In the midst of all my end of year best of the blog malarky, I seem to have left off one of most important year-end wrap ups: my photography.

So today — a few days late, and in no particular order — I bring you the eleven photos (of mine) that I like most from 2011:

The miniatures

As regular readers of the Big Bad Blog will know, roleplaying is a hobby of mine, and I play D&D on a semi-regular basis. I often take my camera along, to take photos of the minis in action.

Here’s an example of minis in action:

Engagement

Two friends of mine got engaged (to each other) early in 2011, and so I took the opportunity to have an “engagement photo shoot”. A number of the photos resulting from this can be found at this post in April.

My favourite photo from the shoot is this one. The epic feel just feels right.

Greenwich foot tunnel

For most of 2010, Karen and I lived in Greenwich. There’s a tunnel there, that crosses the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. We didn’t use it at all.

When we moved back to Wapping, however, it started to get regular use — we would walk or jog to Greenwich, to spend time in the park or one of their many lovely pubs. The tunnel is quite picturesque, but usually the pedestrian traffic is too heavy to make for a good photo opportunity.

One day in March, however, I found myself in an uncrowded tunnel with my camera. I like the result.

Bubblehead

Summer, a visit to a friend’s, bubbles in the garden. A beautiful day.

Maggie

The Maggie-a-day project is an endeavour in which your blogger attempts to add a photo of his daughter to his Flickr stream every single day.

The project has met with partial success — I certainly do not take a photo every day, and I seem to miss posting a photo approximately one day in four (she’s about 450 days old, and there are about 350 photos in the stream). But with so much of my energy spent on photos of Maggie, it should be no surprise that they make up a significant portion of my top eleven.

Reflections on a nephew

All that practice taking photos of children comes in handy when I get to take photos of other people’s children. These stand out to me, as they are different from the Maggie photos I take daily.

My favourite of these is this photo of my nephew, taken while in Canada:

The green wood

I don’t get out hiking or walking much — while London has a fair bit of green space, none of it is “wild”. And it’s tough to drag a child who isn’t up to walking along with you.

Exceptions are made, however, and one such exception led me to find this little green gem:

The road to the sea

This summer featured our first family holiday — we went down to the French seaside. It was gorgeous, and filled with a dozen photos which would all be featured were this “the top 25 of 2011″, and I did not have an aversion to filling such a list with a group of photos taken in the same short timespan, in the same place.

Out of these photos, two made the cut to the top 11. The first is the final photo in the Maggie sequence above. The second is a black and white photo I took of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something special about photos of water in black and white.

All photos are CC licensed by Mr. Topp, and can be found in my Flickr stream. Alternatively, just click on the photo to go to it on Flickr.

It’s a happy birthday for the Big Bad Blog, as we celebrate our second anniversary of Bloggitude today with a trip down memory lane …

Birth: January 10, 2009

The Big Bad Blog is born with the posting of Mr T Bag. This may have set the tone for everything that appeared on the blog since:

Awakening: May 2, 2009

On the twenty-sixth of April, 2009, the annual London Marathon passed not far from my home. I was out on the street, taking pictures. On the second of May, I posted three of the photos here on the blog … and the Big Bad Blog has not looked back.

By the end of that day, over 15,000 people had visited the blog. Another 9,000 would visit on Sunday.

Whether this did something to our search engine ranking, or new visitors decided to add us to their RSS feed, or what, we don’t know. While we have yet to manage another 15,000 hit day (or month) traffic has been up considerably ever since.

And that must be the fault of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Commitment: January 24, 2010

In December of 2009, Karen and I went on vacation to Saint Lucia. On our return, I wrote a five-part story about our trip.

Although it happened towards the beginning (our first morning in St. Lucia, to be exact), I saved the best for last, and revealed that Karen and I were engaged in the fifth and final article about the trip.

While we are yet to be married (that will be one of our big events of 2011), the Big Bad Blog is, in the end, a chronicle of the life of one Mr. Topp. These things are important.

Procreation: October 7, 2010

Everywhere else I have written the date of the Big Bad Blog Article. Here, I write the date of the event.

On October 7, 2010, Margaret Rose Topp entered the world — and my life, to say nothing of the Big Bad Blog, has not been the same since. Blog outages, moves, and that whole Parenting category of articles? All these (and more) can be blamed on Maggie.

We introduced her a little over a week after she joined us.

Cute, ain’t she?

Getting married, it seems, continues to grow in difficulty. The sheer quantity of red tape and bureaucratic hurdles that must be navigated seems to increase every time that we turn around.

Hurdle number one was the French government. Although we are not getting married in France, as Karen is French they must approve our nupitals before allowing us to go ahead. This involved, amongst other things, submitting to them birth certificates that had been issued during the last few months.

This meant I had to order mine from overseas, leading us to the Canadian set of hurdles — the government needed to know various details about my birth of which I was unsure. Moreover, the online form provided did not state outright what information was needed — there was a new surprise on each page of the multi-page application. This meant nearly two weeks of partially filling out an application and quitting partway through to search out information that was not at my fingertips.

With France and Canada out of the way, we turned to the United Kingdom. The registration process seemed pretty straight-forward, so I should have known that we were missing something. Can’t get hitched without hitches, can we?

That something was the Home Office.

As a person who does not have permanent residency in the United Kingdom, I need to seek permission from the Home Office (who monitor immigration) in order to get married here. At first blush, this might seem to be reasonable — people can and do stay in the country by virtue of marriage, after all — but on further analysis it begins to appear silly.

First, I only need to do this as somebody who is living in the UK legally and intending to get married in the UK. The British government has no say as to who I marry should I go to France, Canada or Las Vegas (amongst other locations), and my visa status would permit me re-entry after the fact. Were I illegal, my application would be pointless, and my time would be better spent not drawing the Home Office’s attention to my predicament.

In other words, I am permitted to leave, marry a permanent resident of the UK and return without their permission; after this I would be seen as married by the Home Office for the purpose of any application I make.

Second, the alternative visa statuses for a married person are no more or less advantageous than my own is. The same rules and fees apply. In fact, it would take longer and cost more to switch my visa status over to the “due to marriage category” before applying for permanent residency in the UK.

Additionally, I would need to apply for such a visa — which means that the Home Office could then determine whether I was really married, or had a sham marriage for the purpose of remaining in the country.

In summary, the Home Office cannot prevent me from getting married by denying permission, my immigration status does not depend on whether or not Karen and I marry, and if it did (or ever does) they will have an opportunity to review my case at that time.

So why does the government insist that I must have the Home Office’s approval before they will allow Karen and I to get married in the UK? As with all things Home Office, my passport must be surrendered while they consider my application, and the waiting period for these applications is four to fourteen weeks.

That three month waiting period is going to be as excruciating as it is pointless. It will interfere with vacations and work, and generally destroys any opportunity Karen and I have to plan this thing.

Wedding delayed due to mindless bureaucracy that serves no apparent function.

Mr. Cameron: You seem concerned about my marital status. I’m anxious to fix it for you, if you would just get out of my way.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have previously used the putting a ring on it title, to address a song that has won an award or two. Today, however, we are going to discuss engagement rings.

Like most engagements, when I asked Karen to marry me, I gave her a ring along with it. The getting of the ring, however, was a bit of an ordeal.

My problem begins with the idea of the ring itself.

When you hear the words “engagement ring”, you probably think the same thing I do; the same thing that most of us do: You imagine the diamond solitaire ring. A big diamond, attached to the finger by a band of metal. The same ring that you have seen on thousands of women.

I did not want to buy this ring — and Karen did not want to receive one, for the record — for just this reason. What tells the woman you love that she is unique and special? Buying her the same thing as everybody else? I don’t think so.

But I still wanted to buy Karen a ring, as a token to remember the moment when I asked her to marry me. So I hit Google and started to do some research on the things. What I found was that most of what we believe is a marketing smokescreen.

Engagement Rings – Truth and Lies

The diamond engagement ring is a tradition. False. Although we are getting there. While a ring is traditionally given at engagement (dating back to the thirteenth century), DeBeers launched an advertising campaign to make the engagement ring a diamond ring.

While diamonds were already a popular choice in the rings, they became the defacto must-have gem. Unless you were old money — the British royal family, for example, still prefers to give sapphire, emerald or ruby rings.

You should spend two months salary on the ring. Laughably false. Many jeweler websites support this, of course, while others admit that it’s OK “if you cannot afford that”. Of course, they are vested interests.

An interesting experiment is to go from a country with relatively high salaries to one with relatively low salaries, and look at engagement rings. You will be hard pressed to identify the differences between the rings in the two countries, other than the cost. It seems that the things are priced at two months salary, no matter what that salary happens to be, rather than based on the value of the jewelry itself.

The ring is worth what you paid for it. False. Jewelers might try to tell you that the diamond ring that you are buying is “an investment.” It is not.

How many solitaire diamond rings are there out there? Looking at only the new ones, there must be over 100,000 on Hatton Garden in London alone. Plus 75% of the women in the western world who have been (or are currently) engaged. That is a lot of rings — do you honestly believe that, if things don’t go right, you will be able to sell that ring for more than what you have paid for it?

No? Then it’s not an investment.

Are you planning to sell it at some future date for a profit?

No? Then it’s not an investment.

The diamond that they are selling you is better than those other cheaper ones. False, with a hint of truth.

There are such things as “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds”. They come from African diamond mines, and are sold by warlords there to fund their wars. If you do not want the token you are giving as a representative of your love to fund murder, you probably want to stay away from the blood diamonds.

Luckily, there is a system in place that identifies the origin of the diamond, and certifies it as being of the non-blood variety. In this sense, if the jeweler is offering you such a diamond it is better than many of the alternatives.

This can cloud the fact that it is still not a good deal.

Diamonds can now be made in the laboratory. Better clarity and colour can be had, for a fraction of the price required to dig naturally-forming diamonds out of the earth. There is no difference — they are the same material — other than that the tracking measures listed above will indicate that your diamond originated in a laboratory rather than a mine.

That’s all. Jewelers the world over will claim that such diamonds are “worth less”, although they look identical and have identical optical properties. They are just as real a diamond, and look just as pretty on her finger. If your heart is set on a diamond ring, take them up on that “worth less” offer — that’s just code for “less profit”.

Steal one of her rings. True. The best advice available on the Internet is to grab one of her rings to use for the sizing. Genius.

The Aftermath

The ring I chose, in the end, has a single diamond on it. Nobody is going to mistake it for a diamond solitaire, though.

There are — literally — millions of women out there with diamond engagement rings. It can be tempting to be one of the crowd, and do things the way everybody else does them. But if you really want to make a statement with an engagement ring, give something unique. Give something that stands out.

If you are going to put a ring on it, you could at least be creative.

(More interesting bits in this Slate article)