Pebbles From Paradise

Important Notice Following a long standing dispute that delayed the erection of new electricity poles on the Turunç – Amos – Kumlubük road work has recommenced on the new power grid. As a result sources claim there will be no power in Amos between the hours of eight a.m. and approx. seven p.m. for the [...]

Leica Summilux 25mm, ISO 100, 1/640 at F 5.0, Olympus E-400 RAW Conversion In Bibble 4.85, Monochrome Conversion By Power Retouche. One of the unsung heroes in the song of my life is my elder brother Eric. Unlike Nick, my eldest brother, Eric and I grew up together but I was twelve years younger than [...]

Our Aviation Correspondent’s Preferred Transport! Having been forced by my companies HR department to fly up to Glasgow, I was quite pleased to be flying up from the City airport in London, but all was not as expected. Now obviously the main role of the airport is to dispatch business people to the furthest flung [...]

When I come to Istanbul to teach Family Therapy I find that my urge to take photographs suddenly stops. I ask myself why do I devote so much time to photography in Marmaris? It’s not that photography becomes irrelevant in Istanbul, indeed it is here, (for today I am here), that I spend time and [...]

Models Of Times Past And Present We have started learning about family trees on the Family Therapy Training Course today. These make the structures and histories of families easier to analyse, but at a risk of reducing real people who are living, or once lived, to graphic abstractions. People were, of course, just as much [...]

Istanbul’s Enchanted Grotto! Hurrah, I’m back on the street with the mighty Summilux 25mm 1.4 attached to the E-400. No Family Therapy today until 5.00. p.m. when I will supervise the training clinic for a couple of hours. Marmaris tomorrow, yum! But today it was off to the Grand Bazaar, not quite at the crack [...]

Anyone For Caviar? I found this shop yesterday on my way to the Grand Bazaar. Next stop today Levent’s Orange Garden Cafe, Marmaris, for brunch/breakfast with Amazon and Irem. Own A Camera? If you found this article of interest you may wish to sign up for our FREE Course in Digital Photography. To do so [...]

Does your passport have a page like this? Here is a page from my new biometric passport. Our counter intelligence surveillance correspondent informs me that the loop is an aerial, and the black dot is a microchip receiver. Intelligence services may send a pulse to the chip from a satellite and activate it, whereupon it [...]

Trees by Frank Horvat I have been commissioned to photograph an ancient tree to be found in a secret location on the edge of Turunç. The tree is extremely ancient and, believed by some, to be sacred. To be asked to make a portrait of it is a great honour, if also a challenge. The [...]

A First Study! Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982) was an English forester, environmental activist, and author who contributed greatly to worldwide reforestation efforts. As a leader, he founded an organization, still active today, whose many chapters carry out reforestation internationally. As an expression of his spiritual bent and his broad humanitarianism, he became a Bahá’í [...]

A Second Study Yesterday I spent two hours communing with The Sacred Tree. Whilst I was doing so the mini bus from the garage arrived and my communing became a public display before the driver and passengers. Before you exclaim that ‘Poor Stephen has gone bonkers!’ I would ask you to look carefully at the [...]

The final version will look something like this. It was too windy to photograph the tree yesterday. The ISO needs to be set low in order to capture as much detail as possible on the E-400. My test images show that the Summilux must be stopped down to F 4, or even F 5.6 in [...]

Nearly Finished! At last I’ve managed to get the tree project finished ~ well almost. I have yet to take the finished file to the printer, but I am confident that a print 40 inches wide will be possible. It will have to wait for a week though as we are off to Ankara today [...]

On The Bus To Ankara Ankara, the capital of Turkey was built in the central region for strategic military reasons. It was impossible to shell from battleships on the Bosphorus, and a huge land mass in every direction provided obstacles and early warning of aerial bombardment in the days before RADAR. Naturally an army would [...]

People In Ankara Love To Meet In The Parks People may be classified into all kinds of shapes and sizes. There are for instance people like me, who carry hip-flasks when travelling, and those like my friend Polish Pete who carry sweet digestive biscuits. Although I did not grow up in a family where the [...]

“I’m bored here”, says Gloria. Ten years ago Uncle Tezer promised to take me to see Ankara Zoo. He apparently makes this promise to all visitors below the age of sixty years. I am nearly past the sell by date, if still young at heart. In the event the visit proved to be a sad [...]

Your Hero, His Wife and Her Grandfather at Ankara Opera House. When Europeans think of Ankara they tend to think of a sterile place somewhere in the Gobi Desert, probably created by Stalin and carved out of solid concrete. Nothing could be further from the truth! Ankara is a European cosmopolitan city in central Turkey [...]

Why is Amazon all painted up? She’s painted up because she’s at the Dionysos Hotel as the guest of her boyfriend Sinan who was three today. Sinan is the son of the Dionysus owners and today they allowed yours truly to enter the hotel confines whereupon they plied him with jelly and strong drink. Readers [...]

Amazon and Irem enjoying the children’s playground at the ‘otel Kempinski, Barbaros Bay, Bodrum. Today we drove via Muğla around the Datca Peninsular to Bodrum to visit our friend Abbas of who is staying at the Hotel Kempinski. The Hotel is a modern but elegant five star overlooking Barbaros Bay. In addition to several pools [...]

After a complete rest, and then finding time to check that Phillip’s fridge door had been left ajar when he departed for England last week, I returned today to making a photograph of the tree. This time I took my shots with the final monochrome image in mind. Also I took the photograph with my [...]

Içmeler’s Children’s Slides After our sojourn at the ‘otel Kempinski Amazon and I went in search of a children’s park of a similar caliber. We thought about parks in Marmaris, and also the parks in Turunç. Then we remembered this park in Içmeler. Unfortunately just after this picture was taken Amazon came down the corkscrew [...]

Time For Mulberries You call them mulberries, here they are more simply known as ‘dut’. They come in both white and also red. If the juice from the red variety touches your clothing it is doomed, but the taste of dut is worth it. With the dut comes a particularly stupid kind of fruit fly. [...]

Manifestation In Action? Regular readers will recall how last year my account on the Amos Estate was shown to be 500 YTL in arrears when in fact it has always been paid up in full. The matter was an accounting error and has now been put right. This month the accounts stated that I was [...]

The late Gregory Bateson when teaching art students matters of epistemology was fond of presenting them with a boiled crab and asking: “I want you to produce arguments which will convince me that this object is the remains of a living thing. You may imagine, if you will, that you are Martians and that on [...]

Low Key, Low Light! OK I confess, I have used a little Noise Ninja, Power Retouche and PhotoShop to enhance this ISO 1600 image captured by the Summilux in a virtually dark space. And, truth be told, even though I much prefer the colours from Olympus E-400 to those coming from the Canon 20D, the [...]

The Vickers Wellington There are two things that I regret about settling in Turkey. Neither of them are the result of Turks, indeed I love Turks, and especially my Chick-a-Dee! My first regret is the losing of my home town. It’s a great place, full of late night parties, fuelled with kif and inebriates after [...]