16 posts tagged “photo”
The other weekend I went to a big spring fair at Highnam House just west of Gloucester in aid of Gloucester Cathedral and a charity called Pied Piper. Pied Piper support all sorts of projects but have just visited my wife's special school and presented them with two minibuses. There were lots of things going on - morris dancing, brass bands, flower stalls, facer painting - all sorts. And of course you could go round the extensive grounds which have lots of flowers, lakes and especially lots of wooden sculpture. I really liked a group of yew trees which had died but instead of chopping them down they had been carved into beautiful sculptures where all the variegation of the wood comes out. There was also an exhibition of vintage cars along with a few cars like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future". I took a few photos of the cars, trying to get something slightly more interesting than the usual shot. In the middle of taking these shots I noticed my reflection was in a lot of the shots, so I decided to deliberately take one where I made sure I was actually looking at the camera. So I took the shot above with the camera held at waist height. Hope you like it!
The website is coded by hand in html and css, but the galleries themselves are created using a Mac program called Galerie, fed from iPhoto and uploaded using an Ftp program called CyberDuck. I have been using a MacPro since last September and have found it gives me a much more efficient and much faster workflow than I had previously on a PC where I used Photoshop Elements, PicSizer, Picasso and Filezilla. I do have PhotoShop CS3 on the Mac but mostly I can do everything I need to do using iPhoto - straighten, crop, adjust exposure, contrast and colour - and even remove offending items like car number plates. And of course, delete all the unsuitable images. Our parents sign agreements for us to take and use photos but I do try to be careful that photos are appropriate, and we don't identify any of the youngsters.
Parents and students alike seem very appreciative of the galleries and they are extremely popular with an average of 3000 page views a day and 250 unique visitors a day. There can be 4000 hits an hour and a gigabyte a day download - not bad for a school of some 450 students. By the way, my hosting company is Siteground who give me 750Gb storage and 7500Gb bandwidth for £3 a month roughly, so I've got plenty of room left. I actually have four websites with them, one for online learning using Moodle with nearly 150 courses; this one for photos and videos, one for backup and testing of Moodle, and a fourth one we use for Drupal (for the school theatre), Wordpress (for a student blog/cms) and Gallery (for a new version of the photo gallery).
In my last three posts I have covered photos I've taken which relate to trains, people and flowers. But under the heading people I excluded all my beach and surfing photos since I have so many - mainly taken last summer during a visit to my son in San Diego, California. So now's my chance to share some beach and surf photos. I hope you enjoy them.
The first few shots are surfing and skimming:
The three photos above are 92203 Black Prince at Cheltenham Racecourse station in Gloucestershire; 30777 on the Great Central Railway at Loughborough, and an engine under restoration at Loughborough, England.
Diesel railcars taken at St.Ives in Cornwall, England and at Mayrhofen in the Zillertal, Austrian Tyrol. The next one is an electrically powered inter-city train at Jenbach in Austria.
The next two were taken on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway in England and feature 92203 Black Prince and a prairie tank 5542.
This one was taken in the Zillertal, near Mayrhofen in the Austrian Tyrol. Most of the trains were diesel but a few trains a day were steam hauled old-fashioned passenger cars.
The engine above is 26043, a class 26 diesel I and others have been working on for the past six years, trying to restore it to full operational status. Last year I did a lot of work painting it (the picture shows it before painting!). The controls are being finished now, and it is being prepared for a topcoat of paint, ready for action in the summer, working on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway in England.
Last time I showed you some of my flower photos from my flickr account, so this time I thought I would show you some of the people.
My sister in law and her husband came to see us this evening, after coming back from Minehead tired of bad weather. They were caravanning and the weather has been a bit windy, wet and cold so they are on their way home to Nottingham. They are retired and spend a lot of time in their caravan going all over the country. Denise and Tad do a huge amount of walking so are fit and healthy, but too much bad weather can spoil things. Here's a photo of them.
Show us something you did, made, saw or bought this past weekend.
Last weekend the weather was odd as it often is in the UK. Saturday was glorious, so instead of going to the railway, my wife and I went on a long walk around Leckhampton Hill. This time we went further than ever before so the walk lasted about 2 hours or perhaps two and a half hours. It was a great de-stressing exercise and a good time to chat - quality communication time. Sunday was very cold and windy though sunny so we spent it in the conservatory which was lovely and warm - no quality communication with my wife, but time spent on the computer! Sounds a decent mix to me!!! Here's a couple more photos.
More detail can be seen here on the mini-itx site - and there are many more projects, definitely worth looking at down the right hand side of the web pages. Some absolutely brilliant designs - very imaginative.