crane

These lovely birds don't stay around long for you to take their photo, but they are incredibly graceful and seem to fly away in slow motion.  I just about caught this one :-)

The Sun

Don't ever look directly into the sun.  A gorgeous sunset yesterday at the beach.  Just awesome.  The spot on the left-hand side of the sun is Venus.  I think :-)

Captured!

There are loads of quiet nature spots around the city, just a few minutes' bike ride from home.  We snapped this bird just before sunset, when the light has that "magic" look. 

Haarlem Concerts!!

Haarlem Patronaat café hosts free concerts every week.  Last Friday was a great 4-band event.  Kicking off things was a great band called Labasheeda.  Great performance!!

The Moon

To commemorate the umpteenth reissue of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon, here is a photo I took of the moon last month during the Haarlem Jazz festival.  I was amazed at being able to capture the moon with such detail from my camera.  Even more amazing was that I snapped the International Space Station too!

 Well, as you can imagine, the ISS was pasted on, but I actually did take that photo of the moon :-D

Just read a great book

I put aside Brian Aldiss's "Greybeard" for a week to read an incredibly funny book called "Bad Vibes: Britpop and my part in its downfall" by Luke Haines, driving force behond '90s band The Auteurs.  An account of the ups and downs of the author's life as he finds fame, kicks it away, the finds it again.  You laugh at his envy of better-selling, but of course less-talented contemporaries.  The hated Damon Albarn, poor old talentless Suede.  An insider's view of how Britpop happened, so coloured by the author's subjectivity it's hard to take anything he says seriously.  Good job the story has a fairly happy ending, otherwise it certainly woudn't have seen the light of day.