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.
I will applogise for the last few posts here being a bit morose and screaming about the doom and gloom of our crazy world. To try and make things better (and to shamelessly get more hits on my flickr stream 🙂 ) I want you to have a look at these four castle pictures and let me know which one you think is the best – comments on flickr would be preferred but here will do 🙂
Thanks for your patience and the normal miserable service will resume tomorrow.
I have been looking through the website logs to see just what it is that drives people to this site and, while lacking in raw comedy value (unlike some), it has been interesting.
Running a combination of Firestats, Feedburner and Google Analytics it seems this blog is getting around 400 visits a day. From these around 80% are new (which shows just what a non-loyal readership we hold…) and of those around 70% come here from a search engine – nearly all from Google. For the numbers-fans, this translates to about 200 hits a day from Google searches. Given the insanely varied nature of topics here, you would be excused for thinking this was reflected in the search stats. Not so.
Of the top ten search terms used to come here, seven are image searches, and this accounts for about 90 of the incoming hits. Even stranger, of these over a third are all searching for images of Bodiam Castle.
Now, Bodiam Castle is a gorgeous, fourteenth century fairytale castle in East Sussex, run by the National Trust, so I can understand why people are interested in it. In fact, I understand this well enough to have uploaded another photo!
If you have come here searching for Bodiam Castle, I hope you like this, and you can even see more on Flickr. It has been a long time since I have been to Bodiam so please, forgive me for the photos being out of date now. If you have links to other pictures of this gorgeous castle, please let me know and I will be more than happy to link to them from here.
Back onto the search topic, there is the determination issue to consider now. Will my posting of a new Bodiam article increase the amount of hits I get for this? Are people massively disappointed when the Mighty Google sends them here rather than elsewhere? Why dont people use Yahoo to search for Bodiam?
The other common terms people use for an “images search” are:
Now, some make more sense than others, but I can only guess at the disappointment people must feel when their searches lead them here.For completeness, the most common search terms that bring people to this site are:
One last point, a bit of an oddity is a search term Feedburner has identified leading some poor unfortunate here: “blog: I cannot read, feel distracted” – I have no idea what this blog has to offer this poor person.
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.