Geograph - photograph every grid square

Formerly avid caver, now enthusiastic canoeist (white water and sea kayak, occasional open boating). Skier, ski-tourer, cyclist, walker, climber, mountaineer, photographer, boat-builder, reader... About two thirds of Munros bagged, but this game is on a backburner (ie. haven't ticked one since 2001) as kids are not enthused and it isn't something I can do locally (before kids, I lived in Cambridge and travelled to Scotland most winter weekends when I wasn't in Yorkshire caving).


With a large proportion of the world, I share an utter hatred of everything Microsoft, but have the good fortune to be able to practice what I preach and use Linux almost exclusively. So, something of a geek, then... and yes, when I was little, I was a train spotter - but there were steam engines then !

The personal milestones seem to add up quite quickly:

My first photo cited in Stellar Examples Game for Information was submitted on my second day as a user, but the next took a while longer (and was not an exciting photo). A third materialised after a solo sea kayak trip to Mull and a fourth after another Mull visit (must be a particularly inspiring place!)


My first photo shortlisted for GoTY was in week 10 of 2009, a week after becoming a user, but it took a while to get the hang of it. My first (and so far only) winner was a year later in week 10 of 2010. As many of my better submissions in the first few months were from my deep past, those weren't eligible. Since the introduction of the Monthly Aberystwyth Prize in 2010, I was rather pleased to find that two of my PotY shortlistings got nominations for that, too :-)

Shortlisted:
2009:

2010: week 10 winner:

2011:

I was most gratified to get two shots selected as photograph of the day within my first month, but again, the next had to wait for some time, then more, including three taken on the same night, in my home gridsquare,



A random selection of my own favourites:



My home hectad is NZ01 and I completed this with my hundredth personal point on 2011-01-09. There are a couple of other hectads with a real prospect of completion soon - I had imagined in 2011 before I got sidetracked with other projects. I also seem to be getting on with centisquare coverage of my home grid square (only one of the 90+ photos in that square is not mine, and 61 centisquares are done - the highest centisquare coverage in this hectad). There are a few more hectads where I have the most personal points (both local and in Scotland) and several where I'm aiming to gain that status soon. Early afternoon 2009-11-13, after submitting 67 images in a week to hit the rapidly closing window of opportunity, I achieved the personal milestone of being the 250th contributor to reach 500 personal points, thus gaining a foothold on the bottom of one of the more popular leaderboards. 1000 personal points no longer got one into the top 150, but I managed to reach the bottom of that list with my last submissions. Having neglected geograph for a while, I see I'm back outside the top 200, but working hard on my backlog to get back there.

Oh, dear. Lots of incentives to get out every day, but unfortunately, I got busy with other things in 2011, about the time that our internet went flaky making uploads difficult - I seem to have neglected geograph for some time. Trying to get back into it at the moment - at least I have made a start with some new submissions!

Context for a lot of my photos is provided by blog posts (they go back almost fifty years) on the website URL given above, though many of those entries are outside the UK. It, too, is still a work-in-progress with many more trips to write up.

The original images of all my photos released CC-BY-SA on geograph are available CC-BY-SA-NC on my website, but the server is either on my ADSL line or our WimAx broadband (whichever is managing to stay up most reliably at the time) which won't stand up to a lot of traffic, so if you are interested, please contact me through geograph in the first instance.