May 2018 – The Adventures of Clan Sutherland

May 28, 2018

Hard Weeks

The last couple of weeks have been a mixture of emotionally draining and difficult, and yet uplifting and enjoyable.

We went off to Utah to say a final farewell to my epic big brother – the “King of the Hobos” – a supremely talented, artistic and intelligent individual whom I miss a great deal. We met some of his closest friends for the first time and reconnected with another. It was good. Sad, but good.

I came back feeling buoyed up t o take on the World, to run with some projects that have been sitting dormant for a long time… but the last couple of days my self belief has just collapsed. I am really rubbish at believing in myself and promoting myself – it is one of those great personal failings that I have.

That said, my Dad is talking about doing something else with himself, and selling up the business since I have been talking about setting up my own thing and chasing some dreams. I guess he has faith in my ability… and so this is going to force my hand somewhat since I need to either sink or swim!

So… I guess it is time to start the preparations, but for now here are a few photographs from the deserts of Utah – our adventures there and the celebration of my big brothers life.

Dinosaur footprints in the rocks along the Colorado River in Utah

This was our home for our week in Utah – well, I took it standing on the drive, but our condo was much like all these, just without the Jeep!

May 2, 2018

This… it GRINDS MY GEARS!

Now… I am not averse to people putting subtle signatures or watermarks on their photographs – it is something I have started doing of late after increasing the resolution of my shared photographs to something potentially “useful”.

HOWEVER…

There are companies out there that “create” signatures for photographs for you – you send them your name and they create a signature for you… so it isn’t YOUR signature, it is just a logo! It seems to be popular with the very amateur end of the market and a few aspiring pros… and I can see that it is designed to make your images “look” more professional. But to me using a made up signature is just fake and kinda devalues the work!

Here is a copy of a front page of one such service:

Yes, they all look very authentic and very flash – but they aren’t real!

Perhaps it is just me that gets annoyed by this, but hey – we are supposed to be original, artistic and creative and this just reeks of everything opposite to that!

In contrast – this is my current watermark. It has my actual signature on it!

This is going to change again though I think as I start working towards a massive rebrand and redirection of my efforts, but that is another story!

May 1, 2018

Baby Steps…

Today I made a very, very first and tentative step towards my medium term goal of becoming a qualified Mountain Leader (Summer), the longer term is to become a Mountain Leader (Winter) as well, but that will take a little longer!

I had a little clear time this morning so I decided to tackle my first small hill in a long time. Great Burney is not far from home, not particularly large… but has been sitting there “looking” at me for some time – so today I went for it. Climbed the hill, looped around the side on descent and took in the ancient megalithic cairns on the way back. The sun was shining and it was a rather nice wee diversion in the face of everything going on just now.

So… 45 minutes or so of hill work, which was “enough” for a first shake down and all is good. I think I will try and do a few more of the “up to 1 hour” type routes this month to get my body used to it, then start ramping up through June and July with the plan of starting the formal training in the Autumn of this year (perhaps) and qualification maybe in the Spring of 2019.

But I have started.