ARROW SECURITY SHUTTERS

ARROW FASTENER T25 ARROW T-25 STAPLE GUN

Arrow's T25 Wire Staple Gun Tacker has features specifically designed for safe, fast, and efficient low voltage wire fastening: its tapered striking edge gets into close corners; its grooved guide positions wire for proper staple envelopment; its grooved driving blade halts the staple at the right height to prevent wire damage; and the round crown staple fits snugly around wire. This tacker has an all steel construction with chrome finish. It is widely used in the telephone, electrical, electronics, and communications fields.

Update: I'm re-posting this as it's been used on a few recent blogs and kind people are coming past to see it, way back in the order of things. It also brings a bit of colour to the front of my photostream, amidst a lot of recent black and whites. I just noticed that this was possible, so thought I would have a test run to see how it was done. Hope that doesn't offend anyone!

Broadgate Circus is a private office estate in The City of London, adjacent to Liverpool Street station. Resolved to take some photos despite the rain, I found a sheltered corner of Broadgate with a good view of City commuters hurrying home from their offices in the grey London weather. The wet granite gave a nice dark mirror, with the turquoise glass of Gaucho and glowing gold of other office lights a not entirely uninteresting backdrop to the scene. The airvents here provide a workable improvised tripod too.

I managed to get around 25-30 shots away before private security arrived on the scene to impose their intolerance upon me, and I was ejected with stern authority, and a hand on my shoulder, though with memory cards unmolested. For people taking photos at Broadgate Circus in future, it would be worth noting. The guards were professional, but clearly bored and thus more intimidating than they need have been.

With the first half of the images no more than sighting shots of limited use, only this one stood out from those remaining, but I'm very happy with it. There's a nice symmetry, I think, especially between the red umbrella, blurred to an arrow pointing sharply down to the flowers. This one was cropped to centre the lady; more at home as a focal point than drifting on the top/right third point as she was.

It has been a grey day with some bad news and thick rain, so it's nice to share a colourful, meditative image at the end of it. Hope people approve. Thanks for all the nice comments so far.

[For Long Exposure group info, shutter was 1.3 secs]

The security guard at the Kyamulinga School in rural Uganda. I was told that the knowledge of his presence, a guy lurking around in the dark with a bow and arrow, was enough to encourage local malcreants to stay away from the school supplies. Interestingly, this man owns a pet turtle which he is very proud of. He showed it to me. The guard's salary is paid by Boulder based non-profit One School at a Time. Because schools are fundamentally unsecured (no looks or windows, etc.), precious school supplies are often the target of thieves.

The Kyamulinga school partnered with Boulder-based
One School at a Time which helped improve the school's infrastructure, including installation of a water system. Other photos of Ky are featured in my Blurb book . Sales of the book help support One School.

Strobist: Tungsten white balance, 1 SB-800 with full CTO camera left zoomed to ~70 mm?

In 1958, Ahmad Chalabi’s wealthy Shiite family was exiled from Iraq after a revolution that ultimately put Saddam Hussein in power. The young Chalabi devoted his life to restoring his family to prominence. His first coup attempt was in 1963 at age nineteen, while on a school break from MIT. His next was aided by Iranian intelligence. But as the years passed and Saddam stayed in power, Chalabi made an audacious decision: he needed the support of both Iran and its powerful archenemy, the United States.

Drawing on unparalleled access to Chalabi, Bonin traces the exile’s ingenious efforts to stoke a desire for Iraqi regime change in the U.S. He narrates Chalabi’s ill-fated engage­ment with the CIA and his later focus on neoconservative policy makers who rose to power under George W. Bush. As a result, from day two of the Bush presidency, the push for a new Iraq was on, with the intent to install Ahmad Chalabi as overseer of U.S. interests in the Middle East. The outcome was perhaps the biggest foreign policy disaster in our history and a triumphant end to Chalabi’s forty-five-year quest.

Today, as we prepare to withdraw our troops from Iraq, Arrows of the Night is full of shocking revelations about how we got there, including the true story of Chalabi’s relation­ship with Iran. This page-turner, with its definitive account of the war, irrevocably alters a story we thought we knew.