A New Season Begins

7.00 am on the side of the hill over looking Diggle, in fact over looking several of the Saddleworth villages, the 2013-14 season began, or at least the first of the early morning pre-season meets did, which is more or less the same thing...

A bit damp to begin with, and breezy, but after a lot of rain the day and night before it seemed as if there was plenty of scent around.

 A bit of a "noisy" picture, but it was only just after 7 am and the sun hadn't really got up so the light was appalling, still, with a bit of fiddling about in "Lightroom" these are passable, at least I think they are....

 This hare happened to pass me by close enough to get a few shots off, given how poor the light was at the time I am quite pleased how these turned out....

And especially this one...

 The ladies keeping an eye on things...

 A distant whip..

Time for home........

A cracking start to the season, it has been a very long summer after all.....

(More on Facebook.)

Comments

I have only just been told that there is currently no way of leaving comments, in spite of my attempts to edit the whole thing. I can edit individual posts to allow them, but something I did two or three years ago in the template has changed the way that Blogger applies it to the new version of Blogger...great. () (>sarc off>) 

It seems that I have to re-enable "comments" for individual posts, rather than being able to do a global attack, historically on the whole thing.

It would matter of course if anyone actually read this, but hey, I'm a gardener, not a computer jock.

Want a hedge cutting?

Contact me.

Want a website designing?

Contact a web designer......

 

See??

Insert smiley face thing...........

Photobox (Again)

I am in the process of trying to update my Photobox album.

All constructive advice gratefully received!

That doesn't include "Delete x y & z, they're rubbish" unless they really are......!

September

As I say in the YT preamble, this is one of those songs that I have (hopefully) grown up with. In spite of the potential copyright issue I decided to clamp a load of clips together, of course it didn't take many seeing as how it's only a minute and a half long, and use them as a setting for the experience.

UK Autumn? Bring it on.

More Experiments With "Lightroom 4"

More or less all of the pictures herein are not mine, but my Dad's, and most taken on his old Minolta camera as far as I can see.

As shot:

 LR4 version:

Now, to be frank, some of the changes I've made while trying to learn my way around LR4 are not exactly dramatic, but that wasn't the point. They're meant to be "improvements", at least for the most part, and sometimes the way a picture comes "vanilla" out of the camera is just exactly as you might have wanted it.

 Very old pre-digital shot, scanned presumably...

 As shot:

LR4:

 (Yes, that's me whipping in.....)

As shot:

 LR4:

 LR4 2nd attempt:

As shot:

LR4 version:

 Mr Luxton looking dapper (As shot):

 LR4:

My Dad (As shot):

 LR4 version 1:

 version 2:

 3:

  As shot:

 LR4 version:

 Lawn Meet at Knowle Top Farm (As shot):

 LR4 version:

 A bit more subtle perhaps, but this was the first post-ban meet at The Huntsman when the two beagle packs & foxhounds got together to stick two fingers up at Blair....

As shot:

 LR4 version:

Well, as you can see, I'm no expert, but a keen tryer nevertheless.

Of course it all comes down to personal preference at the end of the day, and if you're looking for really dramatic images to hammer home a point or to use in some marketing thing or other then you might over-cook any aspect of the process just for effect, but I'm having fun trying to get to grips with it, which I could never say about Photoshop which is still an utter mystery to me......

Moby Moment. "The Great Escape"

I was going to write a long piece on copyright, on the music industry and the artists' side of the equation, all of which have been on my mind lately for one reason or another, but until I have a tad more inspiration will have to shelve it for now.

I do not like "stealing" music, via torrents, or unregistered Russian websites, or anything, and do not sell anything on if I find myself compromised by doing so, ever, but if my CDs/DVDs are unplayable, or whatever, or my old LPs and cassettes are just too darned difficult to copy (VERY laboriously) on to my PC and hence music player for personal digestion, I think to myself "I already own this, albeit in a different format, so why not?" Then I read an odd licensing thing that you sometimes see when downloading something, and think that I'm fine with that....I know the artist(s) has/have already been part of the process, and hence (hopefully) got paid, so why not?

Enough, I'm not going to write that essay now.




Ironic that YT or Google deleted my previous video, which I've only just noticed when reading back though....... So have tried again.... (Edited 21st July 2018)

Some of the thoughts were sparked off by YouTube deleting a couple of my videos that featured "copyright" music that someone called "Johnny M" had objected to. Hey Johnny, was anyone fooled into thinking I worked with The Eurthymics or Lou Reed because I'd used them as a soundtrack to walking a pack of beagles through some woods?? No? I didn't think so. Was anyone deprived of any money because I used the tracks? No? I didn't think so.

Was anyone for the remotest second lead to believe that any of the artists I'd picked (because the tracks seemed to fit, and because I LIKED them) endorsed any aspect of the videos I'd posted? No, I really don't think so.

Did I claim anything other than "Fair use" of the tracks at any point? NO.

When artists make zillions of shekels out of a track, and it's been played millions of times "in public" then some of the reasoning for Johnny M to complain about my homemade "Entertainment" videos seems a little bit picky to me. Sorry, but I'm a bit cross.

Hidden messages?

Keep them.

YouTube would die if every single "Copyright" video was deleted, and that's a simple inarguable fact.

Oh, and I was going to go off on one about "The Emperor's New Clothes" and the Daft Punk album, but then that got me thinking about previous "Emperor's New Clothes" albums, like everything by Moby and, in a circular way that made me go look for the one track that always hit me the most. This is a live version of it, but the studio version is sublime.


Got to get a grip.

Reader(s)

After the death of Google Reader, I tried Newsvibes, Old Reader, Feedly and two or three others. All of which had their positives and snags too...I settled on Old Reader as it was the closest to what I was familiar with and seemed to have much of the same functionality...

Then, disaster....they got so swamped by traffic their servers melted and it looked like it was all over.

Thank goodness, that whatever happened, when it looked as if they were reverting to a private network for "friends" only, and I gave up even trying any more alternatives, something must have happened to make them change their minds...

PHEW.

Only 2630 blooming posts to catch up with now............ Time killer.

Dire

After all therse years, I can't help but hear Paul Sutherland's view on Dire Straits. They were associated with the "M&S types".

Still, can't take anything away from much that they've done. My own personal hate is their most successful "Money For Nothing" which to this day I loath with a passion. While it admittedly was technically superb and all that, it was like they'd suddenly turned into a parody version of themselves. This is a reminder of their better tracks, as they had many many....

Dry Stone Walling & Cliff

More experiments with LR4 I'm afraid....

I found my long-lost Polarising filter in a waistcoat pocket, so maybe, just maybe, that might have helped with some of the skies. To be honest, I had used it many times in the past and done "comparison" shots which left me wondering why I'd bothered buying it in the first place. Still, maybe it's more of a learning curve than I had hoped for....

 None of these are "layered", just tweaked a bit until the impression suits me. I am a million miles behind on PS7, and have a stack of tutorial videos to try to get around to playing with, but you can see how many other photographers have got the hang of HDR when you're aware of it. I am just trying here....

 Oh, and in case any of you have been to Yorkshire and seen our walls, this is how we grow them....

 Of course, in "real" walls we try to make the courses a bit straighter, but isn't Nature a fabulous creature?

All you Holme Valley photographers...I've got my eye on you......