Casey fought at this year’s Gracie Invitational at the Excel Arena in London’s Docklands. Was the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournament he has competed in. Myself and the SA went to watch.

Casey won his first two fights, the first by triangle choke and the second fight [pictured here] by points.

His third fight was lost as a result of his opponent stalling [boo!].

Bokeh is the term given to the blurred area in photographs produced by cameras, and the term is very apt to the two photo’s I be posting here :] My new lens is the master of bokeh!

I have been working on building up my Flickr account, but haven’t got very far. I am too picky about the photo’s I allow onto my Flickr account, and as my poor photography yields very little I really like, very little have been uploaded.

I desperately want to get back into creating a few more HDR’s, but need a holiday somewhere exotic for inspiration. Any ideas where I can generate the funds and more paid holiday time? Answers to me on the back of a postcard!

My first HDR [high dynamic range] photography attempts, well second and third, the first was truly shocking! [View at 900×600 on Flickr]. For the uninitiated, HDR is made by taking 3 [sometimes 5] photogrpahs of the same scene, one properly exposed, one over exposed and one under exposed.

These are then manipulated using Photomatix, Photoshop and the like. Mine are pretty average, but there are some examples of absolutely amazing HDR photgraphs here and here.

All I need now is my spanking new lens.

Photograph © Joey Lawrence

My birthday present [one of them anyway] from Sue-Ann was a 90-300mm zoom lens, bought at Gatwick airport on our way to Thailand. On buying it I soon found out it lacked a necessary feature - IS or Image Stability.
The lens handled pretty decently at around 150 - 200mm, but take it above that and it leaves it’s comfort zone. The image shake is similar to that of a white lighting connoisseur who hasn’t had a drink in 2 days.

Long story short, I took the lens back, and have been on the lookout ever since. I was set to buy a 70-300mm with IS from eBay, but fate had it that the bids kept going too high. That’s when I noticed Joey Lawrence’s work. He is a 17 year old guy from Canada, his photography is amazing.

I read up on photography alot. My photo’s suck, but I have high aspirations. I found out the lens Joey Lawrence uses is a prime lens [fixed focal length - no zooming]. I never really saw the point in prime lenses, but research revealed alot of people who couldn’t sing it’s praise enough. Prime’s are cheap for their quality, the apertures on them can open much wider, enabling you to take photographs in darker conditions without flash, the photo’s are supposedly much sharper - looking at some photo’s taken with the lens, I had to have one - mine is on it’s way to me from Hong Kong now :]

Today was a bit wank! The weather has been crap so we spent most of it in our room. We watched a crap but pretty funny film, Bear Grylls on the Discovery channel and three episodes of 24. Got to the end of season 4 of 24 and we have questions, like what happened to Berus [son of the annoying voiced woman called Dina] and what about the stealth bomber pilot that shot down Air Force One?

We decided not to go to Patong tonight and instead ate at the Surin Bay Inn a short walk from the Chedi. Food was awesome and the people were great, we’re gutted we didn’t find it sooner. Still, on a plus note we overheard that the weather is gonna be shit for the rest of the holiday, bonus(!)

Hmm think it’s day 10, have lost track [who cares anyways]. Yesterday we spent by the pool, which seems to have gotten a tad freezing the last few days. Getting in requires a few minutes courage plucking followed by a few minutes of frantic in-pool-movement to ensure hypothermia doesn’t set in.

We went on our second tour today, to a conservation “safari” camp somewhere in Phuket [Chalong, near to Rawai so southish].

In the write up it described the tour as one where you learn about Thai elephant conservation, the only camp in Thailand to receive the Thai government standard award - boasting Thailand’s best cared for elephants.

We were looking forward to seeing the elephants and monkeys in their natural habitat, but instead it turned out to be almost some kind of circus performance. The elephants were taught to play golf, dance, kick footballs amongst other things.

The monkey simply does his short 5 minute show and then goes back in to his enclosure waiting for the next show.

People were given the opportunities to take photos next to the animals, during this time the elephants seemed extremely distressed, shaking their heads from side to side, their eyes looked strained.

It was a pretty bollocks half day tour, and completely mis-sold. A blatant wanna be eco/conservations lodge, set up purely for the benefit of tourists whilst exploiting the animals there.

They weren’t mistreated in anyway but for me it’s a piss take to see such intelligent animals trained to do unnatural tasks just to entertain tourists.

We ate again at sweet, we’re becoming regulars there now, gonna have to find somewhere else. We had fried rice with squid, hot chilli minced chicken, chicken with garlic and pepper and you guessed it - tom yum soup.

On the way back to the night market, we heard the calling “DVD”, we were drawn there like moths to a flame, it was a powerful calling. We were shown to the back of a tailors shop [they better not try to sell me a suit], through a mirror door to a room rammed with DVD’s for a pound each.

We bought about 30, some not the best quality but Case can have those, he isn’t fussy.

After walking through the night market for a while, everything started to close, so we ended up back at Coffee Lovers for a hot and an iced americano followed by iced lemon tea, most refreshing it was too! Couldn’t resist some more Oreo cake, Sue-Ann had some coffee cake.

We then got the free hotel shuttle back to the hotel. Everyone who takes the free bus seems to think because the hotel provide the service they shouldn’t give the guy a tip. He drops us off at 9.20 and waits for us until 12.30. If that’s not worth a tip I don’t know what is.

We got up at 7am, faces like thunder after getting 3 hours sleep, ready for our trip to Phang Nga. The weather is shit, cloudy and windy, but still very hot. We had breakfast and waited for our pick up in the lobby. The air conditioning on the bus was pretty shite so we sat there sweating for the hour journey to the Chandara Hotel, the launching point for the speed boat.

We met our tour guide, and jumped on the speedboat, headed strait for the front where it’s rougher and much more fun. We island hopped for a bit, stopping off at the various limestone formations, one of only 3 places in the world where they are found, China, Vietnam and Thailand. They looked great, but after taking a few rushed photo’s, the rain started. We arrived at James Bond Island, saw the rock that launched the missile. We were told it was a replica though, the real one was blown up in the film :]

Then it pissed it down. We headed to another limestone island, one with a small fishing village on stilts - our stop for lunch. Walking on, we passed a hawk type bird that had also decided to take shelter from the torrential rain. The island was way out to sea, raised a few meters above sea level by stilts, and had a school, a mosque, shops and even it’s own electrical supply and medical centre.

The new thing out here seems to be using monkeys to make money, they charge you to hold them, not something we really wanna do, but the girl pushed the monkey over to me, it reached out for me and I didn’t have a choice. It was amazing, I have always wanted to hold a monkey, maybe not in those circumstances, but it was amazing. I wasn’t going to give them any money though.

We had lunch with a welsh couple and a couple from London, which was strange given that the majority of tourists out here seem to be from Australia, Korea and other parts of the Far East.

After this was our final stop - another limestone cliff with a small beach. We anchored up and went snorkelling and swimming in the small sheltered bay of the cliff. The water was slightly murky because of the sediment, but the water was amazingly warm and it turned out to be the best part of the day - partly because the most miserable looking Aussie made a complete twat of himself trying to rope swing into the sea.

Back at the hotel, we slept for a few hours and went out for dinner. Having been not too impressed with the Thai food so far, we ate seafood pizza and spaghetti. We weren’t too impressed with that either. Surin Beach restaurants are not the best!

On our return to the hotel, we went to the bar for a drink before heading back to the room. I got into the shower and turned the taps, and came face to face with a huge cockroach with the longest feelers ever. After making a swift exit SA called the hotel staff to come and remove it from the room as she wouldn’t go to sleep with it crawling around. Unfortunately, they came armed with bug spray and a stick, so the poor thing met it’s end there and then.

We then settled down to watch another episode or two of 24. Halfway through another one fell on me. I bricked it and threw off my jimmy jams. I dunno who was more scared, especially when the poor thing glimpsed the size of my gargantuan tally wacker! We didn’t want another one killed for our benefit, so SA had to grit her teeth and grabbed a glass to catch it - I was too brave to do it. It was tough work [for her] as the extra long feelers meant it knew where the glass was well in advance of it getting anywhere near it. Eventually she managed to get the glass safely over it. I got some card and we released it outside, with the warm fuzzy feeling inside that we had just saved the ugly fucker from getting gassed.

We then searched the room to find out how the fuckers were getting in. The front door had 2cm gaps all round, and we blocked them up with rolled up newspaper. We didn’t want anymore unwanted visitors during the night!

Pool again today. It is so hot, had to take it easy as we are both a bit sore from the sun yesterday. We had lunch in the hotel which cost a small fortune. My phad thai was rubbish, but SA’s steak sandwich was good.

We took the free shuttle from the hotel to Patong - saving us a fiver each way. Back to Sweet for dinner - glass noodles with seafood, morning glory and sea bass. Then back to coffee lovers and onto the night market for some “shoppeeng shoppeeng”. I bought some shorts for Phang Nga Bay tomorrow & bought SA a skirt. Also saw the most ugliest curly haired fella with a thai girl, and a couple walking back to their hotel with another - wonder what they were about to get up to.

The sun is out and it is fucking hot. We spent the day swimming, snoozing and reading by the pool. The water is free but the food and drink is extortionate. Gutted. Nothing like a big fat burger and chips in the day :[

We decided to eat locally, at a hotel on Surin Beach called the Lemongrass. We had read on a Trip Advisor review that it was particularly good. It wasn’t. It was grim. We forced some down, enough to not be rude - fish cakes were burnt, satay was dry and the pork was as tough as me. The good thing was there was some kind of outdoor aerobics club going on - a bunch of mostly old women doing some shit dance to crap music, entertaining. We headed back to the hotel bar for a drink, but just as we arrived the wind kicked up and it started to rain, so we legged it back to the hotel room to watch DVD’s.