s population is nearly 300 times larger than Ireland (and it produces most of the stuff we in the West use.) If I multiply Ireland’s annual electricity production (24TWh) by 300 we get 7,200. That means that if the Chinese were to catch up with Ireland’s per capita electricity usage then they’d need to double their generating capacity again. In fact it’d probably be more than that given that much of their electricity is used to make ’stuff’ for export… Time for a power-down in the cash rich countries I think.

wastematchers - based in macroom - looks like a great initiative - here’s the lowdown from the examiner:

an online database for members of the public to post their unwanted materials online.

Items can range from motor parts to musical instruments, pottery to pet goods, and garden furniture to electronic equipment.

Browsers can then log on and search for these unwanted items and find another use for them.

The website is free and household items are offered free of charge to others.

i’m increasingly coming to believe that us ‘doomsters’ choose to see the likely consequences of peak oil the way we do more because we don’t like western consumer society than because of good science. this article and this one which challenges the rather flaky peak phosphorus thing i linked to a few weeks back are good examples of why. (NB much of the stuff on the Peak Oil Debinked site I do not agree with but he makes some very good points in some posts).

it has always been a belief of mine that if we put our minds to it there’s no problem producing lots of food industrially without oil. of course it’s not what i want to see - i’d like to see a nice localised agrarian society not wasting resources… but that’s not most people’s view… and that’s why i think industrial food systems will continue to feed a lot of people who can afford to pay for the food for a long time to come.

on a side note, we’re up here in aberdeen with ruth’s mum. we went out for a hogmanay party in the local village hall. there was a pub quiz type of event. one question was ‘name the two planets that are closer to the sun than the earth’, the table next to us had 3 couples. all of the men were engineers employed in the oil industry. i got to mark their answers. they had written ‘the moon and mars’. we live in a strange society!