The Photokina show in Germany is almost over and anything of note has already been announced. Time to review the state of the camera industry.

Ask most people what type of camera takes the best photos and they will answer “DSLR”, the interchangeable lens, mirror-slapping monsters, churned out by the likes of Canon and Nikon in a variety of specifications and a singularity of colour (black). Not so. All else being equal, the bigger the sensor, the better the image quality; so you would do better with something like this:

The shops are closing and the tourists are being poured onto buses. She who must be obeyed thought this would be a good time to go and take some photos. And it was.

Nik was eager to try out his new toy, so it was off to Nong Nuch where there is plenty to photograph, provided you don’t mind shooting flowers.

Next to the car park there is an area full of fake flamingos; but there are also pots with water lilies; so we started there and Nik was soon engrossed.

Some consternation amongst my concerned readership when I announced my plans to strip down my high temperature/pressure potential bomb (aka coffee machine).

The remaining parts arrived today, and I will admit to slight concern when I turned the beast on again for a pressure test; to the extent that the machine was on the balcony and I made sure that I wasn’t. I waited for the normal hissing and popping which is so much part of the personality of my chrome peacock; but there was no sound. Was it broken? No, the pressure was there, but all the leaks had been fixed by my most excellent craftsmanship and hammering. No one more amazed than me, apart from she who must be obeyed who was cowering in the back room, convinced that a major explosion was imminent.

Nik lives in our condo and is a keen photographer. There are few areas of Thailand which have not had one of his lenses pointed at them; and his worldwide coverage is pretty extensive too. He is a Nikon man (nobody’s perfect), with a semi-pro body and load of lenses.

At least he was. A couple of weeks ago he announced he had sold all his Nikon gear and was coming over to the dark side. And yesterday his new toys arrived. A red Panasonic GF1 with the 20mm F1.7, the Olympus 9-18 wide angle, and a Contax 45mm F2. Very similar to my lens collection; and he will be even closer when a Contax 90mm arrives via eBay.

Of course we had to lay out our toys, together with she who must be obeyed’s Olympus EP-1.

…oh no, this is the road to Hell.

When the new mayor of Pattaya came to power, he had a 15 point plan to improve Pattaya. One of the points was to clean up Walking Street and get rid of all the hookers; so once we had stopped laughing we pretty much ignored the rest of the list as well. But tucked away in the projects was a plan to build a tram system, which on the face of it is almost as laughable as getting rid of the hookers. But suddenly the tram has become a monorail and the project is very much alive.

It’s a four billion baht extravaganza which will build a line from a place nobody wants to go to or leave from, to another place that nobody wants to go to or leave from; with a few stops along the way. The project is scheduled to take ten years (for which, read “infinity”) and will cause massive disruption on the main roads of Pattaya while it is being constructed. If it is eventually finished, nobody will use it and it will eventually break down and be scrapped. But none of this matters because some people will have benefited financially along the way; by which if course I mean the construction company which will be awarded a contract based on submitting a least-cost, technically acceptable bid in a carefully monitored tender process. And the hookers will be removed from Walking Street.

Still, we can take some comfort in the ability of City Hall to administer such a large project. Their stellar performance in the project to widen Thappraya Road over the last half century is a clear indication of what we can expect if the monorail goes ahead.

It’s been at least five years since the seven kilometre project started and it’s not quite finished yet. Indeed it is closer to being started than finished. For some reason, City Hall decided to award a separate contract for each kilometre of road. Not sure where they found seven different contractors who thought they could build roads, but experience has shown that they can’t.

The first section, heading out of Pattaya towards Jomtien, took years to complete. Now it is done and presumably handed back to the city for routine maintenance; which mainly involves keeping everything clean and tidy.

In the north of Thailand there is a road that runs dead straight for a hundred kilometres or more. If you join at the northern end you find that there is a patch in the central reservation which looks like a well-tended front garden of an obsessive gardener. There is a delicately pruned bush and a cascade of flowers, carefully arranged for effect. All very charming; and then you discover that this patch is duplicated over and over again, for at least twenty kilometres; before the design changes and another little garden design repeats itself for another twenty kilometres or so. It’s amazing, and you can’t help but admire the dedication of the local authority that planned and maintains this ribbon of display; presumably with a good deal less available cash than urban Pattaya.

And this is Pattaya’s approach to beautifying the central reservation; makes you proud to live here:

It’s Photokina time, the biennial photography fair in Germany where new toys photographic products are announced.

Companies stage their announcements to create what they hope will be maximum impact. This means that some Photokina products were announced months ago, and others will be announced during the show. I am looking forward to some new M4/3 products, but the rumours don’t seem to promise anything exciting.

But, Fuji dropped a nice little bombshell this morning with this:

After some surprisingly excellent navigation by she who must be obeyed, we found ourselves in Hua Hin. The rationale for the visit was based on a question by SWMBO, “shall we go to Hua Hin?”; with the only reasonable response being “yes”.

After checking out a typically Thai hotel, with shit-stained wood and an odour of decay, we chanced upon the Amara Resort.