Cottingham Day in Good Weather

Today was that rarest of coincidences. We were in the country, the weather was great, and it was “Cottingham Day” in the village. They had all kinds of stuff going on, including some vintage cars that were parked all around the village. This is a close up of one of them. I so wanted a car like this when I was a bit younger. A “non-price” to anyone who tells me what kind of car it is, and for bonus kudos, the car it was based on.

I took a whole bunch of other pictures which I’m sure will appear on these pages over time. It was a great day

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

We’ve been to Thwaite Gardens Open Day a few years in a row. We had the best weather a couple of years ago, last year was a bit iffy and we weren’t too hopeful about this year. But in the end it was nice and bright, and the sun even made a guest appearance.  The Friends of Thwaite Gardens spend all year making the place look lovely and then we come along, take photographs and have tea and scones.

Thwaite Student Hall. If you live here you get all this loveliness thrown in.

You wouldn’t believe this was right in the middle of suburbia.

Some plant or other (gardening was never my strong point).

We bought some plants for our garden, and we’ll be back next year. If you live in the area you really should go along.

Lensbaby Bendy Lens

The LensBaby composer is a lens mounted on a ball and socket arrangement which you can twist to change the way that it focuses the light onto the camera sensor.

I bought one a while back and every now and then I get it out and have a play. It is quite fun. Very old school, in that it is basically a single lens in a sliding tube. There is no auto focus and you adjust the aperture (the size of the hole the light comes through) by dropping in and out little metal masks that are held in place with magnets. A bit fiddly to use, but the lens itself is pretty darned sharp, and you can get results that would be very difficult to get any other way.

If you have a digital SLR and you fancy spending some time doing things the hard way, and never being quite sure how the pictures will come out, they are kind of fun.

Spring is starting to spring

After a lot of trying, and frosts all over the place at the wrong time, we are finally starting to see signs of spring. The daffodils have actually been flowering.

Which is rather nice.

Fun with HDR Photography

I’m getting quite into this HDR photography lark. It doesn’t always result in photographs which are lifelike, see above, but I quite like the effect and anyway, it’s my blog…

This picture was produced by the Photomatix program which you can get from HDRsoft for less than the price of a video game. The only real pain is having to take three copies of each photograph, an underexposed one and an overexposed one which are then combined with the software. If you are into photography and you haven’t had a go at it, then I’d recommend that you give it a whirl. It transforms quite dull scenes into much more interesting ones.

Whitby Again

..and so to Whitby. Love the place. And the Fish Pie served at the Magpie Cafe. Actually I like the cafe as much for its technology and business approach as its food. They have large screens showing you what fish is available on the day. All the attentive and hard working waitresses enter your order into a PDA (and have done for quite a while now). The cafe is on Twitter, and they are continuously updating what they do. In these respects they are very like Fudge in Hull, working to improve and extend that their reach while still remaining very good at their core business, serving really good food.

We were blessed with some of the best weather I’ve seen for, well, months, and so I took some more pictures of the place.

We didn’t take a trip on the boat, but these folks seemed to enjoy it.

Last time we came the sea was so bad that we weren’t allowed this far out on the pier.

Hull Pictures

One of the great things about going up town first thing in the morning to review the papers for Radio Humberside is that you can get some great pictures.

Just to the right of the centre of the frame you can see the BBC offices.

Hull centre Looking good.

Hull University on a Lumia 920

Take a look at the original sized image on Flickr. And then reflect that I took this with a phone camera.

Snow Show

Say what you like about the snowy weather, it does make for some nice photo opportunities. Although it also means I’m presently wearing two pairs of socks, two jumpers and a bright red nose.

You get what you pay for

Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.

I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.

If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.

Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.

Christmas Wrapping

I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?

I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.

I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:

“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.

Face Lens for Windows Phone

I’ve been playing with some of the Lens programs that you can get for Windows Phone 8. These application sit on the front of the camera application (a bit like a lens does I suppose) and do things with the image. The Face Lens program puts things onto the faces that it sees. The application is free, but you can buy extra bits and bobs to add to images. Above you can see what it does to the face of a well known local newsreader. Quite fun.

Cottingham Lights

Cottingham has really good Christmas Lights. So tonight I took the big camera out for a walk and tried to capture them. Next time I’ll take the tripod too.

This is the middle of the village

And this is Santa.

Hall Road Roundabout Rainbow

Not a bad rainbow. Well worth stopping the car and jumping out with the camera.

Isle of Man Pictures

Not much to say today, but we did get some nice pictures