Comments(0) I had a couple of days booked off work either side of this weekend, and having decided not to risk storms and flooding on our planned camping trip was at a bit of a loose end for something unconstructive to do. Nosing around various “what’s on” type sites, we stumbled across Paddle Round The Pier, a kayak/general paddling event around Brighton’s West pier - which we just had to go along to.
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mentioned in an earlier post that one of the things that attracted me to the Panasonic FZ30 that I chose as my new camera was the fact that it had a whopping great zoom built in as standard. What I didn’t mention before is that it has a neat little trick up it’s sleeve for when the 12x optical zoom just isn’t enough.
The FZ30 let’s you lower the final image size and use the extra resolution to boost the effective zoom of the camera - all without resorting to digital. For instance, in the gallery that follows, I dropped the image size to a respectable 5 mega pixels and got the effect of a 15.3x zoom. Very handy indeed.
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I’ve had most of my weekend planned around watching the Australian Grand Prix today. I flitted between decorating and working on the computer all day yesterday in order to free up 3 hours of quality grand-prix time, and had the TV & Radio off this morning so that I wouldn’t know the result before hand.
Much as I enjoy F1 I wasn’t going to watch the 4am live broadcast from Australia, so just needed to check the airing times when I got up this morning. Stuipidly, I thought that the best place to do this would be at www.itv-f1.com - the official site for the ITV Formula 1 coverage. Stupid mistake as the result was plastered all over the home page. Tossers.
I watched and enjoyed the race anyway. Actually, it wasn’t so much a race as some sort of strange demolition derby today, but it was certainly not one to miss.
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It’s been one of those fantastic sea-side winter weekends down on Hayling. Cold but sunny with a good wind and some great waves - my absolute favourite for walking on the beach. With my girlfriend working all weekend I thought that this would be a good opportunity to try to get used to the new camera.
I do have a tendency to get absorbed in things, but I was stunned when, half way through my walk, I realised that I had already filled up my 1GB memory card was was getting low on battery. It really was a great day for photos on the beach.
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We’ve been getting some fantastic sunsets lately, which have given me a great chance to play with my new camera. Can’t say that I have exactly mastered it as yet, but nature has been doing most of the hard work for me.
It’s great just to be able to walk over to the beach with a camera when you see sites like these on your way home from work.
Comments(0) As part of my birthday celebrations & visit “up north” to my sister, we went to Xscape at Castleford this weekend.
Xscape is sort of a cross between a shopping centre and an indoor extreme sports centre. The main attraction is a massive indoor real snow slope, although there is also a skate park, ice-climbing wall, climbing wall and a few other bits.
Having the nephews with us we opted for tobogganing on the indoor slope. Despite looking like utter goons thanks to the compulsory crash-helmets it was a great laugh. Well recommended.
Unfortunately some jobs-worth stopped me taking pictures inside (so I’ve borrowed one of another site). Apparently I needed a signed form, but getting this would have taken most of our allotted time, so no photos this time.
http://www.xscape.co.uk
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Decided to make the most of the bright, cold day to blow out the cobwebs and take a walk up the Hayling Billy coastal trail today.
The trail follows the path of the old railway line running up the western side of Hayling Island. The trail starts at the old station in West Town and finishes at the bridge (or the other way around, depending on which direction you are heading), a distance of just over 3 miles each way.
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Heading home this weekend we decided to take a break from the traffic and get some fresh air before we got back to the island, so took a quick walk around Portchester castle.
My inner geek has always drawn me to castles, and Portchester is quite a nice example.
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High tides and strong winds combined today to cause flooding all over the eastern end of Hayling.
Having got a call to say that there “was a river running down our road” I popped home with the camera to see what all the fuss was about and found out that our road had actually become a river.
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As part of the Trafalgar 200 anniversary events at Portsmouth historic dockyard a Rope’s End Theatre Company, who we know several members of, put on some street theatre this weekend.
The play, Black Eyed Susan, was compressed to about 25 minutes and performed near the busy main entrance to the dockyard. I have to confess that street theatre is not something that I would usually imagine myself standing in the cold to watch (unless maybe I was drunk and in the mood to heckle), but it was really quite entertaining.