Status-Q

Thanks to Tom Standage for pointing me at this fabulous collection of fake signs people have put up on the London Underground.

Some examples:

I had to take a picture of these steps in Chicago's Union Station recently.

If you've seen The Untouchables, you'll know why. The 'pram scene' is a brilliant piece of cinema; you can see it here, though this clip is missing the long build-up which is part of what makes the original so effective.

Of course, it is itself an homage to the scene in Battleship Potemkin at the Odessa steps, but I didn't know until today that it too had inspired a later cinematic tribute.

One thing I haven't generally had to pack when going for walks in the countryside - until I went to Montana - is bear repellent.

These are standard issue in that part of the world - you can buy them everywhere.

To an Englishman, an aerosol seems more appropriate for dealing with a small insect than a charging grizzly, but since the usual alternative advice is to lie down and play dead in this situation (which may cause the grizzly to ignore you), I can see why these are popular travel accessories.

Well, one quick transatlantic flight, and I've lost even more degrees of centigrade than I have hours of sleep!

For my more geeky readers, I can report that I return with a Scottevest Transformer jacket, and a Google Chromecast.

But the highlight of the trip was definitely the hikes we did in Yellowstone and in Glacier National Park. I leave you with my favourite picture from the Yellowstone Grand Canyon.

(Click for a larger version.)

We're in Montana, and it's beautiful.

No, I mean really beautiful.

We made some friends amongst the natives.

The humans are friendly too. All in all, a lovely spot.

More pictures are sure to follow soon...

I was quite pleased with this shot, taken by the Marathon Petroleum plant in Dearborn, Michigan last night.

(You can click it for a larger version, which looks much better)

This was handheld - I wish I'd had a tripod, but at this point the security guards pulled up and asked us to move on...

Part of what makes it 'pretty' is the use of two different types of lighting - given the industrial location, I imagine the golden light is sodium and the silver is halogen - and the camera's auto white-balance did a good job of reproducing what I saw.

But when I got home and loaded it into Lightroom, I thought it would be fun to try calibrating the white balance based on a chimney lit by the sodium light. (I could have achieved a similar effect by selecting tungsten white balance in the camera.) The result was also pretty. Can't quite decide which I prefer...

East Anglia seems rather tame today. This was the view, a few yards outside our door, last weekend.