Posts Tagged ‘night’

Earlier this month, I went on a night photography course around Leeds.

I didn’t really learn anything because I knew all the techniques, but having an experienced photography tutor there to remind you all the stuff you have forgotten and who has an eye for the perfect angle, is invaluable in getting great shots. And it was a lot of fun.

On my previous trips to Finland I discovered just how much daylight there is when you go north. However, there was always some kind of a night in Finland.

For example, here is a photo I took shortly before midnight while visiting in mid-July:

It is not exactly a proper night, but it has got darker. There is something you could genuinely refer to as night there. Iceland is not like that. Even by the start of June, anything you would describe as night has disappeared.

It is difficult to represent exactly what it looks like because you are always interpreting the scene through the exposure setting. However, I took a few photos from my hotel window shortly after midnight.

I purposely have not done any editing on these images. There is a clear difference between the first two and the last one, depending on what I told my camera to set the exposure by, but none of them really class as anything other than daylight.

This was from my bathroom window, a room which you could easily use without switching a light on. Equally, while you have to have your lights on at all time while driving in Iceland, it was enough light to do without them.

Some photos of Clarence Cock, just after dusk.

Got up on Sunday morning to find George has been busy snapping away the night before.

This evening has been rubbish. I got home, exhausted and haven’t really done anything. I’ve done a bit more work on some grant applications, answered some emails, done some more planning. But by 8:30 I was already giving up on being productive and went for a power nap.

I’m now fueling up on chocolate and Red Bull so I can get something done, but I wonder if there is just a better way.

For example, I always really enjoyed working nights at McDonald’s. There was actually something really satisfying about working twelve hours until 4am, then (after a quick picnic in the Tesco car park) heading home and just going to bed, knowing that you didn’t have to be up again at some irritatingly, and quite frankly painful, hour in the morning.

Of course, that isn’t really achievable in the real world because of the whole 9-5 office thing, even with the flexitime we have at work it still doesn’t grant me that kind of flexibility. But how about a whole different approach. What if we should shifted our day pattern to accommodate this?

So, let’s say that I sleep seven hours a night. I’m at work from approximately eight until six including travel time, so that takes up ten hours of my day. That gives me seven hours per day of free time. Instead of getting up at eight and going to work, I could get up at one in the morning, spend the morning doing productive stuff while I’m still in the mood for it, go to work at eight, which doesn’t matter how tired I am because it’s work so it’s inherently self-motivating (because it’s not voluntary so you don’t have to choose to do it, you just do it), come home at six and go to bed.

Of course there would be lots of problems with this strategy, notably that because society is geared to holding evening events, half the time I would need to be up when my new schedule says I should be asleep. It also means being awake in the middle of the night when it will be dark but then during winter it’s dark in an evening anyway.

The former I think it really an insurmountable problem in the long term, though I do think it would be fun to try for a fortnight. If nothing else, it would probably make an interesting YouTube documentary.

Finally got the keys to my new apartment on Friday!

What followed was a long, long weekend. Being that it is a bit of a nightmare parking in town I had to move house overnight so having already done a full days work by the time I left work at 4pm, I then headed off to start moving stuff. Which went on for 13 hours.

This included a short break to run to Ikea at which point I managed to somehow – I really can’t imagine how though – pick out the shelves I wanted to buy and then walk though the self service warehouse without buying them. Accidentially. Honestly, how does that happen? I think I was rather tired by this point.

I finished up at 5am and went to grab some sleep however I ended up getting woken up by Brian bringing another potential tenant to look round so I didn’t get much sleep. This was followed by a full shift at work followed by more stuff being moved which I agained finished up at shortly after 5am.

I once again headed home to get some sleep before getting up on Sunday, finishing up a bit of freelance work I had to do then heading over again with more stuff and in an attempt to get the place sorted a little. Finishing up at around 9pm last night when I simply ran out of energy.

Never. Ever. Again.