Rhuddlan Castle

One of the impressive fortresses dotting North Wales:

Rhuddlan Castle

This castle is owned by Cadw but seems to have few visitors, which is a shame as it is fascinating. The diversion of the river and building of a tidal moat are interesting enough in themselves, but the structure of the castle is remarkably intact.

Photoshopping Bodium Castle

It seems that I cant help but stay up late at night seeing what can (and can’t) be done with photoshop. If you are reading this on Planet Atheism looking for Atheist / free thinking content – sorry nothing to see here. I will keep this short and sweet though.

For those who still resit the wonders of photoshop, this is an example of what it can do to an other wise dreary picture taken in poor weather. The source photo was, it must be said, pretty uninspiring. However after a total of 14 minutes in photo shop (most of that was waiting for the disk thrashings to stop, the source image was massive so the file was about 90mb) it now looks a lot more dramatic and is something people would actually want to look at.

Original Picture - Bodium Castle, 5 May 07 Photoshopped Picture - Bodium Castle 05 May 07

Yes, the effects are a bit over the top, I did get carried away with myself, and the low quality used to resize them into something you can download and view has impacted it a bit, but I am sure you get the gist of the point I am trying to make.

Digital photo editing rocks.

[tags]adobe, digital-photographs, digital-camera, digital-culture, Castles, Bodium, National Trust, Sussex, pictures, photoshop, photos, photography, photographs, photo-software, photo-effects, technology[/tags]

I need a holiday

Disney Castle at Night

Disney Castle at Night,
originally uploaded by WarAxe.

I look at pictures like this (found on flickr) and it just reminds me how much I need to get away on holiday. The picture is gorgeous and pretty much captures all the Magic Kingdom castle in all it’s glory. If you have never been it is well worth a visit. Seriously. If you have kids, all the better — at least then you get less strange looks…

It has been over two years since I had an overseas holiday, and all I have had in that time is five day breaks to various parts of the UK! At least the breaks have let me take loads of photos of various castles and the like, but I am sure you can agree, it really is not the same.

I am toying with going to Florida for my holidays around the end of September / start of October. Does any one have any local knowledge which could be useful?

Would it be better for me to arrange things like car hire in the UK before I go (and go flights only) or are Fly-Drives discounted enough to make that worth while?

[tags]Disney, Holiday, Vacation, Castles, Florida, Photos, Photographs, Flickr, Disneyworld, Walt Disney, Magic Kingdom, Fly-Drive[/tags]

Miracle of Photoshop

As mentioned previously, I have taken a few photos of Bodiam Castle (National Trust site in Sussex) and have been pushing them through Photoshop.

The wonders of Photoshop filters can never, ever, be overstated. Here you can see the results of a ten second experiment with a single picture. The first image is the basic image which was then passed through the mosaic filter, the texturizer and desaturated. All of these produce some interesting effects which radically change the impact of the original photograph.

Bodiam Castle - Initial Photograph Bodiam Castle - First Effect - Mosiac Bodiam Castle - Second Effect - Texturiser Bodiam Castle - Third Effect - Desaturate

All this strikes me as pretty impressive for what took up about 5 minutes of my life. In fact, it took longer to write this post about the effects (and upload the images) than it did to create them. I really do like photoshop 🙂

Fairytale Castle

Well, despite the massively predictable bank holiday weekend weather here in the UK, a visit to Bodiam Castle was well worth it.

Bodiam castle is a National Trust property located in Sussex (not far from Hastings). It was built in the late 13th century as a “fortified home” for an English adventurer returning from France. It could well be argued that it isn’t really a castle, as it was more of a “manor house” with a moat and crenelations… This picture shows the front entrance of the castle – if there is interest / time, I will upload more pictures in the future.

Bodiam Castle - Front Entrance - 07 May 07

One other odd thing, was a strange looking duck. Being a City Dweller, I am not really up to speed on what water fowl look like, so this one caught my eye. Can anyone confirm what it is please?

Strange (to me) looking water fowl at Bodiam Castle

As always, feedback welcome.