22nd April Tuesday Tarn Howes and...

A lovely sunny morning, and we needed some Grasmere Gingerbread! So our first destination was rather obvious. Once we had the Gingerbread we continued south, and decided to take the back roads for a change, and spotted a sign for Wray Castle: National Trust, which rather puzzled us as it doen't seem to be in the book! However the car park and grounds are open free to the public, though the house is closed, probably to be renovated.
Although it looks ancient the house was built in 1840 for a retired surgeon called Dr Dawson, and some time later rented by Beatrix Potter's family.
We had a good walk round the grounds and garden, And there were some incredible trees and plants growing there, this one was close to the castle, I was attracted to it by what appeared to be bright red flowers, which actually turned out to be new leaves, as the flowers are white!
We ate our packed lunch on what appeared to be a balcony on the drive which gave us an incredible panoramic view to the north of the lake .
After lunch it was a short drive to Tarn Howes.
Though it looks lovely, it is of course artificial, being the result of combing three separate tarns in the pat: it was bought by Beatrix Potter, and bequeathed by her in due course to the National Trust.
As members of the National Trust we don't have to pay to use the car park, assuming of course you can find a spot! Even at this time of year we had to go round the car park three times before finding somewhere we could get in.
We bought an expensive though delicious ice cream cornet at the residen van, then walked over to the hilltop to take a couple of shots: I was impressed by the way that daffodils survive in what can only be described as the most exposed places...

The views from here are truly breathtaking, but as it was getting late so we set off back following the smaller lanes and roads, and we stopped on one corner to take a scenic shot and I spotted this little family group..

Monday April 21st 2008 Whitehaven and Ennerdale

We decided to combine shopping and scenery, so drove up on back roads round the western side of Derwentwater, then west towards the coast through Newlands pass.
This is one of the gentlest of the lakeland passes, and it also has the least traffic, and some great parking spots where the view is worth photographing. I had been hoping for sunshine to pick out the wonderful forms of the landscape, however thhe weather was a bit dull, nevertheless I took several images anyway:
This is one of my favourite views of the valley, and one of the flatter sections of the pass too, once past this there is a fairly steep rise before the immense hill that sweeps down the mountainside to the village of Buttermere, then on through Buttermere and across via Lowes Water and Frizington to Whitehaven, where we parked at Tesco's on the front, had a fish and chip lunch in a local cafe, then walked through the town centre to find a craft shop as Pat wanted some decouppage print sheets to cut out to make birthday cards suitable for men.
At the end of the main street is a square, and in the centre a small metal pagoda, with these bronze statues: very lifelike and impressive, presumably of two young fishermen from what appears to be the 1960's, one is seated and tying a knot

We enjoyed our walk back along the extensive Marina filled with pleasure craft and passed several strange bits of street architecture or follies, including this rather strange cycle rack made of Stainless steel in the shape of fish.
There are also tiled patterns in the roads and pavements related to fishing, and metal models of nautical knots mounted at intervals in the pavement on the quayide.
All in all the place has plenty of character, do visit sometime.
We spent quite some time looking around before shopping getting back to the car park to do our shopping at Tesco.

Once this was done it was inland to Ennerdale as the sun had come out, though it was still rather misty. We had a cuppa and a banana on a seat taking in the view before Pat went back to the car to do her "decouppage" cutting out, and I went for a walk down by the lakeside.
To my delight there were Peacock butterflies flitting about, and with difficulty I managed to get a decent shot of one, which I have posted on Ephotozine as my entry for today, and it gained 11 votes.

Despte the fact that the sky was a little devoid of detail and there was a mist, I did take several shot of the scenery of course, who wouldn't?
Ennerdale is definitely a "must see" for anyone with an interest in good landscape views, and of course for the more vigorous there is a circular walk right round the lake.

When we got back to the van we ate the sandwiches we had packed up intending to have for lunch before we spotted the fish and chip cafe: then as the sun had come out I nipped out in the car to take my favourite view down onto the house on the promontory: for once the lighting was right!

Sunday 20th April 2008 Sizergh Castle

Since we expected Sunday to be rather busy, and the weather rather cloudy, with a promise of showers, we decided to visit Sizergh Castle (just below Kendal) today, and we really enjoyed it: there was much more to see in the garden than expected and we were both happily snapping away at the flowers, some of which were quite exotic.
These yellow lilies were a kind we hadn't seen before.

And I've no idea what this is!

I don't recognise this either but it's coming out for sure!
Lunch in the cafe was Pork Patty casserole with assorted vegetables and brown seeded rolls and butter and a pot of tea, followed by a tour of the historic interior of the house (which is really a fortified house rather than a true castle.)
There are two walks (one of 2km and one of 3kms in the grounds, but we passed on these!
I have come up with a "holster" to hold my camera handy when travelling in the car,


It came on useful on the journey back when I popped out to take a quick landscape shot.
After the usual sleepy afternoon and tea I went for a short walk in the direction of Grange, looping back along the lake footpath.

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!