An afternoon walk on Dartmoor

Alastair BegleyWalking Short Link

Today the weather was far better than forecast so when I woke up I headed to Dartmoor with my housemates for an afternoon walk in the beautiful scenery and stunning weather that Dartmoor had to offer. I haven’t walked on Dartmoor in the day time since Ten Tors training when I was in sixth form at school and my lasting memory of it from then was just of constant rain, and when I went last year it was in the night time for a joint training with mountain rescue and cave rescue so for obvious reasons I couldn’t see much! So it was great to be out today and be able to appreciate Dartmoor in the excellent albeit cold weather. The walk was timed really well and as we were walking down the ridge back to the car the sun was setting and providing us with beautiful golden light.

Paintballing

Alastair BegleySports Short Link

Today I went paintballing with some friends for his birthday with Skirmish Paintballing in Exeter, and after I ran out of paint or got shot and was out I took some pictures.  I discovered that it is a great challenge to get into a good position due to having to avoid all the paint that is being shot by the people that are still in the game, though thankfully I managed to avoid being shot too many times and my camera only got hit once.

Caving in South Wales

Alastair BegleyCaving Short Link

This weekend I headed over to stay at the South Wales Caving Club‘s Hut at Penwyllt in the Brecon Beacons in south wales with a local caving club. The cave that we did on both days was Ogof Ffynnon Ddu (The Cave of the Black Spring in English) which is one of the longest caves in the UK which has three entrances, one at the top of the hill (OFD Top), one in a disused quarry (Cwm Dwr) and another at the bottom of the hill (OFD 1). On the first day we did a through trip from OFD Top to Cwm Dwr which was great fun and is a trip that I always look forward to as it involves so many different types of caving such as scrambling, walking in streamways, big chambers and crawling, but there are no photos as it was a long trip so chose not to take the camera. However we went for a shorter trip on Sunday which was a round trip around OFD 1 which is the lowest entrance in OFD. This was a shorter trip so I took my camera along and. Read the full article…

Downhill Mountain Biking

Alastair BegleySports Short Link

Yesterday I joined up with a local biking club to do some downhill mountain biking which is another of my hobbies, though due to being busy I haven’t managed to do any since the alps this summer. We headed down to Tavistock to ride the downhill tracks built by the Woodland Riders one of which being ‘Gawton’ and the other ‘Tavi-Woodlands’. I forgot how hard work it is biking in the UK without the benefit of having ski lifts to take you up to the top and instead having to push 18kg bikes to the top! This has been my first attempt at taking pictures of downhill biking and I found out the hard way that in woods you really have to use multiple off camera flashes as even on bright days with fast glass there isn’t enough light to take action photos without off camera flashes.  Unfortunately when we headed over to Tavi-Woodlands for some tracks which are more open the sun had already dropped below the trees so the light there wasn’t great either but was still significantly greater than in the woods.

Cockpits of the RAF’s Fast Jets

Alastair BegleyAviation, North Wales Short Link

Due to various reasons recently I have not had time to do all that much photography and have not done any low level photography since October, so I have been spending some spare time re-processing some low level photos from this summer just to focus in on the cockpits. Thankfully in a week I spent in Snowdonia and the Lake Disctict photographing them at low level in June I had passes from all three of the RAF’s fast jets at the time, the training version of the Harrier Jump Jet the T12, The GR4 version of the Tornado and FGR4 and finally the training version of the Eurofighter Typhoon the T3. Though now unfortunately the Harrier Jump Jet has been retired from service so this is the last time I ever saw one.

GB Cave

Alastair BegleyCaving Short Link

To end a great December I headed to the mendips to go caving for the new year and due to needing to recover only got underground on new years eve.  We headed to a cave called GB which is full of massive chambers and has a fun while fairly short trip around it.Thanks to all the extra water from the melting snow the waterfall actually had some water flowing down it which is a change to the last few times I was there.  GB is full of some amazing formations though they are usually hanging from the very high roof which makes photographing them very difficult and in an effort not to take too long I did not even try.