Why Dont You Blog?

I’ve decided to confuse the hell out of the Google search process by posting the top search terms that have been bringing people here recently. This should bring even more people here for no apparent reason.

Schwarzenegger saw some nice houses when he passed  Bodiam Castle on his way to Stonehenge. He was wearing the blacklisted  chip 666, taking medicine and watching Charlie Brooker on the Wire.

See we believe in giving the public what they want.   We aim to please.

(Hint to people that came here before as a result of one of these searches. There are indeed posts with these words in.  Use our own search engine to find them….)

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Thanks to a generous employer, I am now the proud owner of Adobe Creative Studio CS 3. If I am honest, the photoshop bit is not a massive improvement over the previous two CS versions so if you have Photoshop CS or CS2 I dont think it is worth paying for the upgrade. That said, it does have some “workflow” improvements and, as a result, I was able to churn this image of Stonehenge in the winter out in a few minutes.

Personally, I like it. The source image was quite poor and badly exposed. This is a lot, lot better (But then I am biased!).

[tags]Photos, Pictures, Photoshop, Stonehenge, Wiltshire, Landscapes, Digital Photography, Photo Editing, Photo Effects, Photo Software, Raves, Technology[/tags]

Popularity: 43% [?]

Popularity: 43% [?]

It has been a while since I posted some photos here for you to, err, enjoy so it is about time the blog got livened up a little. I am planning to run off quite a few photos into real world prints using Snapfish (which is, by the way, excellent), but some of the source photos felt like they could do with the Photoshop Goodness.

I am aware of how often I say this, but it never ceases to amaze me that ten minutes spent in Photoshop can turn average pictures into wonderful creations. Now, I am not arrogant enough to say these examples are wonderful (although I think they are…) but they are certainly more eye catching than the originals.

As with most of my pictures they are taken from either National Trust or English Heritage sites. These have been resized in Advance Batch Converter, which sadly reduces the quality a little. On the off chance you would like a larger original (up to around 2760×1840px) then let me know - they are free . As you can see, I have a tendency to get enamoured with “Lomo-Style” effects - mainly on the pictures of Stonehenge and Lulworth Cove.

Although some people may feel that “retouching” the photo after it has been taken is cheating, I disagree, it is all part of the digital imaging process (IMHO of course). Seriously, although I have neither shares in Adobe, nor do I get advertising kickbacks from them, I honestly think anyone who has a digital camera really should get some form of image processing software and learn to use it. The great thing about photoshop is that even after two years, I am still finding new (and sometimes interesting) things you can do to spruce up a picture.

[tags]Pictures, photos, landscapes, Dorset, Lulworth Cove, Stonehenge, English Heritage, National Trust, Photographs, Photoshop, Photography, Photo Software, Photo Editing, Digital Camera, Digital Photography, Lomo, Photo Effects, Lomography[/tags]

Popularity: 48% [?]

Popularity: 48% [?]

“People urged to vote for Stonehenge” says the BBC. Vote for Stonehenge? I didn’t know there was another election but maybe an ancient monument could make a better job of running the country than the current political parties, so I’m game.

In fact, this instruction is to do with English Heritage wanting us to vote for Stonehenge, currently languishing well below the bottom of the candidates list, as a new 7th Wonder of the World.

Unusual use of the word “new” there. Surely Stonehenge is older than most of the original 7 wonders, let alone the “new” ones.

The 7 Wonders of the World has a horrible shouty website (though this may be a case of the “pot calling the kettle black” after some of my attempts at creating sites in the past few days, although I had teh grace to bin most of them.) It has so much movement that it makes you feel vaguely nauseous. Which is neither here nor there, except it doesn’t inspire much confidence in the taste of the judges.

To get back to the point, despite being a slavish devotee of megalithic monuments and a lover of Stonehenge, I can’t see that Stonehenge counts as much of a “World Wonder.” Avebury is much more impressive for a start.

Visiting Stonehenge can be a deeply dispiriting experience. The car park, the gift shops, the shuffling walk round in a circle - making you feel you are either an extra in a remake of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or in a WWII queue for dried egg to which everyone else has unaccountably brought a digital camera. And is not afraid to use it.

Not to mention English Heritage’s new plans, which appear to be an excuse for destroying the landscape even more, in order to create even more of an ersatz “Heritage” experience. Will a vote for Stonehenge just encourage them?

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

This blog (as a collective being) loves megalithic structures and sites.

So, it was interesting to read on clioaudio’s excellent blog and in an English Heritage press release that Silbury Hill is being excavated.

Ironically,the half-arsed attempts to nose around in Silbury Hill were what is putting it at risk, after about 4000 years of being pretty solid. It’s a pyramid shaped man-made hill so it was inherently steady.

It was dug into by the Duke of Northumberland, in 1777, and by a Professor Atkinson, in the 1960s. The shafts they dug have made the monument unstable. Hence English Heritage is going in to shore it up with concrete. Hmm.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Popularity: 32% [?]

It has been a while since I posted some quick edit photographs here, so I will try to make amends. These are two photographs of Stonehenge (World Heritage site in Wiltshire) I took in December when the ground was frosty and the visitors were thin on the ground. I have pushed them through a variety of Photoshop filters to create the additional effects:

On an additional note, in addition to massive visitor numbers, Stonehenge is often inundated by “druids” and new-age hippies in the summer, come the cold weather and they are noticeable by their absence. For some reason the idea that Stonehenge is a “summer” monument.

I can understand, say, 50 years ago, people thinking this but surely almost all modern studies point to any religious significance of this site being focused on the midwinter solstice?

I should point out, there are die-hards who turn up for the midwinter solstice - even if they don’t know what the correct date is - but no where near the scale of the midsummer one.

Maybe modern people just cant take the cold as well….

[tags]Stonehenge, Photographs, Pictures, Images, Photoshop, Image Effects, Black White, Sepia, Megaliths, English Heritage, National Trust, Wiltshire, Druids, Solstice, Midwinter, Midsummer, World Heritage Site, Religion, Stone Age, Cults, Culture, Society[/tags]

Popularity: 60% [?]

Popularity: 60% [?]

To try and change the subject away from Religious crackpots for a little while, I thought I would upload some photos! Here are a selection from Stonehenge and Stourhead. As you can see these are quite old photos which have been scanned in.

Ok, in reality, they have been run through Adobe Lightroom which is actually a wonderful bit of software. I downloaded the beta version quite some time ago but never really made any use of it. Today I had a reminder it was going to expire on 28 Feb so I thought I would try it out.

It is not a photo / picture editing package along the lines of Photoshop but it is excellent for photo management and applying quick preset filters to pictures. This one is called “Antique Grayscale” and seems to be a mix of normal greyscale and sepia tones. I quite like the effect

Where Lightroom really excells is in creating Web Sites for photo galleries. It is amazing how easily this will take a collection of picures and turn them into a functional, usable (valid XHTML!) website. There is only limited control (in the beta version) over the exact style but the look and feel is good enough that most people wont mind. If you are a graphic artist or photographer, and want a quick and easy website, this package really is the best I have seen. Before my trial version runs out, I fully intend to upload some sample sites so you can see the output. At the moment I did two quick sites (one flash gallery and one html gallery) which are now online. Remember, you need ActiveX and flash player to view the flash site in IE.

As a rule of thumb, a site with 28 pictures takes about 30 seconds to select the pictures, a few mins to type in some basic details and then another 30 seconds to build the site. It really is that quick. The longest part is uploading the images!

This is pretty much software that anyone who can actually copy a image to their computer, can use to create photo galleries in seconds.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Popularity: 40% [?]

A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings - our own not very remote ancestors - who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Popularity: 33% [?]

I am usually silent about the failings of technorati & blogger etc, which is mainly because my knowledge of these things is barely more than minimal.

However, I thought I’d put my own whine in now. I was reading back through the posts on technorati, etc (I can’t keep blaming technorati - it’s pretty fair, compared to g**gle) I saw one blog that had been tagged Stonehenge on del.icio.us and I followed that tag. Not only did this post not appear on the tag page, the ones shown on the page included a post from 2003. Do these pages get updated on an annual basis?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Popularity: 14% [?]

Despite my complaints about Technorati recently and MS generally, this is really interesting Blog software. It actually does make it easy to include a variety of things - for example, I am going to search Flickr for some pictures of Stonehenge and so that people can be aware of the place, I have put in an overhead shot from MS Virtual Earth. (Below).

In addition to the overhead shot, in case people don’t know how to get to Stonehenge, I can also add a map

This is pretty cool as you can see - the map works, although confusingly the pushpin is centred on the object, not pointing to it. Instinct would say the bottom of the pin is where the place should be, but this is only the case if you massively zoom in.

As would be expected from a Microsoft package there are some glitches with layout and rendering (especially if you try to use complex CSS in your blog) but for about 90% of the blogs I have read Live Writer is perfect.

I will continue to see what else it does and try and identify where it will go wrong…

del.icio.us tags: Stonehenge, Megaliths, Microsoft, Live Writer, Virtual Earth

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]