Penrhyn Castle is a country house in Llandegai, Bangor, Gwynedd, North Wales, in the form of a Norman castle.

I have added North Wales images to the gallery, thank you for your visit, enjoy.

           19th-century fantasy castle with spectacular surroundings

Ok, maybe not Italy, but Portmeirion in North Wales. It was designed and built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1975 in the style of an Italian village and is now owned by a charitable trust. Portmeirion has served as the location for numerous films and television shows, most famously serving as The Village in the 1960s television show The Prisoner. Just got back from a few days in North Wales, trying out a new camera and lens.

My camera gear is normally the first thing I pack for any trip and all was by the door ready to go. But some how my tripod got left behind. This has never happened to me before, I was just glad that no one was on the beach at sunset, as I tried to rest my new camera on a three legged stool and bean bag, inches off the ground, while the tide was coming in. My family is always telling me that I'm ready for the home.

What a week I've had, first Flickr changes everything I liked about it overnight with a relaunch. Then while my caravan is in for servicing I was told it needed a new charger that would cost me a body part, (arm and a leg to repair). Then my car's rear hub bearing started bending my ear. It wasn't all bad news,  my new Canon 6D is up and running with two new lens 17-40mm and 24-105mm. Finally my EF-s 15-85mm is back from repair and as good as new. It has taken a while as they had to order a part, more than likely the part I broke trying to do it myself.

Flickr: maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and all this will just seem like a bad dream

I used to be proud to say I was on Flickr, I made lots of new friends through Flickr locally and worldwide, other members asked me for advise and it's been freely given, we were a community with one shared passion. I have to admit some of the images look better, but a picture without words is like a toilet without paper.  I used to look at the thumbnails and be able to say who had taken that photo, now there just pushed into my face without a soul to them.  The old Flickr had the easiest and most simplistic layout of any website I know of. It was intuitive and easy to use.  I appreciate the effort to make Flickr better,  as it had areas that could use improvement. What got lost, I'm afraid, is that Flickr is a community - not just a website.  Their argument is that paying customers are not worth as much as ad-viewing free service users,  so therefore we don't need to care about the former and will redesign to suit the latter.


I reckon this Flickr  relaunch will be taught in university and college, on how not  to launch a new website redesign.  Just as it is taught now on how Facebook managed to become such a success. Way too many changes all at once, no notice to existing members that the changes were happening and simply ignoring users when en mass they voice their disapproval for the changes. The lack of communication on the behalf of Flickr is a nightmare - the longer you leave it before saying something to pro users, the worse this will get. The silence is deafening, communication is the key,  the people who have helped build Flickr (and paid for it) deserve better. 
Ignore the storm  at your peril, Flickr.

I have moved all my Flickr images to ipernity.

I hope you won't mind if I just share a few quotes that have passed my way:-

"The photos are indeed the focus of the redesign – to the detriment of the entire site. It is now bloatware – so many images,  so crowded together that no one image can been seen and appreciated. There is not a museum out there that tries to fit their entire collection crammed onto one wall… whitespace matters. Images need to breath.
And by cramming all the images “in your face”, the descriptive stories, critques and comments, links, geomapping, camera EXIF data – all the rich content that made you want to learn more and explore more is now completely hidden. The “social” has been completely removed, the richness buried."

"CEO Marissa Mayer has publicaly said that there are no professional photographers any more… that everyone just shoots and posts from their iPhone. That’s true enough for the 12 photos she’s managed to post in her Flickr stream, but not true for the long standing, serious camera users who carefully tagged and geo-located and enriched their EXIF data to share their learning with others."

"It’s launch day and we had no choice and cannot voice our own opinions. Mean Marissa made us change Flickr."

"The overall impression is of someone having vandalism or hacked the site to cause maximum disruption."

Stormy sky in Cambridgeshire

Just got back from a few days visiting family and exploring Cambridgeshire with my camera.
The above image was taken while driving from Peterborough to Crowland the other evening.
Whenever I see these kind of storm clouds I'm on the motorway with nowhere to pull over and take a picture. But for once I managed to find a lay-by and grab this image. The light was changing rapidly and so had no time to setup a tripod and only managed a hand full of images before the sun rays had all but gone.  I have added this image to the pano gallery and over the next few days I'll be uploading some more images on Flickr.

While in Cambridgeshire I sent many hours watching herons fishing, so much so that I began to feel like a wild life photographer watching all the different characters coming to the water to feed. I stopped short of giving them names like on the BBC. But it was wonderful to watch them in action.