Getting up the mountain to Mountain Thunder can be a little tricky. Two roads spiral around each other as they climb up the steep mountain slopes.

1000, 2000, 3000 feet. You're up in the cloud forest when you arrive, tall trees disappearing into the mists.

It's a long climb, but it's worth it. Our hire car was struggling by the time it reached the top, but the farm's staff were there with cups of fresh brewed coffee for us to taste. It was good, possibly the best coffee I have ever drunk. Mountain Thunder's an organic farm, and there are plenty of animals under foot - all manure for the carefully tended coffee beans.

You'll see plenty of coffee bushes as you drive up the volcano, and there are plenty of cherries growing on the bushes. Most were still green, so a few weeks from harvest.



Unlike many of the other Kona farms, Mountain Thunder roasts on site.



The finished product, 100% Kona coffee



Mmmmm. Coffee.

Why yes, we did bring some back with us, all the way to London...

The Honu is the Hawaiian Green Turtle, a gentle giant of the islands. You'll find then (now that they're protected) in rock pools and on beaches all round the Big Island, feeding on the green algae that coats the lava rocks. The old royal fish ponds at Keauhou are home to a small group of these beasts, and you can watch them gently scull through the cool water. At the hottest part of the day you can watch them haul themselves out of the water to rest and bask on the rocks.

One morning I scrambled over the rocks around the pool to get as close as possible to where they were feeding. You could see them sculling, their huge fins sliding out of the water.

Two turtles had a bit of a disagreement over who had right of way. Needless to say the biggest beast won.



One sculled around the pool, looking for the an unoccupied patch of algae.



Another came very close, and I was able to photograph its delicately patterned shell,



Beautiful beasts.

Keauhou, Hawaii
June 2009

High above the Kona coast, in the cloud forests that rise up the slopes of Mauna Loa, the climate is just right for growing coffee. The bushes rise up above the twisting Hawaii Belt Road, disappearing into the mist that shrouds the slopes.

It was pouring with tropical rain when we visited Greenwell, one of the many coffee growers on Big Island, where you can watch coffee move from cherry to bean, and then taste the final roast. It's one of the oldest coffee farms on the island, and the bushes grow tall and strong.

The coffee cherry is ripe when it's red., but the green fresh cherries covered the bushes in a riot of embyronic caffeine.



Captain Cook, Hawaii
June 2009

Last night I went up on the roof terrace.

There was a spider in the railings, repairing its web after a day in the sun. All that was left of something it had eaten had was still there, just a small wing on the threads.

Nature, green in fang and ichor.



Putney, London
June 2009

It was dusk when we got to the end of the Volcanoes National Park's Crater Road. In the distance we could see the steam rising from lava flows, and below us the waves crashed on the new cliffs that mark the end of the island.

We stood there for a while, in some of the freshest air on the planet.

Suddenly there was a flicker of wings, and a small flock of dark grey birds flew out of the south, arrowing out of the sky.

They were Black Noddies, a Pacific ocean tern.





Kilauea, Hawaii
June 2009

...fire!

One of my favourite parts of Maker Faire is the fire art, where metal and flame come together in a symphony of heat. This year the highlight was a spinning chimney in the heart of a metal flower, lit by propane roses. Every so often it would erupt in a gout of flame, a fireball of beauty.

The flames and the heat distortion made it an ideal subject for photography, dropping the shutter speed a little to capture the spinning heat driven motion of the sculpture's central chimney.





Maker Faire 2009, San Mateo, California
May 2009

One of my favourite novels from the early days of the cyberpunks is Bruce Sterling's first book, Involution Ocean. Set in a universe he returns to in The Artificial Kid, the world of Nullaqua is an airless desert of a world, where unimaginable weapons have gouged out a 70 mile deep crater, full of air. Now the home of a rerpressive theocracy, Nullaqyua is a primitive place, where sailing ships go out across the fine powder of the crater in search of drug secreting dustwhales. The final harvest takes place as Sterling brings us a homage to Melville and Conrad.

Standing on the rim of Crater Lake, looking down the cliffs at the water far below I couldn't help but be reminded of Sterling's book.

Crater lake may not be 70 miles deep, but it's still an impressive piece of geography. Formed nearly 8000 years ago by the collapse of a volcano, the deep waters of the lake fill the empty caldera. Looking at the waters it's hard to imagine the 3 kilometre high mountain that once stood here. A thunderstorm was rumbling its way around the rim, signalling the summer thaw that would soon open all the roads in the area.





Crater Lake, Oregon
May 2009

One of the regular stops on our journeys around the US is Future In Review, a futurist event held in San Diego. It has a long standing relationship with the CalIT2 group at the University of San Diego - and the result is usually a tour of their facilities. Each year we see something new, and often something truly amazing.

This year's highlight was CalIT2's work with NASA. It's developed an open specification for a multiscreen wall, where off the shelf hardware gives you a relatively low cost multi-HD display. NASA is using it to help plan missions for its Mars rovers, with a 1:1 view of just what the rover is seeing, in order to help planners decide where to send the rover next.

We had a feed from one of their images servers:



It's just like looking out a window, a window that opens out onto the rolling hills and plains of Mars. It's an empty cold place, but beautiful.



Have I ever said that I love my job?

San Diego, California
May 2009

Galileo! Galileo!

Oh wait, there's only one... Though there's also Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Herschel and Hipparchus.

(apologies to Queen.)



Statue outside Griffith Observatory.
Los Angeles, California
May 2009

I've got Flickr set up to send me email when an image gets a comment or added to someone's favourite page. At some point on Saturday afternoon I started getting lots of messages - and the view count on one picture started going ballistic. From the few hundred views it had garnered over the last three years or so, it was suddenly gaining tens of thousands of views an hour.

Strange, I thought, and went back to looking for a decent pair of trousers in an outlet mall near Palm Springs.

By evening views and comments were still marching in, so I delved into the delights of the Flickr stats pages to find out just what had happened. As far as I can tell, at some point on Saturday morning, someone found the picture and posted a link to it on Reddit. That then led to it being added to Digg - and then for some reason people kept Digging it - over 2000 Diggs last time I looked. On a slow Saturday that was enough to get it on the front page, and that led to an explosion of traffic.

By Saturday night, Flickr was telling me that the picture had had over 60 thousand viewings. By the middle of Sunday, it had attracted well over 100 thousand viewings. I'd heard that Digg drove traffic, but I'd never seen it happen to anyone I'd known before.

To put the Digg Effect into perspective, my most popular Flickr image, which had been picked up by popular blogs (including Boing Boing, Engadget and Lifehacker) has only just past the 150 thousand view mark, and that's been over four or so years. The Digg front page has driven around 140 thousand separate people to that image in just over 48 hours - and almost 100 thousand of them came in one 24 hour period.

It's late on Monday now, and things are winding down at last. Something else has caught the attention of the Diggerati, and my picture is slowly falling off the zeitgeist radar. It's been an interesting ride to watch.

The picture?

It's actually kind of apt. No one would have seen that picture if it hadn't been for the machine I'd photographed all those years ago, in an acrylic case in a museum at a scientific research establishment on the Swiss-French border.



The place was CERN, and the computer I'd photographed was Tim Berners Lee's NeXT Cube, the first ever web server. Neither Flickr, nor Digg (nor this blog) would be here if it hadn't been for that machine and the server it hosted.

What comes around, goes around.

I love looking out the windows of aircraft. High above the world you watch the ground slide by: mountains, rivers, towns, roads, fields and forests.

Sometimes you see something incredibly beautiful, something you'd only see from 36,000 feet above the ground. This photograph is a good example, taken as we flew from Orlando to Cincinnati last week. High over the deep south we passed a storm cloud that was sitting on top of a mountain ridge. The falling rain was catching the sunlight, and we got a most unexpected view of a rainbow - from above.



May 2009

Beauty can be found in the strangest of places, for the strangest of reasons.

Take the bottom of a fountain, down at the bottom of a Las Vegas hotel atrium. All eyes are attracted to the hanging umbrellas and the falling light patterns that pretend to be rain. But if you look at the fountain, you'll see ripples running across the water, reflecting and refracting the mirror tile mosaic and the bright metal of tossed coins.

It made a marvelous subject for photography. Every picture was different, every one was bright and vibrant.







Palazzo Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
April 2009

If you want to see sea otters in the wild, close up, there's really only one place to go.

That's Moss Landing, a little fishing port halfway down Monterey Bay. The home of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Research Institute, it's also the site of one of the bay's largest sloughs, full of birds and young fish. That's where the folk at MBARI release rescued otters, and a sizeable raft use the slough and the harbour to shelter from the wilds of the sea.

Turn right (or left) at the big power station to cross over the causeway to the harbour. It's worth stopping here, as this is where you're most likely to see an otter close up. There' s bed of oysters and mussels at the base of the causeway, and usually one or two otters sculling around, basking in the calm of the sheltered waters.

That's where this chap was, taking his morning ablutions on a hot California spring day. We'd stopped off as we headed down to Big Sur for brunch to celebrate marypcb's birthday at one of her favourite restaurants, and there he was, close in - washing himself and sculling his big strong tail to keep in place.







The cut3n3ss...

Moss Landing, California
April 2009

The San Andreas fault slashes down the San Francisco Peninsula, dividing the towns and cities of the Valley from the low rolling peaks of the Santa Cruz Mountains. An unexpectedly deep valley, paralleled by the 280 freeway, it's where the Bay stores its water. Fed by the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct the Crystal Springs reservoir runs down the valley in the space between the 280 freeway and the mountains.

If you just go up and down the freeway you'll miss places like Filoli and the Pulgas Water Temple.

"I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people "

The Pulgas Water Temple is one of those uniquely Californian places, built to celebrate the end of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct that brings crystal clear water from the edge of the Sierras to San Francisco.The water used to flow through the tunnel under the Grecian temple, but the pipes have been moved elsewhere, and the deep tiled chambers are empty. Even so, the temple has recently been restored and stands among immaculate gardens.

We stopped there on the way to the airport on our last day in the Bay in April.

It's a strange place, like something from Les Bergers d'Arcadie dropped into a landscape that screams California. It's strange seeing something that should be in a Poussin painting in amongst the rolling hills of the Peninsula. With Poussin's links to the Rennes Le Chateau "mystery", I'm surprised the Water Temple hasn't turned up in a Tim Powers' novel yet.



Well worth a visit - though it's only open on weekdays (unless you can sneak in to a weekend wedding!).

Crystal Springs, California
April 2009

I used to think hummingbirds were tropical creatures, living in hot dense rainforests.

I was wrong.

The tiny little birds live all over the Americas, and can be found everywhere from the deserts to the forests. Hummingbird feeders are a popular gadget, sold in garden centres and through the ubiquitous SkyMall catalogue, but they're usually found buzzing around flowers, supping at nectar.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Even if Shakespeare hadn't seen hummingbirds, they're always Ariel to me.

They're a delight to photograph, so small and fast that they're a challenge to capture in pixels, but so bright and colourful that they quickly form the heart of a picture.

Visiting the Pulgas Water Temple, we found a small thicket of bright red flowers, and were greeted by the angry clicks of feeding hummingbirds. I had my camera with me, and started shooting...

This one had an amazing red head that lased ruby bright at certain angles.



Here it is again, camouflaged against the green and red of the flowers.



Another, just starting its docking manoeuvres.



Crystal Springs, California
April 2009

...someday you'll get to play with the really BIG Legos.

Take these sea defences on dunes at Twin Harbors on the Washington coast. Huge concrete blocks with very familiar nubs on the top. It's a pity I wasn't able to check out the underneath, but they have the makings of a very nice Duplo set...



Twin Harbors, Washington
March 2009

One thing about a childhood full of National Geographics: there are places and things that seem so natural, so right when you finally see them that you almost mistake it for deja vu. Call it "deja geo" for want of a term.

The deep tidal coves of the Oregon coast were part of that world of printer's inks and glossy paper, they became flesh and rock and shell, and now they've turned into the digital pixels of the modern memory machine. It's a metamorphosis of sorts, a transmigration between the realms of thought and memory.

Let's start with the starfish.

The cold waters of the north Pacific are fertile places, full of algae and plankton. The waves crash on rocks, rocks that are covered with sea anemones, barnacles, mussels and limpets. Their predators cling to the rocks too, bright starfish, holding on with the suction of a myriad tiny tubes. As the waves wash in and out you see them: red, brown, orange and purple. These aren't the stereotypically arrayed dried corpses of the souvenir shops - they're twisted and contorted as they hold fast to the rocks.

They stand alone, or knotted in groups.



You watch the waves roll over them, expecting them to be dashed away.



Others hide in the cracks, their purple flesh patterned by white bony dots.



Oregon Coast
April 2009

Driving down the Oregon coast, on our journey from Seattle to the Bay, we stopped at an overlook south of Lincoln City to watch the waves.

Some one was feeding some seagulls, and a crowd of birds was hovering and diving for the crumbs. I pulled out my camera, and started to take some photographs. One was particularly successful, a gull caught moments before it snaffled a piece of bread out of the air. Its tail feathers were spread wide, as it used its feet to make the final adjustments to its course.



Another hovered, feathers almost transparent against the bright spring sky.



Boiler Bay State Wayside, Oregon
March 2009

The long sandy beaches of the Pacific Northwest go on for miles and miles, great curves of sand that reach from horizon to horizon. Up where the sands meet the dunes are the drift trees, great logs that have floated down from the wild mountain rivers, into the sea, where they're thrown on to the beaches by the winter waves.

Walk along them, and you find smooth pebbles, worn down in the angry waves of a hundred thousand winters. Down in Oregon the sands are golden brown, while up north in Washington the volcanic beaches shine black ink in the morning sun. It's on the sands you'll find them, the grey-white saucers. They've landed from the sandy ocean floors, the skeletal remains of bottom dwelling echidnoderms: sand dollars.

The tube feet are lost, and they rest there, empty, waiting to be smashed by the next angry wave, broken into the small change of the beaches.



Twin Harbors Beach, Washington
March 2009

We're in the middle of a short inter-conference roadtrip, driving from Silicon Valley to the fleshpots of Las Vegas.

We could have taken the easy way, down the coast to Cambria and then straight across California to Bakersfield, before a quick hop over the mountains to the Mojave desert and a straight run to Barstow and then to Vegas. Instead we've headed north and east, past Sacramento, driving over the crest of the Sierra Nevada, before making a complete circuit of Lake Tahoe, and finally finding our way onto Route 395, the East Sierra scenic highway.

The sun was setting over the mountains as we passed Topaz Lake, illuminating an impressive line of lenticular clouds.





A beautiful end to a long day in the mountains.

Spring in Joshua Tree, and the teddy bear cholla are fresh and green.

We walked slowly round the nature trail in the largest cholla patch, stepping carefully over the shed arm sections that would someday be the tall spiky cacti that loomed over the path. The bright sun reflected off the sterile fruit and the yellow-white spines. The purple spines of tall desert flowers nodded in the breeze, zigzagging in and out the reaching arms of the cholla.

It was a beautiful day in the desert.







Shallow depth of field seems to work well for this sort of photograph...

The last few days have been very busy, covering DEMO09 from the insides of a Palm Springs hotel. Today, then, was time to get into the outside world.

And where better on a beautiful spring day than Joshua Tree?

The desert is blooming right now, all the bright colours of the ephemeral desert flowers: yellow, pink, blue, purple, red, orange. We stopped to walk around one of the nature trails in the park, and that's where I saw this little chap:





I'm not sure which of the two species of Horned Lizard that are found in the Park it is (though based on the geography I suspect there are reasonable odds that it is the rarer of the two, the San Diego Horned Lizard).

Under normal circumstances it's hard to see the utility of the bull elephant seal's exorbitant nose. It flaps and wobbles as the seal makes its way around the beach. There's a certain comedy value, to be sure, but it's only when you see two bulls facing off that the real power of the nose comes to the fore.

It's a built-in resonant chamber.

The bull raises its head and opens its mouth. The nose covers the upper jaw. Then he bellows.

As the call echoes through his nose, it's like listening to some ancient Victorian plumbing come up to speed, gurgling and roaring across the sands.



The females and the pups just sleep on.

Piedras Blancas, California
January 2009

Male elephant seals are ungainly creatures.

In the water their heads bob up and down as they swim through the waves, weightless in the buoyant ocean. On land, however, they're laden down with blubber and make a slow stately progress up the beaches, noses flapping in the breeze, pausing when it all gets just too much.



Piedras Blancas, California
January 2009

Rusting barbed wire and a blue blue sky.

It's one of those dream combinations that you just have to photograph, especially when the wires divide up that blue nothingness. Just tweak the focus ring just right and click. You know it's going to come out just right.

It did.



Piedras Blancas, California
January 2009