Living La Dolce Vita

So by now you may have twigged that things were about to change for me at university because I was moving away for a year. After lots of farewells, zero hour approached and I was whisked away by Easy Jet to Italy. Well actually to France because I flew to Nice, and then I got the train to Italy. But you can read all about that here.

I spent a month in Italy teaching, sightseeing, and falling off bikes. I was itching to jump in front of Lake Garda, in front of the castle in Brescia overlooking the city, even with my fellow tutors at our English camp. I didn't manage any of these. Instead all I could muster was jumping off my bike on a steep descent on Mont'Isola leaving a large amount of my skin on the gravel.

The problem was that I was staying with a host family, the kind of people that you could offend if it looked like you were mocking their hospitality. 'Thanks for taking me to this beautiful place, can you take a silly photo of me?'

Anyway, that meant for a month, jumping was off limits. But fear not jumping fans! After spending a month teaching, I went to do a month of learning and I found myself in a little hilltop town called Camerino embarking on a language and culture course.

This was one of my favourite experiences on my year abroad - I met loads of fantastic people and managed to inspire their love of jumping too: I more than made up for my dry month.

So without further ado here is the first jumping picture from way over in Italy:

We'll Buy Him a Patch in the Tuscany Hills...

Camerino, Italy, 2009

So it isn't quite Tuscany, but it was one of the most beautiful places I've ever had the fortune to stay in. Neither is it the best jumping picture I've ever seen - but like my year, things were certainly on the up.

Desperate Housemates

The day before I left university for a year in Italy I made sure I spent some quality time with my housemates. You may have read in another of my posts that this time was the end of an era and when I went back to university in my fourth year, things just weren't the same. I look back to this time as the culmination of two fantastic years, and the end of a mini-chapter of my life.

Well that's all pretty depressing, so let's get back to the jumping nonsense.

So that night we'd decided to eat up all our leftovers and watch a good amount of Desperate Housewives (series one) as we were very near the end and we couldn't leave it unfinished for an entire year! Anyway, we ate our fill, watched until we had square eyes and took a whole series of commemorative photos. With one exception. My room was not condusive to jumping.

We went outside and because it was our last chance to take some jumping pictures, we took Marcey the Trampette too. Now you may have seen the false start we had in taking these photos, but we got there in the end and thought about moving on to something a little more ambitious.

Desperate Housemates

St Andrews, May, 2009

We got a little carried away. By the end of the evening we'd annoyed everyone that was studying for exams with our whooping and Marcey was well and truly buried in the ground and we had to dig her out. With a screwdriver. Desperate housemates indeed.

If at First You Don't Succeed...

I like to think of myself as a persistent person. I see no point in doing 90% of a job and not finishing it off. Even if the last 10% is the hardest, to me it's worth it. This is fine if I'm in the driving seat - quite literally when it comes to parking: if I can get it straighter then I will do. If I'm not in a metaphorical driving seat and at the mercies of someone else, then I can end up a little frustrated.

After all they do say that if you want a job doing well, do it yourself.

Well some jobs. For example when it comes to parking, I am pretty horrendous and so it does kind of take a while. But still, I like to do the best job I can.

When it comes to jumping photos, it is more than applicable. As I appear in all of my jumping photos I have to have a designated photographer, it's very difficult therefore to say to someone 'do it like I would' because a) that's unclear and b) really big-headed. I don't just blame my photographers as many are quite competant. I actually blame my [old] camera. It was only when I used it for the last time that I realised the best setting for taking jumping pictures. For the entirety of its life I had been counting a number of seconds while it made its mind up about how long it was going to take to snap closed the shutter.

This is what happened with my next jumping picture. First I will show you the outtakes...

Not the greatest of successes, I think you'll agree. Those eager beavers may also notice the re-appearance of Marcey the Trampette, but alas even Marcey couldn't make the process any less painful.

But perseverence is key and persevere we did (and we actually changed camera-people)...

Try, Try and Try Again

St Andrews, May 2009

The End of an Era

Thus far the pictures I've shown you tell the story from my first couple of years at university. For those of you that are interested/bothered I started by doing an English Literature degree and then in my second year, I decided that English wasn't as fun as it had been, and my third subject of Italian was by far and away the most exciting option for my forseeable future.

I decided to make the change official. (This proved to be horribly bureaucratic.)

Anyway, after some time, I had a plan in place for the following year - my third of university: I was going to Verona to study. This came as a surprise to some of my friends and as May drew closer and with it the thought of goodbyes and 'I'll see you in a year' I started to invite my groups of friends over to my modest abode so that I could have my last supper with them.

There was a group of five of us. Five people that didn't really know each other that well until, during second year, we all had a movie night together. So I decided that it would be nice for us all to go out for dinner: one housemate, two coursemates, and a friend from the Christian Union. We ate handsomely and came back to my house for a movie.

We were treated to a much better show. Nature's finest.

A Sunset in St Andrews

May, 2009

I've called this picture 'A Sunset in St Andrews' because that's all it's a picture of, but to me it means so much more. It was the real end of an era. By the time I'd come back, I'd pretty well lost one of the friends for reasons I could never work out: when they say absence makes the heart grow fonder - they're lying.

The five had become four and things just weren't the same. Everyone had moved on in the year I spent away - including me. Of course we're all still in touch - even now that three of us have graduated - but maintaining those links now we don't see each other every day won't get any easier...

Photoshop Frippery

I'm not the best person to ask about Photoshop. I can't use it. If I fettle my photos it's by adjusting brightness and contrast, but I heavily rely on having taken a decent enough picture in the first place. My camera has colour-select options so I can choose a colour I want to emphasise and leave the rest black and white; I can make the colours vivid; I can blur the background; I can even set my camera up so I smile and the picture is taken automatically. Oh, oh oh it's magic!

So when my pictures arrive in Photoshop in their droves, most of the work has been done for me. I use it principally to save photos which are on the brink of deletion:

What started off as a washed-out mediocre picture of Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics becomes a bold iconic image worthy of the Pop Art era. Well at least I think so - it has been my desktop wallpaper for the last two-and-a-half years.

So Photoshop came to the rescue and put the finishing touches to what was never going to hang on a wall into something I'm really quite proud of. But then again I only fettled the brightness and contrast.

All this is bringing me nicely to my latest jumping photo. I didn't take it. I took about a hundred that evening. There was a beautiful sunset and I decided to go out with a couple of friends for a walk along the beach. The hazy sun left a lot of glare on the camera lens and silhouetted everything in the foreground. Ok so it might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it certainly makes for some effective pictures:

The Silhouette

West Sands, St Andrews, May 2009 

Still, even though it's a nice picture, I think it could be made a little better... With a bit of brightness/contrast fettlage I'd be quite happy to put that on my wall, and, to keep the Stereophonics theme, I reckon they could use that picture for the cover for their greatest hits: A Decade in the Sun.

Arbroath Smokies

One of my favourite pastimes is taking photos. I love capturing pictures of beautiful sunsets or taking an atmospheric city-scape. These photos are the ones that are framed over your fireplace as soon as you buy your first home that your friends admire when they come over for coffee.

For those photos you enjoy the result more than the process of taking them. Admittedly you probably enjoy being wherever it is, but when the moon rises between two Dolomites, there isn't much hysteria when you pull your camera out and snap the shutter.

I'll say it again, then. One of my favourite pastimes is taking photos - the actual act of taking the photo. The result will not end up on my wall, but it will be a fond memory. This is what happened in Arbroath on May Band Holiday, 2009. I went for a day out with two of my friends and together we must have taken 300 photographs. Most of them show us in embarrassing poses, doing silly things fom non-too flattering angles.

Of course they all adorn Facebook and have been liberally peppered with comments from all and sundry, but when the day comes and I finally marry, I will not ask my husband if we can display the picture of me making an 'I' with my finger in the middle of a 'To Let' sign on our living room wall.

Witty, I know...

This brings me onto my next picture in the series:

Dancing in the Street

Arbroath, May Bank Holiday, 2009

I love this picture. It looks like I'm dancing on the bollard instead of falling off it clumsily. It's not a great picture to be honest: it's a little over-exposed and the colours are a little dull. It doesn't matter to me, though. The photograph is not to be enjoyed, but the memory of what happened when it was taken...

Unintentional Headshots

What is the best way to ruin a nice photo? These days it isn't as infuriating as those in the pre-historic era before the invention of digital cameras, but when someone walks into your photo and suddenly the beautifully framed picture of St Mark's in Venice is ruined because a party of five has just barged in front of your camera lens so they can read all the information about the Campanile.

This can be so irritating, and it happened to me so many times I started to do it to other people. 'How vindictive!' say you; 'Not so!' say I. If you search on the world wide interweb for people who barge into other people's photos you may well find pictures of me: putting my thumbs up, doing the odd cheese-filled grin, doing a Usain Bolt-style pose, maybe even just looking grumpy.

These were mild, however, compared to the unsurprising aspiration I had of giving someone else one of my jumping pictures. Whenever I'd see flocks of tourists I'd wait until they pulled out their cameras and jump for about half a minute to ensure someone caught me airborne.

Mmm... clever.

I know what you're thinking and just before you roll your eyes and dismiss me as a reckless youth, I want to explain my desire to inflict my jumping on other people.

First of all, life is unpredictable. Deal with it.
Secondly, I would much rather have someone jumping in my photo than someone's large forehead.
Thirdly, it is very rare that photographs are all printed, displayed and remembered forever. I have thousands of photographs, but the ones I remember are the quirky ones. When you subject your friends and families to your very samey holiday snaps it's right that you show them the picture of the funny girl who was jumping by the Brandenburg Gate.

This brings my very nicely to my next offering...

Surprise!

St Andrews Castle, 2009

My friend may have taken 100 photos of the castle in her time there at university. This is the only one I remember.