Where did summer go?
The weather this week has been mixed, gone are the glorious days we enjoyed through the first part of Spring to something much more typical of the season as we head rapidly towards summer itself. That said, it has been a good week (work wise) and a challenging week (financial wise) due to some unforeseen circumstances!
First off, the bad… I had to replace the front tyres on my car as the rough tracks and full lock hairpins had conspired together to wear the outer 20mm of rubber away from the casing. The rest of the tyres were still entirely legal, and even had a good bit of wear left on them (impressively - they were around 5mm after 35,000 miles), but when I noticed those white flecks of bead starting to show through I knew I had to get them changed, pronto. Unfortunately the Michelin Cross Climates that I have been using for a while were not available in short order so I have had to switch to Pirelli Scorpion all weathers instead. To be fair I have been curious about these for a while anyway as I love Pirellis on my motorbike and they are pleasingly rated for economy… what I don’t know is if they offer anything close to the insanely good performance in snow and ice of the Michelins. We shall see.
The second disaster came in the form of a gust of wind blowing over my 360 camera. I thought I had got away with it… but no - a scratch across the irreplaceable lens makes it an expensive paperweight! The replacement should arrive tomorrow and then I may look at making a claim to have the scratched one replaced on insurance. I just didn’t have time to worry about it as I use this most days - having a spare though would be very useful! I have found some lens protectors on Amazon for a different 360 camera though which look like they may fit well, and at £4 a pair they are a lot cheaper than a grand a camera so I am going to pop those on the new one and see if they work as intended.
Oh… and my phone died. But since my contract expired 4 years ago it was fairly painless to get a new handset and a better contract than the one that had simply been rolling over for all those years! I now get unlimited data for less than I was paying for 30Gb!
But this week has generally been great. Ten jobs, a good proportion of them being private work rather than agency - and those which were the latter included a lot of long distance stuff which pays reasonably okay. I have been to Gairloch, An Nead and Scourie this week along with the usual Inverness and surroundings. The next fortnight looks to be very similar with a whole load of work booked in across the region, as far east as Fochabers and west to Portree… north to Gairloch (again… twice). Not much south though, I don’t get all that much into the Cairngorms surprisingly, which is a shame as it would be nice to get that way a little more often too!
Anyway - here are some of my commercial photographs from this last week.
