Saturday April 19th 2008 To Hawes Water!

We decided to visit Hawes Water, but first we wanted to obtain some prints to turn into postcards to send to family and friends, and also to pick up some food shopping, so into Keswick, and the local Boots to print off half a dozen postcards. Pat takes blank postcards with us on holiday that we attach to the back of the prints with double sided tape to provide an address panel an message area, as if you try to write on the back of prints, the ink takes ages to dry and it smudges.
Saturday is market day in Keswick, so naturally I had to take a few shots.There were plenty of stalls, but not many shoppers.
We were soon on our way and after a break arrived at Hawewater, and parked at our usual vantage point overlooking the island, the bluff, and the far end of the lake, which is of course, a man made reservoir.
The Panorama below is from five separate images, please click on it to see it full size
The scale of the scenery here is amazing, it's so vast!

Friday April 18th 2008 off to the coast

The Panorama of Buttermere above is composed of seven separate images: click on it to see it full size!

With weekend coming on the weather did what it usually does and became changeable: meaning anything from sunny to foggy with rain in between!
So we went for a drive down to the Honister Pass , and stopped to take several shots at Seatoller, (here's one.)
As you can see the colours and lighting are really attractive, I have often wondered why, it's as if you are on a film set, rather than in a real place.
Anyway off we went over Honister Pass, stopping partway down to take some photo's of the view, (but mostly to enjoy a cuppa and a piece of Grasmere Gingerbread.
The clouds came down as you can see
Then off we went though Buttermere and across to St Bees. Since the season hasn't really started there were very few people there, so we moved on to Whitehaven and had fish fingers and chips for lunch in the harbourside Tesco: fuel here is very expensive, at Tesco it was £1.19 per litre, 12 p more than at home!



We drove back via the back lanes and had a sleepy afternoon in the caravan, eating our packing up (we intended this for lunch!) for tea.

I had an evening walk on the lakeside, but boy, was that wind cold?

Thursday April 17th 2008 Grasmere Gingerbread!

Upper Image above is an Ullswater lake steamer, the one below a three image Panorama of Ullswater near Glenridding...
First thing we do when coming to the Lake District is to scoot down to Grasmere to buy a pack of "Sarah Nelson Grasmere Gingerbread" (a great delicacy round these parts, and nothing like any other gingerbread you are likely to have eaten!
The outside is covered with fine crumbs, and the consistency when just bought is like a stiff fudge, which hardens when stored until after a few days it's as hard as toffee: one trick when it's a week or so old (ours rarely lasts this long, mind!) is to warm it in the oven for a minute or two (or microwave for thirty seconds)
It is delicious, next time your in the area give yourself a great treat!

Todays picks are of, first of all some catkins by the waterside of Derwentwater, and the canoes of a school party.

That's followed by some views from "The Struggle " a steep, winding and very long hill, which runs from Ambleside up to Kirktone Pass,

We also bought some delicious Cumberland sausage, which went down a treat at tea time!
The weather was pretty good, cold and sunny till just before tea, when we had some light rain.

16th April 2008 and off to the Lakes!

We decided that you can wait forever for the weather to warm up/improve, so decided to take the plunge and go!
We headed for our favourite caravan site at Low Manesty, just through Grange, at the end of Derwentwater, and arrived mid afternoon. We had a good journey of just over five hours, stopping once briefly to eat a packed lunch in the lay-by at Scotch Corner, at the start of the A66.
To our surprise the site was almost full, so we're not the only mad people around it seems!
I had my hands full with the mains power lead connections which tied me up for a couple of hours, but eventually got this sorted out and went for a walk round the lake.
Here's a few shots....
The site is on the hillside above the lake, and you can simply walk through a gate and down a gentle slope till you reach the boardwalk: This is a raised walkway that used to be of wood planks, intended to raise visitors above the swampy shore of the lak, it's currently being replaced by a newer one constructed of "planks" made out of recycled plastic bottles that require virtually no maintenance as they don't rot!
It's great in the evening to stroll out there, the only slight drawback is that the sun falls below the high ridge of Catbells Fell, and it gets pretty cold in the resulting shadow.
The top image gives you a good idea of how the boardwalk looks, apparently it took something like 40,000 recycled bottles to create just one metre length of the synthetic planks!

9th April 2008 Printing Panoramas

Yesterday I went to the deep, and after taking a lot of photos with the Nikon D60, I left and took the brompton folding bicycle out of the car boot, and went for a short ride around the marina. I took several shots to turn into a panorama.

The assembled panorama has gone on ephotozine this morning, I made a montage of it with two further images, and added a drop shadow in the Gimp, so we'll see how popular it proves to be. I did this because panoramas don't really print very well, unless you're making very large prints, but they turn out as a narrow strip.

8th April 2008

At last the isects have put in an appearance, a sure sign of spring! I have kept the bridge camera set up with close up lens sellotaped on and the external flashgun and diffuser fitted ready for them.

There are difficulties of course, the depth of field even at f11 or f16 is still so shallow with the smaller flies like this one that you have to make sure they are lying parralel to the lens, or you only get a small area in focus.

This is a problem with live subjects, you can't take repeated shots of them and use a stacking software like stackup to give more depth of field.

April 7, 2008: spring?

Well it's spring in theory, so why does it keep snowing? But at least last Friday we had some better weather, and I was able to take some landscape photographs in North Yorkshire.

This one is actually composed from three images, the sky is a separate image, and most of the burnt foreground too.

February 29th at last!

Thank goodness the main body of winter is now behind up and we can look forward to some better weather, over on the forum we're running a monthly competition on the theme of spring bursts out, for which I haven't yet produced an entry, but since it runs for the whole month of March, I don't have to do it in a rush. Over on Ephotozine my last few efforts have not gained many votes, nonetheless I have been enjoying posting on almost a daily basis. Here's one of my latest postings.

Which got a modest nine votes. It started out when I took a picture of a burning match, then asked myself why would anyone hold a match for long enough for it to burn down? It was then the they came up with the idea of a burglar examining something he is about to steal, so I opened my painting of the Mona Lisa, created a new layer over it that contained the picture of the burning match, then erased the background to reveal the painting beneath.

The title was obvious " thief in the night"

1st Feb 2008: arctic Weather hits us

The day started well enough mild and with bright sunshine, we decided to go for a drive and have lunch in Castleton at the tea room , but ran into a blizzrd on top of Bakey Ridge.
Lunch was great, with the snow still falling heavily I felt it would be safe to head across to Whitby rather than risk the gales and Blizzard on Blakey Ridge onto to get stuck half way up the 1 in 4 hill out of Lealholm!
Fortunately I still had the Spikes Spiders in the boot, so had to set to kneeling in teh blizzard to build the spacers and adapters onto the wheel nuts before the snow chains could be used.
Eventually I succeeded, and we drove up the hill passing a stuck lorry, and covered the remaining miles to the coast road up hill and down dales with absolutely no difficulty at all.
The Spikes Spiders were absolutley Brilliant!

Once we reached the main road I had to take the spikes spiders off again, to conserve the chain, as they are not the designed to be run for long distances.
I was very impressed with the efficiency of the system on the snow, and felt that it was very unlikely that we would ever get bogged down, unless the snow was extremely deep.
We then ran into heavy slow moving traffic and it took 3 hours to get as far as Bridlington, where we shopped at the Morrison's and had some tea. From here on there was no snow, so we made good time the rest of the distance home.

26th January Weather more spring like

for once we had several hours of sunshine, and it felt like spring, though obviously this is likely to be a flash in the pan and the cold or wet weather return. We went out for a ride and rapidly realised from the amount of traffic leading to the coast that everyone else had the same idea!

So, we had a quick snack at the McDonalds in Bridlington and a quiet drive down country lanes to come home.

I took quite a few landscape phto's with the intention of dissecting and rebuilding them to gie more attractive compositions, but for the day's Ephotozine I put on a composite of three versions of Ryan next door's face, it only scored a mesly 4 votes.

Oh well, never mind!

25th January Fun with Vista

Been offline due to having to re-install Vista twice after it committed suicide for no known reason, then wouldn't upload updates and voice recognition died a death.. what trash!

Any way put a couple more pictures up on ephotozine.

This is composite of two I took today at the Deep.

22 January and a very different Day's weather

After the heavy rain yesterday we were surprised!
Woke to a frost and sunshine, so off we went for a drive to Whitby.
Many of the fields were flooded and some of the rivers and streams had broken their banks. When we got to Whitby we parked on the Abbey side of the Harbour, and crossed the swing bridge to walk down by the fish dock to the Khyber Pass and the pier. We didn't stay out there long as it was only 1 Deg C, so we came back over the bridge and had a fish and chip lunch in one of the Cafe's (very good too.)
I also enjoyed using both the Digital camera and the Pentax ME round the harbour, and made a composite of two of them to put on Ephotozine
It scored 11 votes.

21 January: Extreme weather again

We were lucky today, the weather was very wet and flooding was forecast, but never happened.
We were out visiting friends today so didn't take any new photo's but I did post a tutorial on the forum on how to combine an image of a tree with a different sky, a tricky tranformation if you want to make a convincing job of it!

20th January Off to the seaside

We decided a bit of see air was just what the doctor ordered, so lunch was packed and we headed for the coast.
To our surprise and delight we spotted these snowdrops on the roadside near Wawne church, and in Bridlington the were actually a couple of Daffodils in full bloom!

We had set of for Flamborough Head, forgetting that if anywhere is going to be foggy, this is!
The picture has uploaded with some very strange artifacts in the sky that can't be seen on the
original.
We drove back via Bridlington and ate our packed lunch on the prom, where at least you could see the sea, even though it was still raining.

Any way, I decided to try a composite on ephotozine of the camera I'd been given, and Brid prom.

Not exactly a huge success, it got 6 votes.
On the way home we could see many fields were badly flooded, it looks like the Lake District out there!

19th January and the weather has turned rather wet!

We had to go out shopping and stopped to eat our packed lunch in Pickering Park, where I spotted a huge puddle in front of the ornamental gate, so this came in handy as the days Ephotozine entry.
And while this was going on I took a couple of shots on the Pentax ME, I'm looking forward to seeing the results in due course.
Over on the Bridge camera user group I compiled and uploaded a lengthy "How To" on Wedding Photography, and was pleased to see that the site was getting busier.
I( shall be adding this to the end of my emails, too.
And the image was called "Reflected Glory" it gained 14
Geoff, the chief admin has suggested a message to invite visitors, so here it is
Hi
Thought you might find this link useful
http://www.89870.forums.motigo.com/
This is a fab forum entitled Bridge digital camera users...long name, I know, but it's really useful.
Regards

18th January off visiting

Spent the day at my sister's near York, she gave me a camera (Pentax ME super) that had been in the loft since her husband died many years ago: It will be interesting to put a film through and see how it performs.
Todays effort for Ephotozine was this.
I had sketched one of the rather good entries from the week earlier and so.......

17th January Still setting up the computer

I have been busy installing OPENSuse
linux 10.3 on one of the drives, and it just keeps getting better and better.
I put a very simple, but I thought rather nice still life on Ephotozine, but only a couple of people liked it!
(May delete it and try another less subtle image later today!0

15th January Wet and windy

The weather was so wet today that the first time I got out for a walk was half past three in the aftrnoon!
I tidied up a shot of Mousehole taken last July for Ephotozine, it got 19 Votes!

14 January 2008 Good old Windows Vista

Last Friday I ordered an 80 Gbyte hard drive off Ebay, and to my amazement it arrived this morning, and was instantly installed in the desktop computer.
I put a new drive into the computer today, initially I installed Freespire to see how much further that Linux distro had got, and was rather disappointed when it couldn't even see my USB connections, no matter what I tried, I never had a problem with Suse 10.2!
Any way I decided that as time was pressing I would have to install Windoze again, quite a lengthy operatotion, as my Vista is an Upgrade , so I have to install XP first just to run the Vista DVD.
Then to make matters worse Vista decided that it couldn't start, and I had to format the drive and start again from the beginning formatting XP.
Even then when it was installed, I had a couple of "Blue screen of Death" crashes over the Nvidia and Soundmax drivers!

13th January

We had intended to go for a decent run out today, but the weather was cloudy and promised rain so we got as far as doing some shopping and having lunch at McDonalds.
I wrote a tutorial for the Bridge Camera forum on combining two images and put the resulting image on Ephotozine as today's submission.
I was pleasantly surprised when it got 15 votes.
The chap who adminsters the forum used the tutorial and produced a very capable first attempt, using the posted images, and we had a friendly debate over the reasons for altering images: we see them as a way to generate images of a type that we don't have the opportunity to catch "in the field", and by creating them learn what makes a good and effective finished result.
During the afternoon I had a short walk, but soon headed back as it was cold and windy.

12th January

Well here's the day's Ephotozine entry, composed of four separate images, the sheep, then a stream off the moors, the bridgeand houses in Hutton Le hole, and a sky from last summer.
We drove as far as Wetwang and had lunch at the local Chippy, but didn't stay out very long as the weather was dull and wet.
This entry scored 14 votes, not too bad

11th January Weather rather damp

Because it was a rather foggy day I decided to look back to last year's images to find something appropriate for Ephotozine, and came up with this one of Haweswater, it had the tones augmented with the LOMO filter in the GIMP and achieved 14 votes, not bad really.
We had a day out to Castleton and though it wasn't exactly sunny, it was pleasant to drive over the moors and meet some old friends at the "Friday Pensioners Special" in the Castleton Tea rooms.
I took something like 15 pictures while out, including some on 35mm on the Dynax, and created a composite of Hutton Le Hole as tomorrow's Ephotozine submission.

10th January A windy day

Since it was too windy and raining too, I had to look back at last week's photo's to find something to submit to ephotozine, and had picked out two: one of a roadside pond on Blakey Ridge, and the other of farms near the end of Fryupdale.
Since I couldn't make my mind up I decided to compromise by combining them into one image, I rather liked the effect, as the warm colours around the cool pond seem to create a feeling of depth, seemingly bringing the farmhouse in the foreground closer.
Good and orginal? heh heh!

9th January :Today's ephotozine entry

Taken yesterday near the Humber Bridge, the weather turned a wee bit nasty!
It didn't do too badly, getting 8 votes.
At this time of year it's hard to take new photo's to put on ephotozine, most of the time you end up looking back through the stuff you took last summer.
I have my desktop computer partitioned so that I can boot either XP or Vista, as I don't trust the latter: I was proved right today when Vista simply refused to startup, and the repair sytem on the DVD failed to resurrect it. Currently I am reinstalling it, but the day when I trust it enough to use it for anything serious has receded further into the future!
It still needed the sound card driver re-installing every couple of day or so.....
Time someone toppled the oh so mighty Microsoft off it's perch and replaced the Windows system with something more reliable!

Curioser and curioser!

I visited a favourite of mine again today, "The Deep" Hull's aquarium: and dicovered that even here the Marketing Executive can't leave your dinner alone....
I went into the cafe and ordered a Pannini (bacon and mozzarella). As I lifted it to take a bite a friend said "Here! what's on the bottom of your sandwich?"
Turning it over I couldn't help but laugh.....
Then I began to wonder how long it would be before they print a message on your butt when you sit down?
A sobering thought no doubt!

Using film in 2008

I had a good look at using a film camera and realised that I didn't really want piles of prints, what I need is images that are good enough for the web. The local Photo processors confirmed that they would provide a developed film and the images on a CD for £2.98, which is very reasonable, and our localAldi superstore sell Koday VR100 135 36 exposure film for 2 films for £1.98, which gives the following cost:
film cost 2.75 pence per frame
Process cost 8.28 ditto
Total 11.03 pence per shot..........pretty cheap!
The other good point is that the processing only takes half an hour; the CD is ready when you come back from shopping, and each CD even has viewing and printing software on it....plus you can order prints over the net from it.
Naturally you an use your image editing software and printer on the stored pictures, and have them already on a permanent storage medium.. by the way you can have up to five films on a single CD at additional cost.
The scanned images are only 2 megapixels, but boy are they sharp! see attached pics: and they print surprisingly well, you only need the negatives for really large (10"*8" or above) prints.
So now I have to carry both digital and film cameras! (must be a glutton for punishment....)

Turning the clock back

Having been converted to digital photography for some years, using compacts and bridge cameras, I rather surprised myself just before Christmas when I spotted this camera on Ebay.
A Minolta Dynax 5: and decided I must have it...
The rationale was that I intend to upgrade to a Sony DSLR this year and the lens would fit......
When it arrived I was amazed at the absolutely perfect condition it was in, it looked new. Considering I only paid £63 for it I was very pleased.
compared to my bridge camera?
Like a ferrari to a citroen 2CV!
The first shot I took was of a seagull flying over me, I just raised the camera and fired....I was shocked at the blazing speed of the camera, it stopped the bird smack in the frame where I placed it, and pin sharp too....this would have been impossible with the bridge camera.

January 8th And now for something different!

"An Alcoholics damaged DNA.Shocking evidence from the Electron Microscope of the damage done by the demon drink"
Er no, not really, just me monkeying about with pictues of a full glass using the flash gun with coloured beakers placed over it, then cloned and arranged in patterns.
The story behind this was that when looking on a great site
http://www.diyphotography.net/
at the range of brilliant flash and lighting ideas that can be done for free or very cheaply, I suggested the method I had of slipping a beaker over the flash head, and in response Udi (The clever chap that runs the site) suggested that I try putting different couloured beakers over the flash gun...
This is the first real attempt , I'm sure that it can be improved on... anyway it got 8 votes... It's hard being a trendsetter!

January 7th "Oh I do like to be beside the sea side"

Scarborough, north Yorkshire January 7th...Brr
I liked the number of triangles in this shot, and the feeling of space.
It didn't seem to appeal to many others, however, as it only scored 4 votes...
If I'm going to be famous it looks as if I'll have to cut my ear off!...on second thought, who needs to be famous?

January 6th Of course it couldn't last!

This is Fryupdale in North Yorkshire, one of my favourite places, and at this time of year the low angle of what sunshine you get (if you get it!) really picks out the dry stone walls and the contours of the land...
Where possible I do like to get out and "do" photography right through the winter,but you rarely get days as nice as this one was..
Alas it only scored a measly 5 votes.

January 5th Mounts Bay and reflections

Fame at last... well perhaps not fame exactly, but this did achieve what for me was a very rewarding 40 votes!
Of course as the great W.C. Fields would say it was "Good and Original"
(Meaning that the parts that were original weren't good,
And the parts that were good weren't original!)
I like to think of digitally manipulated photos as
Paintography
There you are, remember you saw it here first!
For the record the manipulations were done in the GIMP . The open source image editor that everyone should have, 'cos it's free!

January 4 2008 A bit of digital fun

This bit of nonsense came about because I had an image of a kite that broke free and crashed, but the sky was empty of detail, and I though it deserved something a bit more spectacular, so the background shot of an oilseed rape field in full bloom at sunset was used.
Simple really, the kite was cut out and copied onto a layer then blended in using the eraser tool.
Anyway, it got a few laughs and 17 votes!

January 3 2008 and the First Snow

What a difference a day makes! I couldn't photograph the same group of fungi, as they were buried under the snow, but this group on the other side of the stump were partially exposed, and I ad taken my own camera with me this time, (Fujifilm S9600)
Using the built in flash and shooting in raw, under-exposing by a stop I was able to capture the full dynamic range of the snow to the deep black shadows.. as you can see the "snow" was mostly composed of large hail particles..
This one only scored 7 on Ephotozine...looks like I'm never going to be famous!

Continuing the update...January 2 upload

While waiting for a bus I spotted this little group on a an old tree stump. so out came the trusty Sony DSCW100 (belong to my wife!) and this was the result ..it achieve a modest 11 votes

Back at last!

After a couple of years absence I remembered this blog and resolved to contribute again, starting with my Ephotozine goings on..
This was my entry for January 1st, to remind us all that hopefully we can expect better weather soon!