In spite of limited success with the “bring me a snake and I will give you two hundred baht” plan when travelling with Kevin; I decided to implement it in our village by offering the gardener the same bribe. He normally kills snakes on sight, so getting two hundred baht for not killing a snake must have seemed like easy money for him.

He duly knocked on the door today and presented me with a beautiful whip snake in a water bottle. Money changed hands and I examined the snake in the bottle; how to photograph it?

I rang Ian of Pattaydaze who has much experience with snakes and he suggested that it would bugger off at great speed once I let it out of the bottle; which was fine as a warning but not much use as advice. With his only suggestion to “read it some Scottish poetry to calm it” ringing in my ears; I decided to transfer the snake to a large glass jug and photograph it in there. Not ideal but I had no other ideas. But the snake had other ideas and it ejected itself at great speed through a tiny gap as soon as it was in the jug and headed off to a nearby bush. Two hundred baht for bugger all.

But then it appeared at the top of the bush, stuck up its head as if to say “stand on a stool and photograph me, you idiot”. So I did, and for the next half hour or so it just sat there and watched me, gliding slightly backwards if I got too close, and never once indicating it wanted revenge for the bottle incarceration incident.

A real privilege to spend time with such a fabulous creature; here are a few shots:

It’s been a while since I shot a racing bike event at the Bira track; partly because the promoter stopped running events, and partly because I sold all my expensive Canon sports-shooting gear. But there was a special event today and he asked me to go along; so I did.

A little concerned that the E-M1 would struggle with maintaining auto-focus on fast moving bikes, a traditional weak spot for mirrorless cameras; but it did pretty well. Success rate was certainly lower, but when it, or me, got it right, it produced some lovely images; e.g.:

A tree outside my garden is host to many flying visitors in the later afternoon. Unfortunately, my presence means that they only land on the higher reaches of the tree; outside the range of my usual lenses.

So I dragged out my little-used Panasonic 100-300mm and pointed it towards the treetops. The results were mainly crap but this was acceptable at 228mm (456mm effective):

She who must be obeyed shouted at me a lot today. First she shouted that there was a butterfly waiting to be photographed in the garden. Then it was a dragonfly. Then it was a gang of paper wasps building a nest. At the time I was trying to paint a wall; but the brush was dropped in pursuit of targets and a few paint runs were the result. Never mind, it was worth it, particularly the wasps.

Their construction was taking place on a leaf outside the house.

Most cameras now include all manner of special effect filters which “real” photographers, like wot I pretend to be, would not touch with a ten foot barge pole with added extensions and padded gloves. But, as an experiment, I turned on the new “partial colour” filter on the E-M1 which arrived courtesy of a recent firmware upgrade. I have no idea how it works, but it selects some colour and leaves the rest of the image as black and white.

As I was shooting on Walking Street, the predominant colour was seedy yellow orange; so my images came out with similar colours highlighted. I also shot a RAW file so I could throw away the stupid special effects nonsense; but some of them actually looked more interesting than the “real” images:

Things may be returning to normal in the Spike household; an indicator being my resumption of forays into eBay in search of stuff I don’t need, and don’t even want unless the foray is accompanied by alcohol.

A recent film outing with friend Tic (me, with my Yashica, Tic with his rather delectable Leica), reminded me what a different and fun experience shooting film can be.

Our new home is pleasantly shielded from the outside world, such that I could prance around wearing nothing much at all if it were not for the fact it would put my wife off her breakfast; and it is not really acceptable behaviour for an English gentleman of advancing years.

But our seclusion was disturbed the other evening when I found a little face staring through the window at my luckily fully attired physique.