Why Dont You Blog?

One of the impressive fortresses dotting North Wales:

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.

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.

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]

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]

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.

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

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.

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?

As always, feedback welcome.

Today’s news papers (for example the Guardian) have been talking about the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which says that, for those really slow on the uptake, climate change is influenced by human behaviour. How this is news is beyond me, but there are some unreported aspects which I thought people should be aware of.

Today is 3 Feb 07. It is winter. February is traditionally the coldest, snowiest, month of the year in the UK. When I was younger, there would be so much snow schools would close. Dont even get me started on the rain.

However, this is today (Photos taken at Old Sarum, an English Heritage Site in Wiltshire):

Today it was clear, very sunny and really warm. No wind. Not a cloud in the (perfect blue) sky. Fantastic. On Flickr there are a few more pictures which are worth checking out:

(before anyone gets all hyper, the title was a joke – it is not trying to imply there are any “good things” about Global Warming. If you were offended – get over yourself.)

As previously mentioned (albeit obliquely) Technorati is still acting strange. For example, the tag Castles apparently has no blog posts stored in Technorati but there has been at least 2 posts a day for the last thirty days. Does this make sense to anyone? If you don’t believe me (or things are working now) there is a screenshot available. Also, I know it isn’t a fair comparison but Google found over 100,000 hits (it wasn’t a search for “tags” though).

Technorati Tags: castles, Technology

I am still playing with Windows Live Writer and, as I have now installed the Flickr plug in, I thought I would put it to some good use. So a quick search on Flickr produced this image of Corfe Castle. Overall it looks pretty good, the search facilities are brilliant but there seems to be no easy way of showing attribution of the images, which may be a problem down the line.

How do other people solve this? Do they skip the attributions?

I have been playing around with some images, trying to generate good effects. I am still not convinced this is “lomo” but it does produce some stunning pictures and can be done in Fireworks, Gimp or Photoshop pretty easily:

Well, as I said before, I actually quite like this effect. I am happy to listen to what others think or if you have done something similar please let me know.

This is a one-liner to let our readers know we have added a few more categories.

Old Wardour – Watercolour,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

(Loathe though I am to divert from the SEO experiments…)

This is one of the old wardour photographs I took a few days ago (The original is online as well). It has been put through photo shop and given a water colour filter.

Generally speaking, in the past I never rated the photoshop filters. When you work on small, or self made, images the filters are pretty pointless.

However, given a large photo like this – with lots of data in the first place – the filters work fantastically.

Almost looks real

Tynemouth Priory and Castle,
originally uploaded by me.

I promise this is the last photo of the day

This is a picture of the grave yard to the read of the priory at “Tynemouth Castle.” (An English Heritage site at the mouth of the river Tyne, oddly enough )

Most, if not all the graves with readable details on date to the 17th or 18th centuries – some from the early 19th but not many. Despite this, apparently King (later Saint) Oswin of Deira and King Osred II of Northumbria are supposed to be buried here. All I can say is I never found their gravestones.

Apparently the priory / monastry did well until the disolution under Henry VIII. During his reign, the Monks here surrendered the site to the king, and he apparently decided it was more suitable for a costal defence fort – and the castle was built.

It is a strange site – it has lots of early medieval parts (the priory for example), is ringed with a sixteenth century artillery fortress, has WW1 and WW2 gun emplacements and, best of all, a 1960’s tower building (looks like an Air Traffic Control tower) which now appears to be home of the CCTV monitoring site. All very amusing.

Warwick Castle 01,
originally uploaded by jj_mac.

An excellent photo catching Warwick Castle from an amazing angle. In this picture you can clearly see the well designed, and well laid out, gardens that surround the castle.

The distance in the photo is implied by the fact the castle (which is reasonably large) looks like a toy model!