A cheesy website

You might recogise the concept of “watching paint dry.”

That is an Xtreem sports activity, in comparison to watching cheese mature. Online. For 9 months. According to the BBC website:

Over the last nine months, more than one and half million people have viewed the site to watch a round of Cheddar cheese as it slowly matures

The nail-biting wait is now nearly over. Phew.

On Wednesday, the 44-pound handmade cheese, named Wedginald by its creators, will undergo its nine-month grading test, live on web TV.

(Wedginald? Hmm.)

Frosty Stonehenge

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.

Frosty Stonehenge - Image retouched in Photoshop CS3

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]

Silbury Hill to get stuffed

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.

Continue reading

Sunny Easter

Thanks to the wonders of Global Warming, the rainy, miserable (obviously offset by Chocolate) Easter weekends of my childhood really are a thing of the past. On Saturday I went out to Stourhead (National Trust property) and the weather was fantastic. Just so you don’t think I am lying, here are some photos:

Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 1Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 2Stourhead - 7 Apr 07 - Pic 3

As you can see the weather was brilliant. Shame about the polar bears though.

On a more serious note, it amazes me that anyone can deny climate change. Just goes to show how much people can cling to a belief… One of the other reasons to make this post was to try out a geocode plugin I have recently installed. Let me know what you think.

Stonehenge and Photoshop

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:

Stonehenge in the Winter Photograph with Poster Effect Stones in shadows Stones in shadows - greyscale Stones in shadows - greyscale with added sepia overtone and blue overtone on sky.

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]

Pink Flower

StourheadFlower

StourheadFlower,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

Today, I added a new plugin to the blog which is designed to change the way Flickr posts are blogged.

In the past, as soon as I pressed on “post entry” the post was available on the blog, and I had to quickly do any editing required – things like adding tags / categories or tidying up the oddness of Flickr.

Hopefully, the installation of The Flickr Blog This to Draft plugin will change things and now I can make sure it is exactly as I want it before it publishes. If you can see this with Technorati Tags (and in the Photos category) then it worked.

Normal Anti-Religion service will resume soon!

Wonders of Photoshop

Statue of Neptune at StourheadFrom the wonders of Photoshop is this slightly enhanced statue at Stourhead. Basically all I have done is a box blur on the background, a slight enhancement of the white levels of the statue and increased saturation and contrast.

Personally, I think it looks quite nice and I look forward to the day when the crazy monotheistic religions are overhauled and we all get back to worshipping the likes of Neptune (or Poseidon if you are feeling particularly classical today).

We should get back to a time when Gods were proper Gods, not the wet blankets we have today. More thunderstorms! Anyway, all joking aside, I would have liked to have shown the original for comparison but in a fit of foolishness, I saved the changed file JPG over the original. Doh.

More on the Weather

Old Sarum 1 - 25 Nov 06 - ThumbnailA while ago I posted about how “uncommonly warm” the weather was for February. This got me thinking about the recent weather in general, and it seems fairly safe for me to say that despite the one or two days where it was cold enough to snow it has been very warm this winter.

As some more examples, this is a picture taken at Old Sarum on 25 Nov 06. Although you cant see how warm it is, trust me it was warm – and English Heritage sites such as this are not known for their nice climate…

Normally, when you visit an English Heritage site which dates back to the iron age it is like taking a holiday in a fridge. Only windier and colder.

Old Sarum Picture 2 - ThumbnailThis year, it has been very different. The weather has been nice all winter, the skys have been clear and while there has been a fair bit of rain, it has not been anything major. The sun, on the other hand, has been brilliant.

Now I am not going to make the same mistake as last time, so I wont joke about the “joy” of Global Warming, but having such a nice, warm winter has been…. fun…