BLOWING UP POLITICIANS

Today is November 5th - Here in New  Zealand we used to CELEBRATE BLOWING UP POLITICIANS on this day every year. 

Which is a damn good idea really, that is certainly something worth celebrating. Every year on November the 5th, we used to have a huge public celebration of blowing up politicians with lots of bombs. It was called Guy Fawkes.

Rather than hiring hundreds of crisis actors to lie about in the streets pretending to be dead, we would just buy a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Chinese fire works and let them off over the harbour.

And instead of freaking out for months about “terrorists” and “lone shooters” we would just go “awesome, that looked cool”

But for some strange reason, the worthless treasonous scum who call themselves "politicians" banned Guy Fawkes and turned it into some meaningless woketard public firework display on a different day that nobody gives a toss about. 

One year back in the old days I felt that my pictures of the fireworks could be a bit more abstract, so here are some unrealistic photos of the fireworks display over Wellington Harbour.

EXTINCT MOTORBIKES

HAVE MOTORBIKES BECOME EXTINCT – LIKE FAX MACHINES?

THE SAD DEMISE OF MOTORCYCLES

Does anyone still ride motorbikes, or are they just an old timers fantasy, like knights in amour or horses and carts?

As a teenager I was obsessed with motorbikes, and as well as using them to get around I used to race motor-cross as well. Motorbikes are awesome.

But the New Zealand government decided that like marijuana, and cures for cancer, motorbikes needed to be outlawed out of existence.

They did it by making it so expensive to register a motorbike that nobody would be left who could afford to do it.

Cars are fairly economical in NZ, because we are a right hand drive country (like England and Australia), but we have no car industry that government needs to protect (unlike England and Australia), so we get all the second hand cars from right hand drive Japan shipped over here and sold nice and cheap.

Back in the old days, it used to be about the same cost for the annual registration on both motorbikes and cars. But in more recent years, motorbikes have gone up. A LOT! Now the annual registration for motorbikes is $586 (so motorcyclists mostly just gave up and bought cars).

Yes, in NZ it costs more to register a motorbike each year than it does to buy a cheap Japanese car.

Like an intrepid African lion hunter, I went exploring the streets in search of retro two wheeled iron horses – do any still exist?

A few still do, but we are not talking regular A to B transport here – anyone paying $586 a year for a number plate wants two wheeled exotica!

Here are 10 styling motorbikes that got tangled up with my camera:

DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?

DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?

BACK IN THE 90’S WE WERE A BIT MORE HARDCORE

When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street, Wellington as being “bohemian” in 97, and I laughed and said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.

And then I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to for drugs and prostitutes.

Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.

As a cyclist I was pretty familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed it just went underground like all the other drugs.

Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.

The first time I walked in on a drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking man in a suit with a large brief case had it open and was discussing bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range of drugs that he had samples of.

Apart from pot, the popular one in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.

What Wellington was infamous for in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of the dead. Bloody glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding their plastic bags and drooling.

Some of the people on the street were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!

This was in the days before digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost $3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to death a few months later…

Our neighbours on the other side were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway

Although I did have a camera, I didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would have been quite something.

I guess this is all looks like a window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and impressionable goober, this was the environment that shaped me. And even now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over the hill computer addict.

When I hear millennials getting offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…

Those were awesome times back in the days before computers.

And getting “offended” wasn’t that viable an option

All photos taken by Barry Thomas

CAMERA GEAR

My take on cameras: 

Some of my all time best photos were taken with my first digital camera, an old Canon Ixus 330 1.9 megapixel camera that I bought back in 2002. It fitted in my pocket and was built like a small metal brick. I just wanted to mention that, because too much talk of overkill camera gear gives me the droop.

Something that seems to be seldom discussed online is that most images on web pages are only 300 – 500px wide. Or that most photos are viewed on platforms like Facebook, and the maximum image size on Facebook is only 720px wide. 

But most people don’t even click on the images on their FB timeline anyway, they just view the thumbnail – which is only 470px wide. And beyond that, most people are now viewing the entire internet on their squinty little phones. So the vast majority of photos are viewed online at less than 470 px wide, and in that size, just about any resolution would do the job.

On this blog my photos are mostly web copies saved at either 750px or 1000px wide, but if you would like a really big copy of anything, just ask me nice and send some nekid pichers ov yerself in exchange.

After five years and over 10 000 photos taken with the Ixus 330, I did eventually get around to getting something more bling – a Canon Ixus 960 Titanium, which I used to take thousands more photos for another five years.

It eventually met an unfortunate and wet demise, so I bought an Ixus 500HS in a styling blue colour. Smaller, with better specs in theory, it was an OK camera for a surprisingly cheap price, but the image quality wasn’t as good as the Ixus 960, and I didn’t stick with it for long.

Still having a soft spot for the 960 Titanium (A classic IMHO), I bought a replacement one in mint condition on Trade Me for a bargain $100, including a waterproof case. (The original retail on this combination would have been around $1200, but cameras are not appreciating investments)

In 2015 I upgraded to a Canon SX600, which was a dirt cheap NZ$200 on sale. And it was a good camera. It fitted in my pocket, even with an 18x zoom, and with 16 megapixels and a 3 inch hi-res screens it seemed pretty awesome for a pocket camera. At that point it was both the cheapest and the best camera I’d ever owned. 

Then in 2018 I upgraded to a Canon SX720 with an awesome 40x zoom lens, and 20 megapixels. To this day it’s still the best camera I’ve ever owned and it blows me away how far these little cameras have developed. I actually prefer it to the newer models and later bought a back up one second hand.

I'm still using my seven year old SX270 daily in 2025 and have no real desire to replace it. If it ever stops working I'll probably just switch to my backup one and continue on.

My take on cameras is that for what I want to use my photos for – mainly posting on websites and often edited with art filters, what matters is not high resolution but always having one in my pocket ready for action, and to be able to use it rapidly without having to look at it.

Taking shit loads of photos also helps me to get some I like. Each picture is raw material for the almost unlimited enhancements available in my favorite programs. 

Over the years I’ve downloaded copies of lots of image editing programs and tried them out, starting with Photoshop 4 in 1998, and my all time favourite version of Photoshop was Photoshop CS6 from 2012. That was the one I stuck with for 12 years, because hell could freeze over before I would ever pay Adobe a monthly subscription.
 

But Photoshop doesn't run on Linux, so since switching full-time to using Linux at the start of 2025, I've also switched over to using GIMP, starting out with Gimp 2 at first, and then upgrading to Gimp 3 when it was released in March 2025.

I'm slowly learning to use GIMP 3 and it's a very good program, but after using Photoshop for the past 27 years I had become stuck in my ways, and I still have lots to learn. 

On Android I mostly use Snapseed, Cartoon Pro, Mirror Lab, and Chroma Lab for doing my photo edits. Despite hating Google I really like Snapseed and find it the fastest and easiest to use image editor for all basic stuff.

 This is a photo I took on my Canon SX270 that has been lightly edited in Snapseed. It's not high res enough for serious photographers, but I took it from inside a bus anyway, and I like it, as it captures chemtrails, a gay building, a masktard, and a phone zombie, all at once, in Manners St Wellington NZ:
 

THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS

TAKING A TRIP TO THE WILD SIDE

This one time, I had to take a trip to a whole different kind of neighbourhood.

Feeling a bit apprehensive, but keeping in mind that without photos, nothing ever really happened, I got my camera out and started getting a few shots.

Even the cars were from a different era, not of this century at all, probably more like what people have in Cuba.

And there were uniformed fascists intimidating people in the streets.

But the thing that stood out to me the most was the expressions on the faces of the people in the streets – abject fear, and complete submission to totalitarian oppression.

To better capture the atmosphere, I got out my black and white camera that doesn’t focus properly and started taking some grainy photo realist shots.

Thankfully my bus soon arrived and I was able to go back to my own hood, where even the people begging outside the supermarket are able to regularly check the text messages on their smart phones, and the cars all have reliable air conditioning.

STRANGER STALKING

For some reason I have a fetish for taking photos of strangers.

I lurk about with my camera waiting to get a snap of them. And then I post their pics online and hopefully my unwitting victims never know! Here are some lucky strangers that caught my eye.

(I like my strangers in a Polaroid style)

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