I’m in the valley of the Vézère river, just north of the Dordogne. It’s been raining almost all day, but the moisture really adds vibrance to the splendid colours of the trees.
Fangorn
We met some local residents…
No, really! I’m very ferocious too!
Then we had a final brief pause in the rain, just in time for a dog-walk just before sunset.
We went to Lincolnshire last weekend. When I told some friends of our plans beforehand, they said, “Lincolnshire? Really? For a whole weekend?”, or words to that effect. And I must confess to being somewhat apprehensive myself, though we had visited Lincoln itself before and knew that to be a lovely city.
But there’s lots of good stuff in Lincolnshire.
They have some very impressive churches, for one thing. In addition to Lincoln Cathedral (above), we visited Boston, from where some people once set sail to found a colony in Massachusetts.
Boston’s name comes from “Botolph’s Town”, and the church of St Botolph is almost a cathedral itself.
It’s been informally known as the ‘Boston Stump‘ for the last, oh, seven hundred years or so, a name which hardly conveys the fact that it’s really awfully tall. We can assert this, having climbed it, via a very narrow staircase. They let us in at the bottom and shut the door behind us; the only way was up…
Emerging at the top, you can walk around the rather narrow walkway with a lowish handrail, before descending via a second similar staircase.
A fun and very memorable experience, but definitely not recommended for those suffering from corpulence, claustrophobia, or vertigo!
Lincoln itself is built on quite a steep hill, but much of the county is very flat, so Lincolnshire’s drainage ditches are almost as impressive as its churches.
There are lots of marvellous windmills, used both for pumping and for corn-grinding.
And here’s another cool thing you don’t find in every county: a bubble-car museum!
We visited a lovely beach at Huttoft, as the sun was setting.
Tilly did feel, however, that they had rather too many seagulls, so did her best to rectify that problem.
We stayed at “Long Acres“, a delightful and well-run campsite which suffers only from not being very close to most of the major attractions. As a result it’s very peaceful, especially at this time of the year. And if you enjoy looking at bubble-cars as much as we do, they at least are not far away!
I haven’t talked about the quaint teashop we visited in the pretty village of Tealby, or The Usher Gallery in Lincoln, or the Sibsey Trader Windill… But all in all, we had a very enjoyable weekend in our trusty campervan.
Isn’t sand wonderful stuff?
We went to Holkham Beach — a favourite spot — at the weekend.
All of these textures were within a few minutes’ walk of each other.
Oh, and Tilly likes it too.
There was a miraculous event at my brother Simon’s house in Winchester this week, as the new plaster in their sitting room started to dry…
I told him not to paint over it, and he could then retire in comfort, as long as he didn’t mind having a lot of visitors.
Actually, the miraculous event was that — being, he freely admits, somewhat unfamiliar with Photoshop or anything similar — he created this image in Powerpoint.
Anyway, I thought it was great.
Last night I was being a little bit creative with my recent photos… 🙂
Here’s a timely reminder, if one were needed, that you should never assume anything you store online is going to be there for very long, unless it’s on a system (a) that you are paying for and ideally (b) that you run or manage.
Flickr has announced that it’s going to start removing photos from its free accounts: everyone can still have 1,000 images, but that’s much less storage than they offered for free in the past. If you have more than that, they’ll start deleting the older ones first. I starting uploading things to Flickr about 13 or 14 years ago, so 90% of my 10,000 Flickr images will vanish over the next few months.
Most of the Snapchat/Instagram generation are probably not interested in anything that happened more than 1000 images ago! But people who have used Flickr for archiving the first pictures of their children or grandchildren may be in for a surprise. The name ‘Flickr’ might have a certain irony to it…
Now, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for the company to do, and there are several ways you can deal with it: you can start paying for your account, you can download your images if you don’t have local copies, or you can migrate them over to Smugmug (who now own Flickr). But only the first of those options will keep your photos nicely arranged in their albums, and, more importantly, will preserve your image URLs, so I imagine there will be a very large number of pages around the world with Flickr-shaped holes in them where an image used to be. Whichever option you choose, do it before the end of the year.
Now, I’ve been a fan of Flickr for a long time, and paid for an account for about a decade — it’s a good service and reasonably priced — but I switched to Smugmug a few years back because it was a better fit for my occasional bits of professional work. I don’t mind paying for one photo storage service, but I’d rather not pay for two, especially from the same company! So my photo archive has been copied to SmugMug, and I’ll probably need to write a bit of code to go through my blog and fix Flickr URLs. The album arrangements, though, will vanish if I take this approach.
Anyway, the moral of the story is this: You need to look after your own data. Don’t assume that anyone else will do it for you, on a long-term basis, and especially if you’re not paying for the service! In particular, don’t assume that any URL is going to continue to work in the future unless it’s on a domain that you control and manage.
And lastly…
Remember that this will almost certainly also happen at some point to the pages you have on Facebook, the images you have on Instagram and the videos you have on YouTube. Don’t assume that a service will continue indefinitely because the company is large or because it has a model based on advertising revenue. I had stuff on Google Video too…
Update: Thanks to John for pointing me at Thomas Hawk’s post explaining that Flickr’s action is a good thing; yes, I agree overall!
“The Ferry has Departed” — Craignish, Scotland, in July
At the Drop Redoubt fortifications on Dover Western Heights
On Saturday, our research group had an outing to Haddenham Steam Rally, which turned out to be a wonderful gathering of a huge range of old equipment, most of it steam-powered, from tractors to cars to pipe organs to merry-go-rounds to fire-engine pumps. It was, of course, a wonderful photo opportunity.
Amongst the mighty machines, there were also many scale models, fully functional, and (to my eyes) just as beautiful.
Some of them, I felt, must be feeling under some… ahem… pressure… to perform, under the watchful gaze of their larger colleagues.
The amount of care that had gone into building and maintaining these was extraordinary.
It’s only natural that some of them were closely guarded.
As we walked around the fairground and numerous exhibits, some of these would come puffing by, large or small, at such a pleasingly low speed that one could talk to the drivers and passengers quite easily. And always, everywhere, was the relaxed, almost hypnotic sound of slow, rhythmic puffing.
When they all got together, it was a wonderful sight. I call this photo ‘Heated Discussion’:
Anyway, a surprisingly enjoyable day. I went along mostly because of the social nature of the trip, but I have a feeling it won’t be my last visit.
Three days after my previous one, a gloriously orangey moon, but now partly in shadow, so you get to see a few more contours.
I don’t really have the proper equipment for this; this is a crop from a photo taken with a 200mm zoom lens on my Fuji XT-2. But I’m still quite pleased with the result.
You can click on the image to see a slightly larger version, and go here for a map of where the lunar landings were.
I’ve never really looked this closely before, but it’s cool that I can at least identify the basic locations from my study window.
Buzz Aldrin’s footprint is about here:
Well, almost.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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