Picture of the day 2005-2006
I used to run a website, creatively titled “Ben’s Picture of the Day”. Every day, for ten years or so, I took a photo and uploaded it to my blog.
It was a time of change for me, the blog starts with my final few days in school, goes through my last summer, through university, living abroad, getting a job in Sheffield and so on.
I thought all these photos were lost, but it turns out I’d set up an auto-backup to flickr and I’ve managed to recover all but the very earliest ones. So, er, thanks flickr for hanging on to these all this time.
I thought perhaps I’d post some of my favourite ones here and see if I can remember any backstory. Sadly I think the text that I wrote with the photos really has been lost.
The banner image is of a cow that I think was stood almost bang on the France/Spain border. Around that time I was coming off film cameras, and I had a little Sony Cybershot point and shoot camera. It was 5MP but I liked the pictures I got with it.
This one is also from the Pyrenees. We spent a lot of time there as kids and had family and friends living in the area. These are the only pictures I have from 2005 sadly.
This is New Year’s Day 2006, at a friend’s house in the Pyrenees. From left to right it’s my brother, my uncle, our friends Pierrot and Marie Rose and stood up behind them is my dad. We’d have extrememly long lunches there just shooting the shit for hours on end. Pierrot and Marie Rose used to speak Béarnese to each other which is when you know shit was starting to get real.
Pierrot died a couple of years ago I think, and my dad died back in 2014.
This is skipping ahead now to the summer of 2006, when I went on a diving trip to Malta with school. It wasn’t a particularly good school so this sort of thing was extremely exotic. I think it was organised because the teacher fancied one of the diving instructors.
As you can tell I was also getting handy with photoshop and dicking about. In retrospect I should have left it alone, the picture was probably pretty good!
August 2006 now. Back from Malta and back in the Pyrenees. This is the view from the house my dad built, which he later sold to his brother, who still lives there. The lit up mountain lies at the end of the Aspe valley and marks the Spanish border via the Somport pass.
At this point they’d only just finished a road tunnel through the pass a couple of years ago. Things were opening up but I remember in the years before, Spain felt a bit like a distant land in spite of being only a few miles away.
I’ll be back with a few more of these later on when I’ve sifted through them.